Recent Paintings
Green Tara is the Goddess of Compassion. I was helping my husband on one of his meditation retreats that he was teaching when I had a particularly powerful experience with the center's Green Tara thangka. In meditation, I became her. Her energy flowed through my limbs and beat my heart. I knew I had to capture the vision of her in my own way.
The multi-bird heads symbolize the Great Mother in a variety of moods and aspects: vultures for death, parrots for life, and a Harpy eagle for the clear light of inspiration. The angelic eye in the center is the sight that penetrates all of the realms.
She has a caplet of mushrooms to emphasize her generative powers of life and death. She has a full pregnant belly made of the sweet honeycomb of bees. Within her belly is the lotus springing up from the eternal waters with a rainbow serpent making a lemniscate as well as devouring its tail harkening to the ouroboros. Behind the snake is the deepest space, images just released by the James R. Webb telescope that came online just as I was painting this part.
Her body is a traditional thangka pose and is the exact same as the Tara I had my experience with. She sits atop a lotus pedestal made of travertine. Travertine is a form of terrestrial limestone found around hot springs and other bodies of water. As a Mother Goddess, Tara is also a symbol of the primordial waters and here, the waters themselves have created her throne. Behind her is the Andromeda galaxy. This with the deep space within her belly shows that she is both near and far, inside and outside, as above, so below.