Axis Mundi
The beginning of a circle is also its end. Not I, but the world says it: all is one. And yet everything comes in season.
- Heraklietos of Ephesos

The Evolution of a Painting

by Amethyst

Rayvensclaw has been asked to write a regular article on the magick of his paintings or you could call it how they speak to him; but I thought I would do an article on the evolution of one of his paintings from an non-artistic sense. I'm not saying that I'm not artistic, just not with paint or pencil.

I have watched Rayvensclaw paint many times over the years, watching as his paintings change and grow; but I have never had the urge to document a paintings progression before this one, or since. Yet to watch a painting evolve from a blank canvas to the finished product is in itself a magickal experience.

He tells me that an idea comes into his head and so he starts to put guidelines onto canvas. Then he starts to paint (oils in his case) the drawn image. He's told me in the past that the first layers are really only to give the image a voice, as after that the painting starts to tell him what colours he really should be using. Sometimes if the painting is from somebody else's idea the image, or should I say the finished picture, is one he usually isn't happy with. It may look good to the person concerned, but knowing him and looking at his other work, the magickal spark, the life that comes into a painting is missing. Mind you he can do that to his own ideas as well, I think it's just a case of it being the wrong time for that image to speak.

For no reason at the time, I decided to chart the evolution of only one of his paintings. I didn't tell him till the painting was nearly finished what I had been doing and it surprised him that I would have done this. This painting is Stonehenge.

This month I'll cover the first two pictures I took showing the painting's evolution.


This was the starting point (above) and as you can see the outline of Stonehenge has been pencilled in and some paint applied. Rayvensclaw had decided that he was going to paint Stonehenge as you would see it if you were there in the daytime.


This next stage (above) looks a bit confusing, but this is the transition of the day painting into a night version. He had begun to put light to medium blue for the sky and did a little bit more work on the stones, but as I'd written earlier, now that the painting had a presence it started to speak for itself. It said to him that it should be a night view painting and so the change of the sky is starting, also there is a focal point for Stonehenge's energy forming in the picture.

Next month I'll talk about the rest of Stonehenge's evolution, and how the picture spoke to me, so until then.



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