The Navel of the World

Some of you may remember that last winter I was working on a series of sketches of the landscape at Delphi, Greece. The one above remains my favorite - I even made it the screen image on my phone.

A few weeks ago I did another one, this time in oil pastel, following up on the oil pastels of Sicily. I thought maybe that medium would lend itself to this subject. Here's the full painting:

There's a lot that I like about it, and a lot I don't. My handling of the medium has gotten more confident. The color palette here works well, even though it's mostly imaginary. What doesn't work for me is the composition. It's fine for a "pretty painting" of a scene, but that's not what I'm after -- I've got photographs that serve that purpose. The circular, central lawn-like area is boring, and it makes the entire left side of the painting boring too, even though there are some interesting passages in the trees. Furthermore, the ruins in the foreground feel too literal and too prominent, even though I tried to subdue them. The result is that there are too many places for the eye to look, and this distracts from what drew me to this view in the first place. Why is it so hard to remember that, I wonder?

The picture is in this area:

Which is, not surprisingly, much like the gouache. Here it is again:

What makes this compositions work is the combination of strong simple shapes with intersecting angles that create tension and interest. In the gouache, which is really pared down to essentials, both in shape and in color, these elements create a locked-together composition of dark, slightly-triangular verticals held within the picture frame by the intersecting diagonals. Because the viewer isn't overwhelmed with details, and because the palette is so limited, the more abstract picture is able to create an emotional response that, for me anyway, is much closer to what I actually "felt" when standing there, and what I hoped to take away.

With the oil pastels and the picture cropped this way, I really like the strong cobalt blue with the lavender and dull green of the mountain. The foreground is missing in this crop, but the gouache helps me see better what to do with it. In addition to the beautiful, iconic trees, one of the most striking aspects of this landscape was the circular pattern of rocks and scrubby growth of the mountain behind the cedars. I like how the oil pastels have worked to capture that -- it's subtle, not detailed, but effective. Now I'm thinking about making a larger painting, in oils, based on what I've discovered by analyzing these pictures. The main message is simplify.

--

While I was working on this piece, I found a suite of poems by Seamus Heaney that he had written in Greece. One of them is set in Delphi, and it speaks of Heaney's desire to drink from the spring where all visitors to Delphi who came to consult the oracle stopped to wash and drink; the same spring was used by the Pythia and the priests for a ritual cleansing before giving an oracular pronouncement or interpreting an oracle.

The Greeks believed that the spring was located at the center of the earth. Zeus, king of the gods, had loosed two eagles from opposite ends of the world, and, flying at the same speed, they crossed paths above Delphi. Zeus let a stone fall from the air where they crossed, and where it fell became the sacred site, marked by a stone called the omphalos, or navel of the world. Under the omphalos was buried the mythological monster called Python, which had guarded the sacred spring, until it was killed by the god Apollo, to whom Delphi and the Oracle became sacred. We saw a Roman copy of this large carved stone in the museum in Delphi. The carved pattern represents a woolen net that was once thought to cover the stone.

If you've been to Delphi, you would have thought, as I did, what a long, difficult journey it must have been to get there from any of the major city-states of Greece, and then to have to add the arduous climb up the side of Mt Parnassus. I wish I had known that the spring still exists, and that there's a modern fountain by the side of the road for modern travelers, but I had no idea! Heaney, visiting in the 1960s, did know this, and of course -- as a poet who had been steeped in the Greek classics, translated some, and used so many references and stories in his own poems and plays -- he was determined to drink from it himself. The poem speaks of his frustration and its resolution, and it's an image that has now been added to my own thoughts about Delphi.

Castalian Spring

Thunderface. Not Zeus’s ire, but hers
Refusing entry, and mine mounting from it.
This one thing I had vowed: to drink the waters
Of the Castalian Spring, to arrogate
That much to myself and be the poet
Under the god Apollo’s giddy cliff—
But the inner water sanctum was roped off
When we arrived. Well then, to hell with that,
And to hell with all who’d stop me, thunderface!
So up the steps then, into the sandstone grottoes,
The seeps and dreeps, the shallow pools, the mosses,
Come from beyond, and come far, with this useless
Anger draining away, on terraces
Where I bowed and mouthed in sweetness and defiance.

--Seamus Heaney

Comments

[Rachel Barenblat]

Beth, this is so beautiful. It's funny - I loved the first image, I liked the second image, and when I saw that you were dissatisfied with the second one, I didn't see why. But then you explained, and now I look at it with more skilled eyes. Makes me realize how much there is for me to learn about where the eye naturally travels.

In any event -- thank you for this.

[Natalie]

he top image is indeed marvellous, my favourite, completely satisfying in itself, needs nothing more.
I agree with what you wrote about the oil pastel one and of course with the dictum "simplify". I think that in this instance, the medium is overloading the message. But there are lovely parts in the two forground cypresses.