Gyneknossos—Why This Painting? Why now?
Gyneknossos—Why This Painting? Why now?
You may recognize my painting’s source—the mural of the three women from the Knossos palace ruins of ancient Crete. It’s a classic image…
You may recognize my painting’s source—the mural of the three women from the Knossos palace ruins of ancient Crete. It’s a classic image, emblematic of the artistic style unique to the ancient Minoan culture. Truly, no other ancient art is like it. Moreover, this level of aptitude and technique was attained in the Neolithic era, or about 7,000–10,000 years ago, millenia before the “golden age” of ancient Greece and the events related in the Bible.
Minoan culture was a high-water mark in human civilization before the catastrophic rape and devastation of the Neolithic, partnership/woman-based cultures that stretched from Anatolia to Western Europe. As Riane Eisler recounts in her seminal The Chalice and the Blade, ancient Crete represented the pinnacle of those civilizations that emphasized a partnering of female and male versus the dominator model of nomadic conqueror cultures that then swept in, ever since redefining civilization in terms of war, male domination, and patriarchy.
Why This Painting?
I paint “Gyneknossos” in this particular way not just to encapsulate the way of life that had been lost millenia ago but to grasp what is happening right now. Note that I subtitle the work “(Whitewash).” Note also the blurring, scrapes, slashes, and distortions in my interpretation of the Three-Women mural.
civilizations that emphasized a partnering of female and male versus the dominator model of nomadic conqueror cultures that then swept in, ever since redefining civilization in terms of war, male domination, and patriarchy
The loss millenia ago didn’t end there. It’s been going on since. You see, in order for the male-dominating patriarchy to remain so entrenched that most of us think it the “natural order” of things, that system has to continually be imposed. Any hint of the possibility of the thought that things could be different, that women could be something other than male property, that women’s unique partnering skills and technology crafted a reality that was distorted into what we live today, has to be utterly wiped from the collective consciousness. Whitewashed where it can’t be obliterated (and it can’t). Blurred when it surfaces clearly. Struck through when it is printed. Strangled when it is uttered. Raped when it is asserted.
Any hint … that things could be different, that women could be something other than male property, that women’s unique partnering skills and technology crafted a reality that was distorted into what we live today, has to be utterly wiped from the collective consciousness.
Why Now for This painting?
This painting of mine has been under the surface for 7,000 years. The aquamarine background is the ocean that was the life of Knossos and a hint at the ocean we swim in but therein never recognize—the palette for the continual gas lighting of not just one half of humanity, but of all of us.
Swimming that ocean, we fail to see that things could be different … but hell yes! they indeed once were different … and will be again.
Every mass slaughter perpetrated by a white male, every depraved separation of an immigrant child from their parents, every slaughter of a trans woman of color, is both a death throe of that usurper tyranny and, more importantly, a birth pang of the way things should and will again be.
And that’s the terror of the present upheaval in our culture. That the “natural order” was radically different terrifies the male-dominant overlords that it could be that way again. More than a hashtag, #MeToo is a nightmare for the cultural forces that feel their hegemony slipping away.
We are on the cusp of a civilizational transformation not seen for seven millenia. Every mass slaughter perpetrated by a white male, every depraved separation of an immigrant child from their parents, every slaughter of a trans woman of color, is both a death throe of that usurper tyranny and, more importantly, a birth pang of the way things should and will again be.
That’s why this painting erupted from me. It couldn’t do otherwise.
It won’t be whitewashed and blurred. Neither should you.
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