The Initiate

● narrative oil painting series ●

“First. we need to take very seriously the disappearance of ritual processes for initiating… There are carefully constructed rituals…Over the centuries of civilization in the West, almost all these ritual processes have been abandoned or have been diverted”

- King, Warrior, Magician, Lover (Robert Moore and Douglas Gilette)

This series of figurative oil paintings arise from the artist’s experiences, transformations and inner visions, prompted by her own personal sense of initiation following a post-traumatic depression and an in-depth psychoanalytic process that lasted 18 months and involved uncovering her own personal daemons by excavating the depths of her unconscious mind.

“Because of their firsthand experience of the depths, and their recovery…Such people know their way around in the underworld…”

- Goddesses in Everywoman (Dr Jean Shinoda Bolen PhD)

In this series, the artist incorporates allegory, archetypal theory of the unconscious mind, mysticism and the occult to depict her own surreal inner symbolic dreams and visions which guided her through a process of psychological healing.

The resulting metamorphosis of her personality from passive sufferer to autonomous participant in her destiny is an experience that parallels the myth of the Greco Roman goddess: Persephone.

“Persephone the Guide is part of that person's psyche, the archetype responsible for the sense of familiarity the person feels when she encounters symbolic language, ritual, madness, visions, or ecstatic mystical experience.”

Consequently, this series responds to the monumentality of the classical tradition of renaissance mythology painting established by painters such as Titian, Tintoretto and Raphael, but from the perspective of the feminine deity. Deae was also equally influenced by the continuing movement of surrealism which itself draws so heavily from psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious mind:

'The images appeared to me spontaneously, I didn’t create them per-se. My unconscious presented the skinless figure to me in a series of incredibly vivid dreams and visions. Rather than this altered state o consciousness arising from neurochemical or psychedelic intervention, this experience emerged instead from facing the intensity of my personal existential suffering and allowing it to be transposed into creative energy at a deeply unconscious level.

Gradually, through study and contemplation, I was able to understand the significance of this character, this part of myself, and the adversity she was attempting to overcome. I realised that this narrative was something deeper than one person, that the figures, settings and transformations were somehow more broadly human. Through study, reading and observation, I tracked back their symbolic significance to the ancient greek initiation ritual of Eleusis, where a human shaman would ‘become’ a skeleton deep in the cave, and come back to life. I believe that this shaman was a woman - a reenactor of the original ‘resurrection’”