Un Souffle de Renaissance or Breath of the Renaissance is finally a painting I know something about as its me, (Anthony, her youngest son). This was a real struggle to get painted during a brief vacation the year after I graduated from Duke University in the USA. You can see from the diary entries below that she was only able to complete the face and hands while I was there, painting right up to the last minute before I left, with the rest of it being done afterwards. The details of which were fine-tuned from several slow exchanges of letters and photographs through the mail across the Atlantic. Although, some might consider the painting a little busy, everything in there had meaning in my life at that time.

I’ll describe the symbolism starting in the lower right corner and working my way around the painting. The toad, whose name was Tobias, is representative on my education and degree in Zoology and was actually a pet I kept in a terrarium for a short time. Beside him are two small electronic pieces of jewelry that I designed and built that used a small battery and an integrated circuit to flash an LED. These prototypes were the start of what I hoped to be my foot in the door of a business selling the first electronic jewelry, that unfortunately never came to fruition. Behind those is a prism which represents both science and alchemy. As used by Sir Isaac Newton to demonstrate how white light is made up of all colours of light. It also represents the human aura which I had also been researching which is why the colors go across the Vitruvian Man image. This drawing by Leonardo Da Vinci, should need no introduction but in brief it is a study by Leonardo into the various proportions of man and how they are related to each other and the golden ratio. In the painting I am holding some dividers I made that dynamically show this ratio. Unfortunately, they were slightly distorted in their travels and are not accurately portrayed here, see the photos below for how they should look. The Vitruvian Man drawing and dividers illustrate my study and interest into the nature of humans. Beside my right elbow is a book, the classic symbol of passed on knowledge which I felt was the key to this understanding, hence the key on the book. Incidentally, that key is a faithful rendition of my mother’s, none too elaborate, front door key. Beside the book are the circuit drawings for the electronics used in the jewelry and representative of my other interests in our modern technological world such as it was in the 1970’s.

In the background is a statue illustrative of my love of art. She is holding a set of scales as the symbol for Libra, my astrological birth sign, notice that it is not balanced but tipped in the direction of the female form. On the back wall is a wonderful rendition of the seal I designed for myself that my mother cleverly converted to stained glass. I hope one can immediately see a combination of the Yin and Yang and the juxtaposition of the air above the ground and the sun as the source of life on the earth. The final detail is the book of knowledge being guarded by a snake, representative of sin and in the shape of the Greek Alpha symbol. On the floor next to the light beams from the window, is my mother’s cat, PC, short for Pussy Cat. She is symbolic of my love of animals and is there as every worker of the magical arts needs a familiar. The spiral staircase illustrates the required steps upward to enlightenment and I also like spiral staircases as I think they are the most efficient use of space for stairs and harken back to earlier times. Finally and accidentally hidden in the rendering of the painting there is a message about our ability to observation nature.

I find many of the diary entries very interesting even though I was there much of the time and visited with my mother after the painting was finished. Of course, I now feel a little guilty about all the extra work, over a hundred hours, I put her through with the prism, the stairs, stained glass window and all the details but I think she really rose to the occasion and did a fabulous job with all the various elements not to mention overall likeness. Ten years after finishing the painting, she was persuaded to submit it in the media competition at the local Science Fiction Festival in Fayence where it won first place in the painting category, garnering her a diploma and an elaborate cup which she displayed in her atelier for many years.

Diary Entries