The Latin word for chair is cathedra, coming from the Greek kathedra,which gave us the word cathedral. Without saying any more, that is the basis for this painting’s title, Kathedra.
This is a painting I finished several weeks ago which has been leaning against the stones of my studio’s fireplace since then. It is a 24″ by 24″ canvas and it catches my eye on a regular basis. Perhaps it is the fragmented look of the sky with what some people call a stained-glass look.
While I understand people seeing it as looking like stained-glass, I see the lines in the sky as being fractures or seams in the fabric of time and memory. It’s a difficult thing to explain, as are many things that live deep within us, things that make up our inherent system of belief and understanding. Things we instinctively know or believe even though we may not know why or how this even came to be. I’m not talking about religious belief so much as I’m talking about how the unseen forces and energies of the natural world really operate around us, just beyond our perception.
Maybe it is the physics of belief.
That being said, perhaps that is what this represents for me. The seat of belief before a mysterious world that we barely know and can’t even begin to understand. Kathedra…
Redtree Times 