“Trouble the Water” began as a sort of icon – one piece in a series called “For Saint Brigid” (inspired in part by a beautiful poem written by my friend Jonas Zdanys). This particular piece was to be a meditation on fire drawing on associations of Brigid with purification that predated Christianity in Ireland. Like many women whose power was celebrated as divine, Brigid was canonized at least in part as a way to contain her – a demotion, really, from goddess to saint. My plan was to picture Brigid in a (not quite) traditional icon that incorporated familiar symbols of Spring and purification – invoking the festival of Imbolc just beneath the feast day (1 February) of the Christian saint. The focus on purification and fire had me thinking also of water and its association with healing power – of both with the rebirth attributed to baptism. Well into the painting, I became dissatisfied with the direction it was taking and inverted it. When I turned the painting upside down, I also turned from fire to water and took a few steps from Saint Brigid’s well to the pool at Bethesda that is front and center in the spiritual “Wade in the Water.” The outline of Brigid in the icon became the body of water in this painting – just below the surface, like the angel (or goddess) that was the source of the trouble – and the healing – at Bethesda. The old painting was obscured and submerged, but, still an icon, it gave shape to the new.
published with "Trouble the Water," by Robert L. Dean, Jr.in KYSO Flash, Issue 12: Summer 2019 [http://www.kysoflash.com/Issue12/DeanTrouble.aspx]
included in the 2019 “Pentimento” exhibit at the Tall Grass Arts Association Gallery, Park Forest, Illinois.
