I started drawing The Golden Bowl painting directly onto the canvas which is not my usual practice, but I’m impatient to make stuff! I’m quite excited about the piece. It’s unusually small compared to the rest of my work, but I really like the symbolism embedded in the piece. There will ultimately be five figures in the painting. Here’s the sketch right now, only two people in it so far, and they’re both modeled by the same person!
As I was drawing the piece I realized that there was something familiar about the image, so I did some digging in my alchemical books and found this etching. The female figure with the bowl is nature, holding a vessel containing the maturing lapis. The image is from the R.C. Theophilus Schweighardt’s 1604 work “Speculum Sophicum Rhodostauroticum”, a text almost as significant as the Fama and the Confessio.
No, I don’t have an original copy of the book. Adam McLean has a text only version of it on his site here.
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