The Hanged Man

from the Tarot Series

2019,
Acrylic on Canvas
48×36 inches

The tarot card “The Hanged Man” suggests ultimate surrender to fate, sacrifice to the greater good, martyrdom, or being suspended in time. Typically depicted as a young man suspended from a T-shaped cross of living wood, he is inverted, seeing the world from a new perspective. He is serene, as though he has chosen his path, and his head enhaloed – symbolizing new insight, awareness and enlightenment. This was an important theme to me at this time, as I was reflecting on motherhood, its inherent biologic mandates and societal duties, and the impending loss of my children through persecution in family court. My tarot imagery tells the story of Eve from Biblical Genesis, the story of mankind’s fall from grace and the introduction of evil into the world. For me, this story also has meaning as humankind’s ascension into free agency through knowledge, and the consequential punitive actions of our creator towards humankind. I have chosen to depict the central figure as Eve, a pregnant woman everyman symbol, tied to the Tree of Knowledge by the serpent (here, the World Serpent of ancient mythologies gifting knowledge to humankind, rather than the Christian interpretation of an agent of evil or Satan) which has tempted her. In the Biblical Genesis, Eve is tempted to eat of forbidden knowledge, and upon her enlightenment is banished from Eden, cursed by God to bear children in pain and sorrow. Here, she is inverted, pregnant, enhaloed as a saint with her new perspective. The fruits of the Tree of Knowledge in the painting (our awakening from innocence to a state of awareness of the world) are nourished by the unborn babies entwined in its roots below, an unending and inevitable cycle. This cycle of life and death, coming from earth and returning to earth, was decreed by God as a curse upon Adam for eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. In the air surrounding the tree and Eve dance atmospheric rabbits, symbols of frivolity and fecundity. The rabbits are inspired from the Aztec mythology of the 400 Rabbits of Drunkeness, which represent an infinite world of celebration and foolish action through inebriation. The rabbits are exempt from biblical mythos, joyful in the natural acts of their lives and reproduction. Each figure is bound here by fate and biology, the composition depicting the contrast between cultural and societal persecution of motherhood and the reality of procreation.