The Empress

A silkscreen by Tienfan Jiang, that hangs in my front room.

Jiang was a painter in China. During Mao's years when you could be killed for painting anything original, Jiang would paint secretly at night, and destroy his paintings by morning. He did this for 20 years. Eventually the government changed. Now he is considered the founder of a whole school of Chinese art, and lives in San Diego.

The Empress gives me hope. One eye is the ocean, the other is the Mystery. She is terrible, like Aslan. She knows more than I do. On the days I am not rehearsing, she reminds me the universe is much larger than theatre, and there are other ways to grow as an artist.

I read once that if you ask a child to draw a picture of a tree, and he draws one with a hole in it, it means the child has suffered. I look at her different-colored eyes that same way.

Although... both my dog and my brother's pony, when we were little, had one brown and one blue eye. Perhaps she also looks familiar.

Leonid Anisimov says,

"Look on the most beautiful
and the most high
as long
and as often
as you can."

This is his single instruction for how to grow as an artist, as a human. He would call Nature the most beautiful and most high of all. Looking on the Empress with one eye, and the trees with my other, must surely be growing me.