A painting's evolution

The bottom picture is how the painting looked at my show in March. I was bothered by the head/body disconnect of the mother figure; Jami was bothered that the child looked like some kind of alien. So one day I changed it and the result was the picture above the bottom: a nice enough solution, but to Jami the child looked like Danny DeVito. Maybe not here, but in some earlier incarnation. The child didn't seem childlike enough. So I painted the next painting, the one second from the top, and we're all happy. It's my Max Beckman solution. The child even looks like a child. I say it's my Max Beckman solution because the lines are so heavy around the forms and it's as much drawn as painted. Still it now has an energy and vitality it lacked at the show.
Now I have a virgin on the high-seas with child: she's smoking and he's piping. It's a religious painting for a new era: an era of peace and harmony; an era of truth telling and putting an end to realpolitik; an era of non-violence and defeat of the beast - the beast of systems, agenda, and ideologies that enslave God's good creation. The Virgin of the High Seas with Camel and Child and Flute on Boat is the emblem for a new order, a new modus vivendi for the Church. The Stella Maris, which is the name for the Virgin as well as the name for Aphrodite, brings erotic love back into the church and states a way for eros and agape to live together. I don't think Lewis in his Four Loves intended agape, eros, phillia and that other thing (which stands for the simple affections) to be read as antithetical to each other - but that's the way they're often read: and Nygren didn't help with his Eros and Agape. The early Church makes the mistake of splitting eros off from agape: it's what gives us the cult of virginity and celibacy - like people who weren't married or married people who acted like they weren't married were holier. Everyone knew that they weren't that holy. Oh sure, it's easy to be holy sitting on a pillar not swatting any flies that land on you and eating only the most rancid of meat and chasing that with the most flat of beers: "look at me lord, see how much I love you and am sorry for my sins - why I'm barely existing." For centuries the Church lived under the triumph of the neo-Platonic Knuckleheads. There's just no other word for them. St Anthony - knucklehead; St. Mary Egptiana - Knucklehead. St. Jerome - Knuckleheadissimus. The Church developed the "treasury of merits" for all their super-erogatory works, for all us poor idiots who got married and went to work and could never be holy enough for Jesus to spend much time with us: no matter how spiritual we were or how much we read and delved into the mysteries of the faith; the Church believed that Jesus didn't like us as much as the emaciated, celibate, body hating saints. Agape trumped Eros: neo-Platonism trumped the gospel. But now I think we're reevaluating it. Here's to the virgin on the high seas with her camel and her baby playing his flute. She's Mary and Aphrodite all at once: sex and goodness rolled up in one easy to swallow goddess pill. You can now be married and working and be, of all things, just as holy, if not more, than some starving guy sitting on a large phallic symbol in the Egyptian desert - it's not that they were so good at being holy anyway, but so almost very good at repressing and calling their repressions a solution.