solar inflourescence

40"x40"
acrylic and charcoal on canvas
2006

Detail of the magic square, bottom righthand corner [link]

This piece was inspired, initially, by my previous submission, 'dead gerber'[link] I had painted the dead flower originally on an old piece of masonite, and I wanted to refresh it and paint it again on canvas to make it 'official'.
So I began with the 'bare bones' of the thing by painting the flower's center, the 'inflourescence', and the stem to create my composition, and then I nestled into a 'zone'. Things just started to hit me about the significance of this piece. As I was paining the individual tiny flowerettes that make up the inflourescence, my mind wandered to thoughts about the sun; how the placement of this larger circle in the canvas was remeniscent of the sun in the sky.
Then I added the stem, making it flower-like once again.
But, still thinking of the sun, I began to think of the stem in reference to the archetypal 'holy wind' which, it was believed in ancient times, to flow from the sun to the earth. There is also a biblical reference to this wind being the facilitation for the conception of Christ... the wind blew up Mary's skirt.
Carl Jung also made reference to the 'tube' or 'wind' from the sun in his 'Structure of the Psyche' collection of works. He also refered to this as being the archetypal 'sun-phallus'.
Then it hit me, at this stage of the painting... I had based my pattern of the location of the dots in the center on the 360 degrees of the protractor. I had counted every tenth degree, making 36 spirals altogether inside the inflourescence. The magic number of the sun is... you guessed it... 36! So I included the magic square associated with the sun in the lower righthand corner of the painting.

Now the significance of the square:
There are 36 numbers in the magic square for the sun... All the numbers from 1 to 36.
If you add all the numbers of each individual row... you get 111.
There are 6 rows. If you multiply 111x6... you get 666! So all the numbers from 1 to 36 equal 666!

And this was the story of how a dead flower became the SUN!