Mind, Memory and the Play of History

Mind, Memory and the Play of History (first person)

My ancestry is Icelandic and Irish. During the final years of my mother’s life we spent a great deal of time reading and discussing family history, Norse, Irish, and Icelandic histories, and the Sagas. This work comes from a promise I made to consider our ancestry and its relationship to the present.

Raven images from both Celtic and Norse mythologies appear in much of this series.
In some of these paintings, Odin’s two ravens, Huginn and Muninn, are featured.
Huginn and Muninn are powerful symbols for “thought and memory” in Norse mythology.
In the Celtic tradition Raven is most closely linked with the deity Morrigan — a triple goddess of Fertility, Birth and Death. In this tradition, Raven is considered to have the powers of a Seer — the bird of wisdom and prophecy. Combined with this imagery are images of baseballs,

my childhood bear, a jump rope, toy soldiers, trees — metaphors for and symbols of, childhood, family and play. It is the relationship between thought and memory, wisdom and history, and the distortion of time that preoccupies me in much of this new work.

Then there is the simple pleasure of remembering and painting some of the things I’ve lived with and loved my entire life.

James Lahey Summer 2023