The story behind the painting
Context and inspiration: La Loba
The painting is deeply connected to the archetype of the Wild Woman – La Loba (the Wolf Woman), as described by the Jungian psychoanalyst and storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estés in her book Women Who Run with the Wolves.
La Loba is an ancient woman of the desert who gathers bones. When she has assembled a whole skeleton, she sings over it and the skeleton comes to life – it runs off as a wolf and turns into a woman. It is a story about the soul returning home.
Estés says that this wild, instinctive soul lives in every woman. Sometimes it gets lost. And it returns precisely through creating with one’s hands – through paint, clay, thread. We recognise it by a sudden sense of being moved and fascinated.
This painting is a record of such a return. La Loba has found her home in it.
“I did not paint a portrait of a woman. I painted a landscape in which she can live.”
Golden veins: life paths, the nervous system of the soul. Scars that have turned into light. A connection between depth and fire.
Colours
Violet-blue at the bottom – the archetype of the Wise Woman, intuition, water, night, what she feels and knows before words.
Rusty orange at the top – the archetype of the Creator and the Lover, fire, passion, earth, the power to create and to change.
Two red buds / two suns: the heart of the painting. The duality of the inner woman.
The lower one, larger and more glowing – what we already live fully. Creative power in the present.
The upper one, veiled in mist – what is only just emerging. A new longing, a new story still searching for its shape.
