I made this one a few years back, fresh out of Uni. It was around the time of the Spring Equinox, and I was reading my Priestess of the Goddess, Priestess of Avalon by Kathy Jones and one of the goddesses mentioned in there is Sulis.
Sulis a the British life-giving, motherly sort of goddess of both the Sun and the Water: particularly hot springs! She is associated with the thermal Bath Springs in Somerset. Nowadays these springs and warm baths are enclosed in 18th century buildings, very beautiful, but a far cry from what they would have been once upon a Celtic time: hot pools of water deep in a lush valley, a sacred spring where visitors could immerse themselves to be healed. (You aren’t even allowed in the water in the Roman Baths nowadays.) There has been a shrine around them for the last 2000 years and various pools and buildings have been made around them.
Anyway, back to Sulis. In this painting, I was inspired by the idea of her being goddess of both the sun and the sea, and wanted to show her connection between the two – creatures of the water rising up to meet the warm sushine, the Goddess being created of the water but holding the sun within her arms, the true source of all life on our planet, sunshine and water.
She measures approx. 44cm by 33cm, give or take a few milimetres, (so she’s one of my bigger ones) on sexy watercolour paper with top quality watercolour paints as I am a bit of a materials snob. It’s pretty fab, I must say.
It’s on sale in my Etsy shop at the moment for £195 plus postage.
(Have you been to my Etsy shop yet? No? You should totally just have a sneeky peek around. Click here to snoop!) 