Lyn Bainbridge

Areturn to painting has driven much of my creative work over the past two years as I have rediscovered the joy in the processes of my art. It has been liberating to focus, not on results, but on the sheer pleasure of paint and canvas and colour.

This diptych has been more than a year in gestation. Like many others in the CST community, I felt I had wrestled with the shadow Prostitute for a long time when my professional and family commitments seemed to be crushing my creative life. Challenges and changes in both areas were overwhelming art and the more I struggled to do the work I felt called to do, the tighter the constrictions wove around me. COVID gave me time to step back from these difficulties and, eventually, led to a long overdue decision to leave my career of 30 years.

I felt I had a grasp of the shadow side of the Prostitute from this experience and my thinking was echoed in an image from an old course I had taken at university. It was a Hellenistic statuette of the 2nd century BCE. Only 8 inches high, the figure is of a veiled dancer. Her shrouded and masked figure spoke to me of the drag of demands and the imprisonment of the spirit and the gesture she made stayed with me.

But I could not find my way towards the friend Prostitute. I still hadn’t managed to access her. It was through the dialogues with my topical group and the many creative souls in CST, that I gradually found the door opening and the numinous sister of the little dancer began to emerge into the light in her full confidence and joy, the shrouding robe becoming luminous drapery, the constrained movements turning into the spreading motion with which she claimed her right to be what she chose to be in a world full of fertility and light.

I have walked with this archetype for a long time now, in her desperate highwire act and then in her world – transforming dance. I am grateful to both sides of the Prostitute and her lessons and hope these paintings do them justice.

The Prostitute Diptych 2022 12’’ diameter (each painting) Acrylic on canvas NFS lsbart6@googlemail.com Instagram: lyn_artandthread