Passageways
I aim for my passageway and arch paintings to embody the realm of the “liminal”, which is derived from the Latin “limen”, meaning “threshold”. Anthropologist Victor Turner describes the liminal as a transitional quality essential to all rites of passage. It is the state in-between, without a fixed identity, but with openness and ambiguity. It is a state open to insight and inspiration as well as to new connections.
A sacred state.
I find arches and passageways in almost all of my travels, including to Morocco, Peru, Spain, Nepal, Cambodia, Ghana, Mexico, Italy and Turkey.
More about Holly Downing’s Passageway Paintings
Why do I paint so many arches and passageways? For one, they are formally very interesting to paint with their dark and light shapes. And their shadows. And I find them, surprisingly, everywhere when I travel - in France, Italy and Spain, in Peru, Cambodia, Vietnam, Tibetan villages in northern Nepal, in Morocco, and the terrible “Door of No Return” in Ghana that slaves were forced to pass through to aboard the boats that would carry then to American plantations.
The passageway and arch lead from one place to another - both physically and metaphorically; from one state of consciousness to another.
The poet, Jane Hirshfield, writes in her book, Nine Gates, Entering the Mind of Poetry, of the threshold state and the threshold life. She refers to the anthropologist Victor Turner who writes, in The Ritual Process, of thresholds as being integral to all rites of passage.
To me the passageways and arches are manifestations of the threshold. These are places that are neither here nor there, places of both becoming and leaving, of ambiguity and openness; of potential. Hirshfield maintains, and I would agree, that the poet and artist must reside in these places to provide us with insight, and new awareness.
And then, on a very mundane and practical level, my small Passageway canvases are convenient to take traveling in my suitcase, and a pleasure to paint, reminding me of just what I felt as I walked through such spaces - from light through darkness to light.