Alchemist's Flask #2, Monotype of the Day #223

I used to be obsessed with the medieval alchemists who are responsible for so many of the recipes for early pigments. I made pigments from scratch, poured over ancient recipes, and even tried my hand at translating (very poorly!) a few from Latin. Much of the language is symbolic and it sometimes requires a lot of experimentation to get a recipe to work. I carry many of their ideas into my work today. People think of alchemists as trying to change lead, what they considered a base and impure metal, into gold, which was thought of as perfected matter. Some were acting out of greed, but the true alchemist was trying to heal matter of its imperfections. Their’s was a deeply devotional practice fueled by belief in the Divine. They believed in the concept "as above, so below (as in heaven, so on earth)". So, the physical world and the spiritual world were inseparably connected. For the alchemist, every external action in the physical world had a corresponding internal action. So when they healed the external world with their alchemical recipes, transforming base metals to more pure substances, they considered that they were also healing their internal selves. This idea fascinates me and I often find myself so connected to my own work that when I make intentional changes to a piece it really does change me. Alchemists often described their chemical reactions with symbolic drawings in flasks. The flasks in this series are describing my internal alchemy not actual alchemy recipes.