Click on the picture for a larger image of Fire

The Meinrad Craighead Documentary Project has been given a wonderful opportunity. A long-time admirer of Meinrad's work has donated an original Meinrad painting, Fire, and agreed to let us auction it. Half of the proceeds will come to the Meinrad Craighead Documentary Project and half will be returned to the family of the donor.

Fire was painted in 1984 and is featured in The Mother's Songs, Images of God the Mother. The painting is ink on scratchboard and is 10" x 10". It is matted and framed and is in excellent condition. Here's what Meinrad wrote about it in the book.

Fire

The trees were diseased and had to be felled. A crew arrived from Barcelona and for days chainsaws screamed over the mountain of Montserrat. When the logging was finished and the trucks had gone, an old man remained to tend the burning rubble. He raked debris to the fiery centers of the seven huge stumps, often sitting down to smoke a cigarette and stare into the fires. At twilight on the second day the man left. That night I sat down to continue the vigil.

The stumps, rising like charred mountains from their separate seas of white hot ash, smouldered for nights and days and more nights. Inside each black mountain a burning womb sat cooking on the earth, hollowing a cave. All the fires on earth visited the seven caves during those nights: home fires and war fires, fires of initiation and purification, menstrual fires and the fires which enflame the imagination.

Finally, the trees were gone, my vigil was over, and the fertilizing ashes blew over the mountain.

Amy Kellum