Eternity II

eternity II

acrylics on canvas
40 x 80 cm
2019

available
(292 € incl. VAT 24%)

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Eternity I - III

“Where does space begin?"
“It’s really, really far away. Like a hundred kilometres up there!"
“Oooo."
“Yeah! And the stars are even further away! Like, it’s something like… a thousand kilometres to the stars!”
“Whoa!"
“Yeah! And space never ends! There’s always more space!"
“A thousand kilometres! That’s like so much!"

Our boys have lately been interested in space. Maybe it’s the dark winter skies that let us actually see the stars; we live close to the forest with not too many lights around us, so late in the night when the street lights are off, we sometimes get to see a lot of stars. Even northern lights, if we’re lucky.

Valtteri - that’s my husband and their dad - is a physics teacher and knows Stuff About Space. He showed them a video that tries to explain the size of the universe; the animation starts from Earth, from ground level, and then goes up up up into the sky, and moves through our own solar system - you see the planets swooshing by. Then it moves even farther away, showing our galaxy, and how our own solar system is just this tiny dot in one of the more remote arms of it. Then the animation moves to the space between galaxies, and so it goes - until galaxies become small dots in the velvet darkness of the universe, until galaxy clusters do the same… out, out and out, up “into the skies” until you’re left speechless with both how massive the universe is and how your mind cannot even start to grasp it and how we still live, exist, love and find joy on this pale blue dot here.

The boys were mesmerized. They probably couldn’t yet quite appreciate the scale of it all, but it made a real impact. They know that stars are far far away, and it’s so heart warming to hear their discussions - “at least a thousand kilometres away!”, because that’s pretty much what Massive Distances mean to them now.

What I love most is how readily they accept it. This mind-boggling amazing mesmerizing fact was presented to them and they just went “oooooo” and stood in awe. It doesn’t evoke fear in them, the fact that the universe is so huge. They don’t need all the explanations. They don’t need to understand it all. They just embrace it’s awe-inspiring coolness and enjoy in it.

I love how they know how to be awed. We looked at some of the amazing Hubble shots that Nasa has on their website, and the kids’ reactions were just delicious. “Whoaaaa! Look at that…!!” I know adults might feel the same but we’ve maybe lost our ability to just revel in it. But kids, they’re still there. Their minds live still in the fairytale, their minds haven’t cooled off to some over-rational detachedness that sometimes plagues adults. They are ok with just… awe. It’s so inspiring. And it invites me into it; into the same round-eyed happy mystery.

So I have been thinking about the skies lately, about space. Stars nestled in their heavenly nurseries, being slowly born out of celestial dust. The massive, unfathomable beauty of the endless skies, dotted with star diamonds. I think it has come to represent mystery to me; the beauty of the fairytale. Of accepting your smallness in the Grand Story and enjoying the beauty unraveling around you. Of letting go of the over-rational mind and just surrendering to the mystery.

"He has set eternity in the human heart”, said Ecclesiastes (Ecc. 3:11). I’m tiny, awfully tiny in the face of the universe. My kids are. But still something in our inner being resonates with the vastness of the universe, embracing its glory. That’s just beautiful; in my mind, it’s reflecting the glory of the Creator.

These three paintings all came to be as a result of all this; I wanted to create something that’d carry the feeling of the fairytale, of what it feels like to look at a stellar nursery and think that new stars are slowly forming in the nebulae. I wanted to capture a bit of the awe; something to remind us of that.

There are three Eternity paintings, this one is called Eternity II.

Eternity I is here,

and Eternity III behind this link.