The Watchtowers - The Watchtower of the East.

The problems with conceptual & abstract thought.

I saw the background for The Watchtower of the East before the Watchtower herself. At times when I paint, I have more than one idea or "vision". I was contemplating different ideas for this painting but it was my daughter that triggered off which one I should use by commenting on the shape of a cloud formation. 

Each morning at dawn, the Watchtower of the East lays an egg, which is in reality, the sun. It is cradled in the tail of the Eastern Watchtower but as the sun rises, she begins to vanish back into the atmosphere. Her back feet are the first to dwindle but the rest follows suit soon afterwards. The fishermen underneath this spectacular event do not see her as such, just the rising sun & the brilliant oranges & reds of the sky above, which, being busy they do not really notice. She is of the sky, the sky is she.   The Watchtower, having being visible to birth the sun then vaporises into the sky, where she always is. However, each morning before dawn, the egg of the previous day, births the Watchtower of the East, who then births the new sun for the new day and the whole process starts again.

The Watchtower of the East

There is a lot of different and at times conflicting information of the Watchtowers & I am not going to go into great depth about it as then I would lose my interpretation with the amount of information there is.  The Eastern Watchtower generally signifies the element of air & intellectual, conceptualising thoughts, ideas, spring, the Maiden and youth but there are also other schools of thought.  

I wanted to underline the eastern connection of the Watchtower with the rising sun & the east itself.  The dragon is oriental, so to me this had to be the land of the rising sun. Below this scene the fishermen in their boat carry on with their morning's work and do not notice the birthing up above.  She is an air dragon, made from the sky itself, so the fishermen only see the sun and the vanishing red skies.  
This represents the difficulty that we sometimes have with intellectual thought.  For example; if I awake with a fantastic idea at 4:00 in the morning, I can guarantee that if I don't write it down or sketch it & go back to sleep, by the time I get up later on the idea will be gone, or at best fuzzy.  Because the fishermen are busy with their own lives, they have no time for conceptualising.  Any ideas that the fishermen have, they will only acknowledge as they do the skies above, but then their ideas will pass them by unless they totally focus & write them down.  So often in our day-to-day lives we will have some mad idea that is actually rather clever but we leave it until it is too late to fully recall it.  The blazing skies remind us that we too can be like the Eastern Watchtower, our ideas, concepts & ideals if noticed & worked upon could be trail-blazers and we should not ignore them.
The other elements of earth, water and fire bring balance to airy ideas.  To have an idea & then to be able to produce something from it, one usually needs more than the idea itself and so all elements here represent balance and harmony.
There is another aspect to the fading blazing skies & the vanishing dragon, that is of youth, the time of the maiden does not last long - very much like our ideas & so needs to be lived as such NOW and NOT saved for later. All too often we let important aspects of our youth slip away because we feel it would be better if we waited.  Generally, it isn't, the air dragon tell us that the time is NOW for everything we do, otherwise we might just let it all slip away.



This painting was sold this year & it went to somewhere in the East of the United Kingdom.  Some artworks belong with certain people & I can safely say that this painting went to the right people and place.



 
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