“The older I get, the more I recognize the ways in which we aren’t here alone in any kind of way.”

I wanted to make a night painting, lit entirely by moonlight. My friend Denise was working on an art project about ancestral healing called StarGazer and I felt a resonance. So asked if I could paint her portrait and she accepted.

Denise chose Allegheny Cemetery as our place to meet on a chilly November night. I observed while Denise asked the ancestors where we might be welcome. Her silent conversion with the more than seen world was mesmerizing. She repeated gestures, placed rocks, and cooed into the darkness. I felt a deep sense of reverence and a presence. There was no separation between us, the land, and sky. The full moon emerged as the night breathed.

What followed was a fascinating phenomena: a period of seeing and not seeing. Light scattering (or Green Flash) is when the light changes in a way that affects the rods and cones in the eyes changing vivid oranges and reds to cool greens and goals. The moon lit Denise’s face, and the stars emerged as a mysterious backdrop. I imagined a time-lapse of the stars forming a dome of light around Denise. Her cloak, an extension of the night sky, enveloped her body. Her hands disappear before my eyes. The landscape loses its color. Everything fades.*

Weeks after starting this painting, Denise told me she had discovered that her grandmother’s ancestors were buried in the Allegheny Cemetery. Together we returned to find their graves and she shared family stories. This gave me what I needed to complete the painting. I added the family name and guiding ancestral figures.

Jeffrey Dorsey

When I saw the painting, I was down in Atlanta. My father was in hospice. He was dying. And to see the painting felt like an auspicious moment of care on multiple levels. Not only the beauty but also the feeling in the painting that there is support all the time in our passage through life, and in that case, through death.

This painting is situated one of the oldest places in Pittsburgh, the Allegheny Cemetery. It became important to me as a place where I was able to seeing myself in time, in relationship to all of the people that were resting there.

I learned that I have ancestral ties to people that were buried there, and learned about my mother’s line. So I sought out the graves of those kin, and found the plot, and that’s where I took Jeffrey when we went to find a location for the painting. It made a lot of things about my being in Pittsburgh make more sense to me. And it actually allowed me to embrace being here rather than seeing it as a transitional place for me.The gravestone says “Mother” on it. And that’s the one that’s in the plot I have a bloodline connection to. It’s from the early 1800s.

There’s another detail that continually moves me: when I look at my own face, I see an ancestor’s face. I recognize it as mine, but also see this other grandmother.

And then the way that the hands are outlined. I’ve often felt this relationship with ancestors through the hands. The significance of the hands for generations of women that that worked with their hands, and then also the hands as a kind of mystical relationship with the heart and with healing.

The posture of receptivity is part of an exploration into ancient sculptures that I’ve been doing for many years. The one that this posture is inspired by really does have to do with stepping into an archetypal embodiment of one’s own sacredness. There’s a quality of receptivity, like the openness of the hands, to receive. And then the opening of the heart to be open rather than guarded.

And the gaze—open to that cosmic connection, but also just being very firmly rooted here.

For me it represents this sense that maybe we think we are directing ourselves, that we’re in charge and behind the wheel, but then coming to realize that we’re being carried somewhere.

The older I get, the more I go through life and have this journey along this spiral of this path that we’re here for as people, the more I recognize the ways in which we aren’t here alone in any kind of way. There’s something deeply beautiful and grounding about that, because we are in a time when there’s so much separation.

From the time that this painting was created I have had a shift in my own… I don’t know if confidence is the word exactly, but it’s a kind of a confidence in the capacity to stay with the challenges of my life. Since this painting was made there were a lot of things that happened in my family life, my professional life, and relationship and personal life that really necessitated that I was fully here. Understanding that we are here by no accident. And we are here to be here. And sometimes we go through painful challenges to really bring that home. Because there is also beauty in that: staying with what is difficult.

In working with the ancestors, especially the grandmothers, I see them as the ones who hold the weave around us, and that they are weavers and they are holding a shawl around us children. And I’m thinking about the shawl of protection and the shawl of blessing and the shawl of care.

That cape I’m wearing is from Ireland. It’s from a Weaver family in Ireland, and so having a shawl is a relationship in a direct way to those women who weave, and very much thinking of that as an ancestral thing. I find myself in shawls a lot these days. On the Imbolc night, it’s the last night of January going into the first of February, it’s known as Bridget’s time, when we leave out the shawls at night. And the tradition is that Bridget flies through the night and brings her blessing to the shawls. And so in the morning they’re covered with the dew that carries that, and you use that shawl for medicine work through the year.

My name is Denise. I feel honored and blessed by you seeing this portrait of me.