Believe in the Music: Eternal Life
A welcome smile lights the harpist’s face as she looks somewhere inside all of us – from a place that is not really a place. From the vantage point of the painting, she looks from several different places – perhaps from everywhere or nowhere. Whether they are truly there or not as the viewer knows them, we find some foretold familiar places in the scene. There is the transient tunnel of light so often described, a tunnel also subtly shaped like a kind of birth canal to eternal life. The symbolic life-giving water trickles like a baptism into an eternal pool of calm that flows beyond the scene. Budding blue florals further warm the water’s edge, as does the fluorescent blue atmosphere of the scene, filling this other world with both energy and peace. Wherever or however, it is all good and all inclusive. By inviting all of us into the scene, by transcending the spatial limits of the painting itself, the harpist beckons us to hear the full range of her harp strings flowing both nowhere and everywhere – to begin to feel the presence of what awaits beyond – to ultimately “believe in the music.”
