Mercury

Mercury – acrylic painting by Heni Sandoval

In continuing the theme of painting abstract planets, I decided to paint Mercury. Mercury is the smallest planet in the solar system, just slightly larger than earth’s moon. It is the closest planet to the sun and takes just 88 days to make its trip around the sun. Because of this, from our view here on earth, it appears that mercury always travels close to the sun at a fast speed. Perhaps that’s why the ancients saw Mercury is the messenger of the gods. The actual color of mercury is a brownish grey but in astrology mercury’s color is symbolized as an emerald green.

I chose green for mercury’s color. Because mercury is zippy and small, I pictured it in my mind that it had a texture of the inside of a golf ball with rubber bands tightly wound together. I painted lines going all different directions overlaying each other as if they were communicating.

A few years back when I was going through my dad’s coin collection, I loved looking at the old mercury dimes. As a Greek god, Mercury was the messenger of the gods and had a winged hat and winged shoes; but he also was the patron of commerce which is why he must have been featured on the silver dime. He often carried a caduceus in his left hand. A caduceus is a a wand with two snakes twined around it with wings on top. He was somewhat of a magician and could do magic with the caduceus, with a touch of the wand he could heal illness and turn metal into gold

I decided to paint mercury close to the large sun with the caduceus symbol between them. I painted the caduceus upside down so it would be fairly subtle. I enjoyed learning about mercury and some of the mythology, it helps me to focus on a theme as paint these abstracts.

Twin Fairies

Twin Fairies is my third attempt at painting twins and I think the most successful.  As  I have written on my about page, I have an identical twin sister and we are the youngest in our family.  My parents had an eight and four year old when we came along.  They were busy with the older daughters, so the two of us were left on our own  and played together all the time.   We actually developed our own language and I can remember being in our own imaginary world pretending to be animals, fairies, etc.   If you were to see our baby photos, we actually looked like chubby cherubs with curly hair.

My Mom was born in the early 20’s and when she was a child, her mom gave her illustrated prints of little fairies and children that were popular during that time period.  Mom kept them and they hung in our  bedrooms growing up.  We loved them, they were magical and fun to look at.  I wanted this painting to have a bit of that dreamy, magical style.

The Twins

                                    The Twins – acrylic painting by Heni Sandoval

 The Twins is my most recent painting. It is is another painting for my Heni’s Happy Paintings Etsy Shop. I wanted to create a fun, happy outdoor scene and tried to show the special bond that identical twins have. I have an identical twin sister and we had that special bond.  We came into the world together and share the same genes.  Technically, we are mirror twins; I’m a lefty and she’s right handed, which means our egg split late, after nine to ten days.

Even now after living apart for so many years, we still have the same mannerisms. As I wrote on my about page, my twin and I were the youngest in our family and spent most of our time together in our own world, running around outside and playing pretend endlessly.  I think that helped us to be creative as adults.  Both of us are in happy marriages and I wonder if that has to do with being in a partnership from day one and learning how to give and take at an early age.   I love my sister and am glad she is my twin.