Baroque Rosary

I have noticed how Christian art become a kind of mimicry. A copy of a copy where so-called “good” art is imitating whatever acceptable form, as if art which comes afterwards is lesser and not meeting a “traditional” standard. I received that rosary when I was a child and have had it for almost 70 years. It has featured in four different paintings. I play with the angle, the crystalline light and refractions, the memories embedded—of my life touching consciously or half-consciously those beads almost daily—have a meaning too near for me to describe. It was there when my children were born, when I was told I was dying of stage 4 cancer. There is ecstasy and anguish in that painting, the saturated phenomena of my life.