This article explores a single painting: Blue Moonrise. The text brings out this work's deeply symbolic and spiritual meaning by analyzing it from many perspectives: symbolism, artistic analysis, astrology, spirituality, and mysticism. This approach demonstrates how art not only inspires us through beauty of color and form but through content and meaning that uplift our souls and help us make progress on the spiritual path.

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Art provides a powerful way to connect with our inner selves because it communicates through symbols, which constitute the language of the soul. This symbolic language speaks to us through art's physical qualities of color, form, composition, and medium; it also communicates through an artwork's content. In this way, form and content combine to express spiritual or mystical meaning, giving art a sense of mystery and inviting us to return again and again for contemplation. Over time, art can reward us with new insights and touch our souls through beauty of form and meaning.


Blue Moonrise, acrylic on canvas by Anne Nordhaus-Bike


Since ancient times, people have associated the Moon with feminine, receptive energies. For many cultures, she symbolized the Divine Mother, the celestial counterpart to the Sun's masculine, active energies. As the Sun rules day, she rules night, the time of darkness, sleep, and dreams.

In astrology, the Moon rules Cancer, a water sign famous for its shifting moods and strong feelings. Astrology classifies Cancer as a feminine, receptive sign because of its watery nature; all water and earth signs rank as feminine, while air and fire signs constitute the masculine or active signs. As the Sun moves through the zodiac, it alternates between feminine and masculine signs, just as day follows night in every 24-hour period.

The Moon's feminine quality also links her strongly with women, and her gravitational force influences women's monthly cycles as well as Mother Earth's watery realm through its effect on tides. The mysterious Moon reveals only half of herself to us: her movement around the Earth and her rotation synchronize so closely that we always see the same side of the Moon. Nevertheless, her appearance changes constantly because of her phases.

Blue Moonrise Evokes Cancer Themes

This painting, Blue Moonrise , shows the Moon at her most dramatic, when her monthly cycle has reached its full phase and the entire lunar disk reflects solar light. The Moon, recently risen in the east, dominates a brilliant night sky that changes color from indigo at the top to ultramarine in the middle to purplish blue near the horizon. Lunar light extends vertically and horizontally and creates a milky effect around the Moon via wispy clouds.


Blue Moonrise (detail), acrylic on canvas by Anne Nordhaus-Bike


Blue Moonrise's title and subject carry powerful associations with the astrological sign Cancer. The painting presents a night scene dominated by Cancer's ruler, the Moon; astrologers often call Cancers "Moon children," and many Cancers have round, Moon-shaped faces. Also, most of this image consists of a sky in varying shades of blue, a color linked with watery, tender Cancer and long a symbol of feelings, water, and the emotional plane. Where sky meets land, an undulating horizon line not only indicates Wisconsin's gently rolling topography but mimics the effect of waves in water.

In addition, Blue Moonrise was painted from memory, as a recollection of childhood camping trips to remote lakes in Wisconsin. Cancer and the Moon are linked with childhood and memory: Cancers generally look back fondly or even nostalgically at their childhoods, and they tend to have powerful memories that can be expressed negatively as holding grudges for a lifetime or more constructively as a love of history and tradition.

Blue Moonrise also exhibits the mysterious or even strange quality associated with memory, imagination, and night. Although inspired by summer experiences, it was painted in autumn and shows an elm tree whose leaves have long since fallen; tiny, imagined structures at far left hint at a village or town from a distant era, adding another layer of time. In night's world of shadows, the lone tree rises strange and vaguely threatening at right, and the few lights on the horizon suggest inhabited areas too far away to provide help if needed. The Moon's cool light makes the land look milky and seem like water, an effect reinforced by ribbons of moonshine and earthglow just below and above the horizon. Unsure of what is real in such a setting, we may have the strongly Cancer experience of feeling like a child, afraid of the dark and the night.

Cancer, the Full Moon, and Spiritual Illumination

This very strangeness gives Blue Moonrise its peculiar power. Much as a dream may feel odd or unsettling when we first awaken into that halfway point between sleeping and becoming fully awake to everyday existence, so can art's colors and symbols provoke feelings of being "in a different place." That "place" consists of our inner, spiritual world, the realm of the soul.

Blue Moonrise brings us directly to that realm because, on the spiritual plane, the Moon symbolizes the soul (among other things). Also, the Moon's monthly cycle symbolizes the inner process of spiritual evolution: at the beginning of each lunar cycle, the Moon is new or dark, and as the days pass she grows in light until the full Moon, the time of greatest light. Afterward, the light gradually diminishes until the next new Moon begins the process again.


Blue Moonrise (detail), acrylic on canvas by Anne Nordhaus-Bike


This inspiring cycle symbolizes the inner self's potential for illumination. Just as the Moon gradually increases in light, our inner self shines brighter and brighter as we grow spiritually and acquire greater wisdom. The monthly full Moon represents the climax of this process, giving us the time of greatest light and symbolizing spiritual illumination. After receiving light in the form of insight, intuition, or inspiration, we must share it in some way with others, as symbolized by the Moon's diminishing light in the second half of her monthly cycle, as if she is emptying herself, giving away her light in order to prepare for receiving even greater light in the future.

These little monthly illuminations correspond to the Sun's larger, annual cycle of light: fittingly, the Sun's time of greatest light (in the northern hemisphere) occurs each year at the summer Solstice with its entry into Moon-ruled Cancer. This event often corresponds with emotional insights, dramatic outer events that bring change, or inner breakthroughs. Across a lifetime, this combination of monthly and annual illuminations gives us great opportunity to evolve spiritually. As we do, we reveal more and more of our soul's beauty and shine greater amounts of inner light.

May Blue Moonrise touch your soul, and may its bright full Moon inspire your own process of introspection and spiritual illumination.

Authors Website: https://artistanne.com/

Authors Bio:

Award-winning artist Anne Nordhaus-Bike paints colorful, calming watercolors inspired by nature.

Anne's art has appeared in numerous solo and group shows as well as many arts programs, presentations, and performances. Her work has been published in periodicals and books; covered in numerous print publications; and featured in broadcast media, both on television and feature films.

She received a degree in art history, with honors, from the University of Chicago and went on to launch a fine arts column that ran for two decades in the Gazette Chicago newspaper, where she has served in various capacities since the newspaper's founding in 1983. She joined Gazette Chicago's board of directors in 2004. She founded her multimedia arts firm, ANB Communications, in 1993.

A member of the prestigious Woman Made Gallery in Chicago since 1998, she launched her book, Follow The Sun, with a book signing at Woman Made in 2012; the book includes more than a dozen of her original watercolors. Among her many awards and honors, she was named to the National Women's Hall of Fame's Wall of Fame.

Anne lives with her husband Bill and cat Sterling in Chicago, where she makes art and enjoys cooking, tai chi, and time in nature.