Donegal Chronicles Redux is not my first blog. Before I left New York, I had three more. One was Maureen Donegal where I posted my photographs of downtown Manhattan, but when I moved to the Cape and started taking new pictures of the dunes and moors, my followers lost interest. Another was the original Donegal Chronicles, which was created about six months prior to the move to address events that led to my leaving and the memoir I was working on at the time. I continued write on it while in Yarmouth Port, but stopped by the time I got to Provincetown since it was no longer relevant to my life and what I was working on. I liked the title though, so I revised it when I began blogging again. Both of those older sites are linked to this one, neither is active, but the third, Archetypal Angels is not although it is still there, (here’s the link to it) http://archetypalangels.blogspot.com, but you have to go to the beginning to see what it’s really about because it evolved into something else. At first it was my paintings, then it expanded to include other artists I saw while working at galleries in Soho, Chelsea and Brooklyn that I felt a connection with, whether their art was angel related or not.

Archetypal is a Jungian term referring to an image that transcends cultural boundaries and spiritual practices. Westerners usually think my pieces are ghosts but for me, as a Buddhist, they're angels, which are basically the same as ghosts except less scary. The earliest example I have is a mug I made with my grandmother, who was a professional ceramicist, during a family visit when I was five. There are seven sloppy winged and haloed figures on the mug with my name, which matches the messy blue handle, written in Grandmother’s scroll. Later, in college, I did a series of prints and paintings that were literal angels, but even as an adult, my abstract work had something like wings in them. That was what I was doing, abstracts, when the Archetypal Angel series was born. I’d gone to a Native American drum ceremony at the outdoor plaza of the World Trade Center in the late 90’s. We arrived before dawn and sat inside a circle of musicians who sang and drummed as the sun rose. I went home and started a new painting in honor of a friend who’d recently died of AIDS, and once the sketch was done I realized there was a howling face in it. I went on to do over a hundred paintings as well as a series of small collages that incorporated more traditional angels along with astronomical imagery during the period after 9/11 when it was too painful to put a brush to paper or canvas because of what I saw that morning.

I don’t paint angels anymore; I actually don’t paint at all since I became serious about writing. They’re too New York, people in Ptown find them alarming, but I don’t feel that energy, the need to be guarded, anymore. So I just write, I love my characters, but it’s nice to know my angels are still around.