Number 23...???

Twenty-Three by Marina Petro

Who said Google search wasn't a real source of synchronicity?

When I was looking for crow images for my post on The Crow;

The Crow: Examining the Dark Side of Life

I stumbled across a painting by Marina Petro titled Twenty-Three.

(UPDATE: 25/7/14. Twenty-Three seems to have been given the title   
The Bluebird Of Happiness since I wrote this post)

I was almost struck dumb when I saw it.
Apart from being named Twenty-Three (my birth-date), it had so many figures, colours and themes running through my life, that I wouldn't know where to start.
It was like she had painted memories onto the canvas from inside my head.

My Mexican owl and my Portuguese rooster

For instance, here are two of my favourite art pieces that I love dearly.
A green owl I bought from a Mexican art-ware shop in Brisbane 
(no longer open) and a Portuguese rooster I bought online from a shop in Sydney.
These stand on a bench in my dining room.
Notice the rooster has a heart on it's chest, but in the painting, the green owl has a heart on it's chest.
The owl in the painting also incorporates a heart in the face which to me is also like an arrow pointing to the heart in the chest of the owl.
Which I take as meaning that while it is important to use the mind to unlock the intuition of the heart, the heart is the more important metaphorical organ 
(or rather intuition is more important than logic ... but you still need logic) of the two.

The rooster also has a Yellow flower with a red center and a

red flower with a yellow center, plus a few spirals painted on it's side also.
Which reminds me of the Hopi Sun Kichina's brain - red within yellow on the left side of the brain and yellow within red on the  right side of the brain.
To me the message I get is that both sides of the brain need to be integrated equally. 

The rooster also reminds me of Abraxas,

 My morning coffee cup

Which is also the name of my favourite bookshop.
Which I have only just found out is closing it's doors after 
17 years :- ( 

The flower on the back of
 the green Mexican owl

And the flower on the owl's back looks a bit like a hibiscus flower to me.
Hibiscus Sync

My Mexican "Tree of Life"

There are so many other things about this painting that speaks to me personally, like the rainbow serpent of Aboriginal Dreamtime, goldfish, dragonflies, space, turtles, sun imagery and on and on.

I love this painting on so many levels that words couldn't do it justice.

Out of all the paintings in Marina Petro's number series, 23 is the only one that really speaks to me. 

What a coincidence?