In the dark speech of praise and birth: the prints of Judith Anderson

The artist's engagement of soul and art resolves itself in the body divine.

The picture is printed in viridian ink, so dark as to appear blue (see p. 238). The central image draws the eye first: a three-quarter view of the Venus of Willendorf, etched not only with photographic precision but with a certain fundamental seriousness (however the eye knows seriousness; it is compelled, above all, to keep looking). Gradually the other layers of the image make themselves known: the skull on which the Venus is superimposed, the woman's body in which the skull rides as womb, the lilies and the tree that sprout from the Venus's head. Snakes are twined with the woman's legs and feeding upon the lilies. Roman letters awkwardly positioned supply a caption, AVE IN MY OWN WAY. Ave/Eva? The prehistoric Venus incubating toward her resurrection? Lilies, limbs and snakes are reaching, sinuous, in motion - but all is contained within an eggshell: the skull and the stone figure are the still center. Womb, grave, fetus, yolk.

When Judith Anderson made this print she had been studying Jung's thought and her own dreams for some months, preoccupied by the archetype of the Great Mother. She was known as a Christian artist: she had done several striking prints on eucharistic and biblical subjects, and had carved liturgical objects and furniture for the local Episcopal church (All Saints' in East Lansing, Michigan). Ave in My Own Way is one of several prints made in 1978 that signal a decisive shift away from the church and toward pagan feminism. (Its title is drawn from Alan Watts's autobiography, In My Own Way.) Since that time her work has appeared in feminist journals, books on the revival of Goddess religion, on a Bill Moyers program on spirit and nature, and (pirated) in at least one college women's newsletter; she has become, not a household word, but a presence respected by a small public. Her output, though steady, has not been large - owing to the distractions to which women's artistic work is often subject - but it is work of distinction and power. The case for a feminist exodus from the church has often been made by rational argument; Anderson's work - intelligent, scrupulous, complicated - makes the case for her own emigration by a compelling irrational argument.

Anderson is of Sylvia Plath's generation; she graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1956. As a young woman she faced the same painful tension between work and traditional marriage as Plath did, the same expectation that one could be an educated woman and an artist without ever sacrificing wifely forbearance, maternal solicitude or gracious living. Unlike Plath, she managed to survive - partly because she took longer to discover the nature of her work, partly because by temperament she has a greater trust that the world is not her enemy - but the stresses of the dual life, and the vulnerability of the artistic life to the collapses of the domestic life, form a subtext to her work that is especially familiar to women of her generation.

After college she studied for a year at the Art Students League with George Grosz, Robert Beverly Hale and Edwin Dickinson. She went on to do graduate work in English at the University of Minnesota, married (uncertain what else to do, she says now) and moved with her husband to Bloomington, Indiana, where their three children were born, then moved to East Lansing. There, in 1970, she took an evening course in printmaking and found her work: etching, on zinc plates, images of immense detail and intricacy. Her first prints had such authority that her mentor from the University of Minnesota, Samuel Holt Monk - professor of 18th-century literature - insisted on giving her an etching press. (Anderson's son, and several other Sams among Monk's former students, are named for this remarkable and generous man.) For all the subtle costs of her position as faculty wife, the gift was a magnificent one, and she had the time to make use of it.

At about this same time she underwent the religious conversion that returned her to the Episcopal church, which she had left twenty years before. It was not so much an intellectual conversion as a sense of being known in a private anguish; not so much an attachment to a theology as to an iconography. The religious work that emerged is restrained, intense and ambiguous: it is in a Christian tradition that - at its artistic best - has always allowed the darker realities of loss and death to push to the wall the promises of forgiveness and redemption. The Still Point (1973), its title from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, presents the eucharistic bread and chalice in a protected space at the center of the print, set off by a Gothic arch and an uneven floor of white space; under the floor a multitude of little troll-like men and animals crouch and sway, holding up a roof of rock, and under their feet in a ghostly sea swim sharks. Above the Gothic arch soars another arch made of large bones: the delicate joints of knee and shoulder, the rib cage, the hand. Fraction (see facing page) is an immensely complex image, dominated by two hands (Anderson's own, and seen from the owner's vantage) in the act of breaking the sacrificial bread; between the torn edges of the bread appears a visual quote of Rembrandt's Christ at Emmaus. Arching protectively and threateningly over all is an image of a Vietnamese mother and child flanked by two eagles with outspread wings. Images of sacrifice are everywhere: mice dangle from the eagles' talons, a human body hangs from each thumb of the priestly hands (at the left a warrior enduring the Sun Dance ordeal and at the right Judas in his suicide, an act which Anderson sees as redemptive, "an expiation and not a punishment"). Below the mother and child and above the Rembrandt image is another quote, from Poussin's Slaughter of the Innocents. A buffalo skull, images of wild horses, and a heap of human skulls at the bottom of the picture flank a wrapped figure in the doorway of a stone tomb. Tucked under the eagles' wings are lozenges with faces peeping through them: on the left the eyes of Picasso, on the right the smiling face of a reformed thief. The mother and child bow under the eagles' wings with a sense of inevitability. The question of the print is the question of willing or unwilling sacrifice: the food chain - physical and metaphysical - on which are placed the mice, the buffalo, the murdered humans, the warrior in his ordeal, the betrayer in his atonement, and the child born to die and become a sacrament. Whose will is done? Anderson says she came to see the mother who gives the son for sacrifice - in the absence, or the silence, of the Father - as "the darkest secret in Christianity, what no one will say."