SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue Two - Journal - Page 7
Note on Cover Art
Raquel Cordón, Resonance
(oil on canvas, 2026)
The cover art for this Issue Two of Sine Qua Non is based on my painting, Resonance.
The horse in the painting is underwater. And we are submerged with him. The only air in
the painting comes from the horse, transported into the water from above—from outside
of the water and the painting—from beyond the canvas.
The horse breathes life into the painting.
Horses do not naturally inhabit water. They inhabit earth, air—the world that is not
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alive beneath the surface, moving through a medium that is both alien and potentially
deadly to it, and also vital to its existence.
Water mirrors reality, imperfectly. Light bends. Waves distort. The body fractures into
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was originally lived. Something is always altered in translation: distorted, refracted,
submerged. Something survives there that could not survive otherwise. And something
new comes into being that did not exist above the surface, outside the water.
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consciousness does not just survive. It resonates.
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