Margaret Keane

Her ten planets divide three apiece in fire and earth and two apiece in air and water, with four cardinal and four mutable. This chart holds no closed figure of any kind. The record says Keane painted the big eyed children, sold under her husband's name until she proved otherwise in court.

Mercury is in four of the six closest contacts and the chart is built around it. It sits conjunct Mars at just over half a degree, which is quick and pointed: decisiveness, debating ability, and the old caution that the tongue is a weapon here whether or not it is meant to be. It sits sixty degrees from Saturn at under half a degree, structured thinking without strain. And it sits directly opposite Uranus at just under a degree, thought jumping the rails and being right in a way nobody has the context to follow. An artist who had to prove in a courtroom that her own paintings were hers needed every one of those three contacts at once, and the record says she proved it.

An artist who had to establish authorship of her own work in a courtroom needed all three of those at once: the decisiveness, the structure and the willingness to be right in public before anybody else had caught up. The chart does not explain the court case, which was a thing another person made necessary, but it does describe somebody equipped to sit through one. Saturn sits in easy contact with Uranus at half a degree, practical innovation, and in hard contact with Pluto at four tenths. Mars sits sixty degrees from that same Saturn at just under a degree, sustained effort. Three of the ten planets were retrograde.

She died at Napa on 26 June 2022, at ninety four. The Sun sits at twenty two degrees of Virgo with Venus at fourteen and retrograde, and the Moon answers from Taurus at twenty, needing the physical basics settled first; both lights are certain. The Moon was balsamic and five per cent lit, the phase that finishes things, lets them go, and is already looking past them.