In the genre I want to express the deep well of magic, beauty and dynamic mystery which resides in the human heart.
The heart can metaphorically be described as a sun. Like the sun the heart brings energy and light and the flow of a living force.
Similarly when expressing my heart in painting I want to create a feeling of this energy which is an expression of love. When we love we feel the heart is the instrument of love. We do not love with our thinking or our will.
The colours of the heart
The medium of oil has a force which is like the blood. It flows and moves and carries the energy of colour in its expression.
The darker colours bring the beauty of depth and gravity. Purple is a colour of sacredness and expresses the song of the night.
Blue is an overarching colour like the sky. It creates a feeling of stillness and a sense of calmness.
Green is the colour of life and it absorbs dark and expresses light in a multitude of variations of green.
Orange is the colour of fire and scintillating movement.
Yellow streams out and warms everything in its path.
And red speaks of passionate vitality.
When the colours are given their due value by darkening or lightening on the canvas they begin to sing the song of the heart.
To understand this genre, I thought it would be helpful to give some additional information regarding what the ‘soul’ is.
The soul is the medial point in the human being between the spiritual realm and the material realm (the body/the earth). If you imagine the shape of an X, the top triangle is the spiritual realm, and the bottom triangle is the material (earthly) realm. The soul is at the point of intersection.
This means that it has a connection to both the spirit and to the earth.
The spiritual part of the human being is the aspect which has ideals, and it is here that ideas and spiritual qualities arise.
For e.g., truth, beauty, generosity, wholeness are all spiritual qualities. Most people want to evolve and develop spiritual qualities. But/and these qualities are invisible. They only exist when they are given a manifested form.
The material realm (the earth/body) is opposite to the spiritual. It is the realm of the visible. It is in on the earth that the spiritual qualities must manifest.
And alternatively, the meaning, reality, of the earthly realm must be uplifted to a higher level.
However, the polarized nature of the 2 realms means that a bridge is needed for this.
The soul is the bridge. But something very important happens in this realm. It is not only the bridge. It becomes a battleground as the spiritual and the material vie for dominance.
This could be called the eternal battle of ‘light vs dark’; of good versus evil. This battle takes place in the soul of the human being.
My desire in this genre is to give expression to both the battleground, as well as the bridge.
This is the area in which psychological dimensions of light and dark play out.
As an artist my purpose is not to evaluate the soul. It is to reveal the power of the soul with its powerful and dynamic expressions of light and dark.
* Note – All canvas measurements are in millimeters.
The genre of Spiritual Art opens a window to a world which is at a different level of consciousness to the more everyday ‘ordinary’ consciousness. This implies trying to express a ‘supersensible’ reality; in other words, the reality is not the material world of landscapes for example, or the world where everyday objects become the focus of artistic expression.
This movement away from realism was the intention of the genre called Impressionism which was concerned to articulate the tonal relationship of light and dark and a less fixed realistic impression of the world. Impressionism approaches spiritual art, but its realm of expression is still more or less the visible, natural world of the senses.
Spiritual art – my spiritual art – approaches the realm of ‘forces’ which live in a ‘supersensible’ reality. We refer to these forces as spiritual qualities such as evil and good.
The spiritual world thus speaks to a mysterious, unknown, and ‘higher’ reality. An analogy for this is the world of science fiction.
It is however not fantasy but a higher imaginative plane of energy.
So in my spiritual art I attempt to express that which is sublime, powerful and has an element of the eternal rather than the transitory.
I am a woman and hence I believe and observe that my art has a different colouring, texture, tone, and subject matter to many artists who are men.
Male artists have tended to dominate the artistic ‘landscape’ overall and have put their stamp on what artistic trends or directions were in the past and currently are.
Increasingly the feminine principle has and is becoming more dominant as a voice in all spheres of the world including art.
I love to paint the feminine! I try to express the multi-faceted nature of the feminine which ranges from the icon of ‘the Goddess’ to the complex ‘femme fatale’ who carries beautiful energy but also the potential for manipulative darkness.
The archetypes of Lilith and Eve find their continuing evolutionary expression in the variety of feminine beings who appear in different forms in my painting.
The feminine has beauty and potency which is captivating and alluring.
The feminine body was a strong focus of interest for many male artists in the past and speaks to the cultural phenomenon of women across time seeing themselves primarily through the eyes of men.
The time has come for women (the feminine) to see themselves through their own eyes and create an artistic formulation which speaks to and from a feminine standpoint.
I don’t paint many political paintings but when I do my intention is to create awareness of a world which is filled with war and conflict but also to bring awareness to a world where suffering is an everyday reality. This is the world of poverty and hardship. One can ask why I pay so much attention to this.
There is no easy answer to this but possibly it has to do with the expression of humanity. It is in the more ‘extreme’ parts of society that we see the most powerful expressions of humanity. So to some extent this genre overlaps with the genre which I have called Soul/Psychological art. It is what lives behind the external representation that I find interesting and wish to express.