Visionary art is not easily defined. As a recognised genre it is recent, a half-century old at most – its first generation masters are still practicing, its horizons are still expanding. Visionary art is contemporary. To search for a defining boundary therefore is fruitless; definitions, being restrictive, are more readily established in retrospect. But if we cannot define, then we can unearth. For there exists in any art genre a lineage, a bloodline, and in Visionary art we find a genealogy that can be traced through the Surrealist and Fantastic Realist movements of last century, past the Renaissance, across continents and centuries, back to the first dawn.

Solstitial Bridge by Breck Outland

The position of drawing as a specialised discipline within this genealogy is an even more subtle ancestry to unthread. In Visionary art we find a bewildering breadth of subject matter; we find particular attention given to dreams, to death and memory, unexplored terrains of the psyche, madness, mythic creatures, gods and demons, the organic and mechanical, anatomy, animal consciousness and organic emergence, geometry and mandalas, and the symbolism of alchemy, astrology and assorted wisdom traditions. Yet none of this is essential, none of this in itself is sufficient to make a piece of art ‘Visionary’, for the genre rests upon a unified and identifiable foundation of technique, a technical style and temperament that those artists specialising in ink and pencil share with their painter siblings.

Ernst Fuchs has named this “ein verschollener Stil”- a “hidden prime of styles.” [i] This unity of style is the genetic code writ through the Visionary artist’s bloodline; it is the grammar upon which their language is constructed.

Visionary art rests upon a unified and identifiable foundation of technique, a technical style and temperament that those artists specialising in ink and pencil share with their painter siblings – a “hidden prime of styles.” This unity of style is the genetic code writ through the Visionary artist’s bloodline; it is the grammar upon which their language is constructed.

To begin at the beginning.

The underground caverns of Lascaux in Dordogne, the guide switches off his flashlight. “The senses suddenly are wiped out,” one visitor recounts, “the millennia drop away… you were never in deeper darkness in your life. It was – I don’t know, just a complete knock out. You don’t know whether you are looking north, south, east, or west. All orientation is gone, and you are in a darkness that never saw the sun.” [ii]

This primordial darkness is a space of pre-conceptual potential. This is a creative space.

The guide switches his torch back on and turns it to the roof and walls. Emerging from the depths of the rock are painted animals, images of bizarre creatures, half-human and half-animal hybrids. “A strange beast with a gravid belly and long pointed horns walks behind a line of wild cattle, horses, deer and bulls that seem simultaneously in motion and at rest.” [iii]

What motivates this art?

Ernst Fuchs is the recognised Grandfather of the contemporary visionary art movement.

It must be something of deep significance. The upkeep of these sacred sites was hugely unpragmatic. It was dangerous, exhausting, uneconomical and time-consuming. Visitors to these ancient caves were required to climb for some eighty feet down a sloping tunnel, sixty-five feet beneath the earth; some caves were so deep it took an hour to descend into them. Yet these sacred sites endured for 20,000 years.

This is not art born of idle fancy. It is not art which serves simply to satisfy the individual creative will, nor is it concerned with interpreting and analysing social context. This is art born out of a direct confrontation with certain inescapable fundamentals – death, physicality, conscious awareness, and the relation of humans to the organic and animal world.

These caves reveal that our ancient ancestors felt profound anxiety over the slaughtering of beasts in the hunt that were their friends and patrons. Anthropologists tell us that to assuage this anxiety they surrounded the hunt with taboos and prohibitions. They believed that the Animal Master had sent his flocks to the lower world, and that the performance of certain rites returned the slaughtered animals to posthumous life in world of the spirit. Hunters therefore hunted in a state of ritual purity, abstaining from sex before an expedition. They felt a deep empathy with their prey. Bushmen on the Kalahari planes reconstructed their kill by laying out its skeleton and pelt; others buried the non-edible remains. Hunters lay beside the dying animals and wept with them, imitating their movements and participating in their passing. [iv] In their sacred caves, they smeared the walls with the blood, excrement, and fat of the kill to restore it, symbolically, to the earth. Animal blood and fat were ingredients of Palaeolithic paints. The act of painting was an act of restoration.

These ancient cave paintings were the attempt to construct a visual language, a language in which the profound and disturbing mysteries of existence could be given voice: the incomprehensible translated into an aesthetic form, rendering it sacred, thus illuminating an essential value in the otherwise fragile and bewildering course of a life.

The Czarna Madonna. Ancient religious art is full of traces of mystical experience, indicated by their aesthetic sensibilities.

Visionary art is characterised by the attempt of each artist to develop this shared visual language, a language of illumination initiated by our primordial hunter forbearers. Each artist contributes to this universal narrative in their own distinctive accent, spoken through their chosen discipline – be it oil paint, airbrush, digital art, or drawing.

In sharing the commitment to developing this universal language, the Visionary artist distinguishes herself from gallery politics and financial speculations that unfortunately surround much modernist and post-modern art. Academicism and elitism are dismissed. Cynicism and cold irony give way to quiet contemplation. In Visionary art is the sincere attempt to transcend shock-tactics and cliché in order to revive something eternal within the contemporary experience.

French Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau laments, “If only the great myths of antiquity were continually translated, not by historians, but by eternal poets. We must escape that puerile chronology which forces artists to translate their own times, in all its finitude, rather than the eternal… To give to myths their full intensity, we mustn’t lock them away in their own epoch – they need release from the moulds and styles of their time.” [v]

The Visionary artist is the eternal poet – ‘ein verschollener Stil’ is the grammar through which they speak.

The lineage from these founding fathers is subtle but true. From the shaman’s etchings, this artistic spirit continues into the carvings of the ancients. It is in the Egyptian pantheon and the Mesopotamian cuneiform. It finds expression in the art of the ancient Cycladic and the Minoans; and from these, ancient Greek mythology is born. In Middle America, it arose among the Aztecs, Mayans and Toltecs, and endures today amongst the last surviving indigenous tribes of the Amazon basin. In each of these cultures, common motifs are expressed. We find depictions of the creation and the cosmos, of form rising from the void, of Gods and the sacred hero, and of the endless cycle of death and rebirth. This is not Visionary art, but it is ancestral. [vi]

In the European dark ages the bloodline is more difficult to discern. We find traces in Nordic woodwork, and in the remnants of Celtic carvings – in their animal heraldry and horned gods. It is in the serpentine motifs that scatter the globe at this time, a spiralling symbol of transformative potential. In North America, it finds expression in the Indian peoples’ complex animal mythologies, through totems, weavings and carvings, through masks and dance.

The Visionary lineage predates religion, and has informed sacred art across the millennia. Within ancient Christianity we find Bible covers encrusted with precious gemstones, their contents illumined with arabesques and bestiaries. It is in the mysterious thangka of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism. In the geometric mandalas of Persian Sufism. We find the language spoken in the stone and stained-glass facades of Gothic cathedrals and the egg-tempera icons of the Byzantines. It endures into the frescos of the Italians, into the oil and resin altarpieces of the Netherlandish painters.

Ohlhaeuser, a master painter in the mische technique.

In each of these, the subtle thread endures.

The great achievements of European art for the last thousand years have predominantly been in its depiction of the sensory world. It was five hundred years ago that the rules of perspective became widely known and began to be harnessed by artists, these painters embodying the discoveries and new understandings of actual geometry. This resulted in art that was realistic and empirical, and primarily concerned with nature. Even religious iconography from this period was concerned first and foremost with literal depictions of the virgin birth and crucifixion.

The onset of modern art was essentially a movement away from the sensible world to depictions that mapped the terrain of the mind. This was born out in symbolic, abstract, conceptual, and phenomenological art. In this it was not nature that was being depicted, but the psyche. Not realistic but abstract. Not Euclidean but Surreal. Beginning with Paul Cezanne, who Matisse called “the master of us all” [vii], the fixed perspectives of the material world were broken down and superseded by emotional and psychological participation. Vassily Kandinsky championed this new approach, stating, “It must be possible to hear the whole world as it is, without representational interpretation” [viii], prefiguring a vision drawn exclusively of the mind. Jean Delville and Pavel Tchelitchew were amongst those who pushed this trend over the threshold and into a temperament that may rightly be named Visionary.

Visionary art then is entwined with and born of this modernist thrust, but a number of notable Visionary artists preceded it and we may trace their bloodline.

Twelfth century mystic, polymath, and painter, Hildegard of Bingen, stands removed within the early period of Western art as a herald, her transparency of style and depth of vision being antecedent to later Visionary masters. She also pioneered the fusion of disciplines that has come to characterise modern Visionary art. She set her art in the context of poetry, theatre, and music, just as the modern practitioners of Visionary art are bridging disciplines by working with musicians, film-makers, and architects.

But probably the first true Visionary painter was Hieronymus Bosch. His work, rich in fantastic imagery, presents a door to occluded domains of hell and to a lost paradise. We speak particularly of the Garden of Earthly Delights triptych and the Temptation of St. Anthony. His distinguishing style, influenced by but significantly distinct from the contemporary Flemish practice of applying multiple glosses, bridged the disciplines of drawing and painting as he evolved his technique to ‘draw with his paintbrush’. His idiosyncratic vision and the Flemish style he diverged from each became foundational in the emergence of Visionary art mid-way through the twentieth century.

The earliest Visionaries that followed Bosch worked to elude the currents and fashions of painting in their own times, thus seeking to rise above what Moreau called the “puerile chronology”. Included in these are Goya – with his adumbral murals, and portrayals of Darker Realms in Black Paintings and The Disasters; Henry Fuseli; the engravings of Gustave Doré; and – perhaps most significantly – William Blake with his watercolours and etchings of the Ancient of Days, the Book of Job, the Last Judgement – all accomplished with little or no recognition.

Blake is seminal. In a widely celebrated passage he writes, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, then every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.”[ix]

Gustave Moreau, an artist who transcends the definitions of symbolism, essentially a visionary.

In this is the founding dictum of Visionary art.

Following the Renaissance, the spirit of Bosch and Blake continued under the broader heading of Mannerist art in Bartholomäus Spranger and Wendel Dieterlin. In the last two hundred years there emerged the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in England, and the Symbolist and Decadent Movements of France and Belgium. These were followed by the later Symbolists, including Odilon Redon, Alfred Kubin, and Max Klinger. These were followed close behind by the Secessionist Visionaries – Gustav Klimt, Viteslaw Masek, and Jan Toorop. Singular amongst all of these was the masterful Gustave Moreau. [x] Each of these artists illuminated the ancient language; each broadening its vocabulary and honing its grammar.

From here, a more recent lineage can be traced with greater precision.

Surrealism must undoubtedly be identified as a direct influence upon Visionary art, but two strains within this movement must be separated and identified. The one, Automatist Surrealism, tended more toward form and abstraction, with Joan Miró heading this group. This movement inspired Abstract Expressionism and Action painting in America. Of these, Visionary art has less in common. The other, Figurative Surrealism, tended more toward the accurate, plastic representation of dreams and their imagery in paint. Here, Picasso, Ernst, Magritte, Delvaux, and particularly Dali must be recognized as the modern forefathers of contemporary Visionary art. From these we arrive at the source.

In the aftermath of Second World War, the misinterpretation of Surrealism led a group of academy painters in Vienna to eventually create the movement now recognized as Fantastic Realism. Hausner and Hutter, Lehmden and Brauer, and particularly Ernst Fuchs, sought to revive old master’s techniques of painting, combine it with Impressionist colour theories, and dedicate this new finesse and precision to fantastic subjects. In this elite group was contemporary Visionary art given birth.

As many of these painters are still alive today, they have become recognized as first generation Visionaries. Included among this generation of painters, but working more independently, are also Ernst Steiner, Peter Proksch, and Wolfgang Grasse.

Of his art Fuchs states, “I have always been drawn towards things which man cannot see from the exterior. And I have always practiced a kind of art which depicts things that, otherwise, man only sees in his dreams or hallucinations. For me, the threshold has to be crossed from inner images to their expression in wakeful being – the transformation of dreams and fantasy into the world of reality and its plane of visual imagery.” [xi]

Of Surrealism and Fantastic Realism, two things must be noted. Firstly, that the Surrealists primary concern was with the dream-state. ‘Surrealism’ is the umbrella term under which Visionary art is often conflated, but the latter does not give the same predominance exclusively to dreams as does the former. Secondly, that where the Surrealists were primarily inspired by Freud’s writings on dreams, the Fantastic Realists, from which Visionary art is born, were more influenced by Jung, particularly his work concerning the Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. And so, while the early dream-works of Dali manifest much of the repressed sexual imagery uncovered by Freud, the fantastic works of the early Fuchs, by contrast, revealed the sacred images of alchemy which Jung taught in his dream studies.

Under the expert guidance of Fuchs, a second generation emerged in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, practising (what Max Doerner called) the Mischtechnik, as taught to them by Fuchs. A direct link is traced from here through Fuchs to Mati Klarwein, De Es Schwertberger, and Robert Venosa. During this period other students of Fuchs organized movements and became teachers of the technique: Brigid Marlin (member of Inscape and founder of The Society of Art of the Imagination), Philip Rubinov-Jacobson (member of the New York Visionaries and organizer of the Old Masters/New Visions seminars), as well as Fuchs’ own son, Michael Fuchs. [xii]

Augustin Lesage, outsider artist

Of the same generation, but working more independently: Alex Grey constructed his series of Sacred Mirrors – anatomical paintings infused with subtle energies, informed by transpersonal philosophy and by many years of psychedelic exploration in the city morgue. In Switzerland, H. R. Giger harnessed the techniques of airbrushing to his aphotic visions of aliens, bio-mechaniod symbiosis, and the occult. Also exploring the shadow side of Visionary art at this time, in Norway and Poland, were Odd Nedrum and Zdzislaw Beksiński, whose individual yet resonant visions of archetypal beings inhabiting desolate and apocalyptic vistas continue to inspire contemporary masters, most notably in the work of Chet Zar and Jeremy Caniglia. Many of the Visionaries working in Europe during this period – Fuchs, Hausner, Giger, De Es, Venosa – crossed the Atlantic and were introduced to a broader American audience by the magazine Omni.

Contemporary with this was the rediscovery of l’Art Brut, Outsider art – untrained artists whose psychomimetic style was expressed in imagery strikingly similar to the more calculated works of Visionary artists. These include the water-colours of Heinrich Nüssbaum, the apocalyptic landscapes of Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, and the work of Augustin Lesage, whose detailed patterns set within a surrounding ‘negative space’ have resonated strongly into Visionary art. Many of these works have been documented through Raw Vision magazine. The parallel emergence of Juxtapoz magazine in California, championed by Robert Williams, and later of Hi Fructose, has widened the context in which Visionary art proper may be understood.

Through a synthesis with other media and disciplines, Visionary art has expanded beyond the art world to give birth to an international Visionary culture. Grass-roots groups including Pod Collective, Elfintome, and UK based Lila, have been instrumental in this, establishing Visionary galleries at music festivals and cultural events worldwide.

“Through a synthesis with other media and disciplines, Visionary art has expanded beyond the art world to give birth to an international Visionary culture. Grass-roots groups including Pod Collective, Elfintome, and UK based Lila, have been instrumental in this, establishing Visionary galleries at music festivals and cultural events worldwide.”

Included in these is the Entheon Village at Burning Man in Nevada, spearheaded by Alex Grey and US organisation MAPS [xiii]; and the Visionary art gallery in the Liminal Village at Boom festival. In Boom is the leading synthesis achieved, with Visionary art forming the backdrop and context for ground-breaking electronic music and mixed-media disciplines, all underpinned by a sustainability ethos based on the pioneering theories of permaculture.

Alex Grey has opened his art up further into the music world with his collaborations with rock band Tool; and his collaboration with transpersonal philosopher Ken Wilber has led to a fusion with modern academia and a thriving multi-disciplinary lecture circuit where Robert Venosa and Martina Hoffman are to be found speaking alongside leading psychologists, writers and scientists, including Stan Grof, Ralph Metzner and (in years gone) Robert Anton Wilson. Alex Grey is also an ambassador for Ken Wilber’s Integral Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Mars 1, a contemporary painter straddling visionary and pop surrealism.

Visionary art has organised itself into a flourishing and integrated global community. Those at the forefront of the contemporary scene include – but are certainly not exhausted by – Oleg Korolev in Russia, Maura Holden in the USA, Peter Gric in Austria, Satoshi Sakamoto in Japan, and Kuba Fiedorowicz in Australia. Jon Beinart’s Surreal Art Collective at beinart.com has provided international artists with a central hub through which to promote and share their work, and has been instrumental in a number of collaborative international exhibitions. UK-based Daniel Mirante’s www.lila.info has charted and explored the movement and associated artists since 2000ad. Canadian Delvin Solkinson has been instrumental in organising and presenting visionary art to an international audience through publications and the Galactic Trading Card oracle complex.

In America the Visionary art scene remains rooted predominantly in California, with Robert Venosa basing himself between Colorado and his spiritual home in Cadaquez, Spain, where he studied under Dali; and Alex Grey working independently to build the Temple of Sacred Mirrors in upstate New York. The Cannibal Flower exhibitions, hosted by various galleries across Los Angeles, have given the opportunity for upcoming artists to exhibit alongside more established names, and the ‘Temple of Visions’ gallery, a huge space on downtown Gallery Row, opened opposite Hive in spring 2010, proudly “bridging International Visionary Culture and the Los Angeles Art World”[ [xiv] Large collective Visionary art exhibitions have been held recently in Germany, Spain and Amsterdam; France hosts the Chimera Visionary art festival. The UK is notable for lagging so far behind this international movement.

For 20,000 years our ancient ancestors committed themselves to the development of a visual language through which to express the bewildering and the incomprehensible.

Speaking of his role as an artist, Robert Venosa states, “I believe I’ve figured out that my true purpose in the scheme of things is to act as a translator – in the language of form and color… allowing the artist, and the viewer, access to the infinite iconography.” [xv]

In Visionary art this ancient spirit endures.

The mainstream art establishment, however, has been reluctant to acknowledge Visionary art. Nowhere is this truer than in London, where an aloof hyper-modernism has rendered the Visionary artist stranded. Certainly this is in part due to widespread ignorance of the Visionary artists’ ancestry and pedigree that grant her a rightful place on the contemporary scene. Probably it is also because the establishment is yet to fully grasp the extent to which Visionary art is a coherent and flourishing international movement. But most likely it is due to incorrect and uninformed assumptions over what classifies a work of art as ‘Visionary’ – the misconception centring on the notion that the term refers predominantly to subject matter. This leads to cynical and misinformed associations between Visionary art and New Age-tinted depictions of fairies, dolphin consciousness, alien abduction and crystal healing. These do not make an artwork Visionary. It is not what is portrayed that matters, it is how.

The hidden prime.

Fuchs speaks elusively of “a secret art whose traces I have discovered with almost all people and cultures, but also in nature itself, there where the primeval world appears.” [xvi] The nucleus of this secret art is a shared grammar, ‘ein verschollener Stil’, which both distinguishes the Visionary artist from her contemporaries and betrays her ancestry. This secret grammar is the unifying factor that underpins the bewildering diversity of the genre.

Fuchs speaks elusively of “a secret art whose traces I have discovered with almost all people and cultures, but also in nature itself, there where the primeval world appears.” The nucleus of this secret art is a shared grammar, ‘ein verschollener Stil’, which both distinguishes the Visionary artist from her contemporaries and betrays her ancestry. This secret grammar is the unifying factor that underpins the bewildering diversity of the genre.

From a technical point of view, Visionary artists are unified in their tastes, temperament and preference. Though their methods differ – Venosa and Fuchs preferring classical techniques of oil and varnish, Giger the airbrush, Lipton and McFadden ink and pencil, and others including Luke Brown the graphic potentialities of computers – all demonstrate a commitment to an exactingly precise rendering of their vision. Fine lines, gradual transitions, infinite subtlety, mystifying detail – these are the hallmarks of the Visionary artist.
Why such intricate detail? Why such precision?

Speaking for the Fantastic Realists, Fuchs relates that “From the beginning we wanted to re-animate the craftsmanship of the Old Masters. But, more than that, we wanted to depict the fantastic image in such a way as if it were painted, not by hand, but by the dream itself, leaving no trace of the craftsmanship behind.” [xvii]

De Es expands on this idea: “In these early works, I avoided anything which could look like a brushstroke. The onlookers always wondered how it was done. They were really quite mystified. That sort of response made me feel very good about my work, because that is how I perceived existence. There are no brushstrokes in life, and only the creator knows how it is done. I am left mystified.” [xviii]

In Visionary art we find a dedication to seamless detail and precision of form, a subtlety of technique that renders the medium as translucent as possible, so that the image is presented immediately to the viewer. There is a self-emptying that is reminiscent of the Zen painters of the Orient. Just as the Zen painter sits quietly before nature, perhaps before a bird or flower, and allows the spirit of the object to flow through him onto the paper, so too the Visionary artist makes themselves transparent to their vision, so that it may flow unchanged through them and onto the paper – only unlike the Zen painters, they express the vision through an exacting technique of exquisite detail and precision that is rooted in a thousand years of Western tradition. In so doing, the Visionary artist permits the artwork autonomy, leaving behind little trace of her role as its author.

Nowhere is this commitment more recognisable than in those artists choosing drawing as their preferred medium within the genre. Of these we name the light-infused etchings of Gustave Doré and William Blake, of Ernst and Michael Fuchs, early Kris Kuksi, the deeply representational drawings of Laurie Lipton (which place her on the very fringe but certainly within the Visionary tradition), and the art of Breck Outland, Daniel Freedman, Bethan McFadden, Dariusz Zawadzki, and Michel de Saint Ouen, amongst many others.

Gustave Doré completed illustrations in Visionary style to The Divine Comedy (particularly The Inferno), Don Quixote; and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. In these he developed an accented expression based upon light and form. His technical style, in which a unified work emerges from countless tiny marks, finds expression in the contemporary scene in Laurie Lipton.

Laurie Lipton

“My imagery is savage but my technique is extremely controlled,” Lipton recounts, before lamenting, “It’s so much harder to sell a drawing, when I started out all the galleries said, ‘Do colour or we won’t show you and you won’t be able to make a living.’” [xix]

If the mainstream art world is slow to recognise Visionary art, then to draw within the genre presents the artist with a double challenge.

Yet in choosing a medium where colour is absent, the artist is free to explore their subject in depth through Doré’s lens of light and form. Of her work, Lipton states, “It’s like a Diane Arbus photograph: monochrome makes it stark, it feels frozen in time. There’s an atmosphere to black and white which I like: it’s the colour of ghosts, of memories and ancient photographs… And it’s also much harder to do.” [xx]

The distinction between black and white can serve to draw apart other polarities, while paradoxically unveiling their underlying interrelation. In a pencil drawing, light and shadow are interdependent – only through shades of darkness can light be understood; without light there is no boundary to shadow. These two, light and shadow, give birth to form. Light and shadow anticipate and precede form. In this sense, drawing is the most immediate of all the visual arts – drawing is an exploration of the foundation upon which all visual art is based.

The interdependence of light and shadow form the context in which other polarities may be explored – those of life and death, animal and human, physical and spiritual, organic and mechanical, heaven and hell.

HR Giger

H.R. Giger, maestro of a ’symphony of blacks’, exploited this to explore the polarities of organic and mechanical. Giger shows us female human figures in fearful symbiosis with cold mechanical beings; the organic arising amidst an industrial underworld, never able to escape it. Giger states that he “established certain connections in the architecture of the human body on the one hand and in the technological world on the other.” [xxi] The absence of colour acts to highlight the stark distance between these polarities, while the inherent interdependence of light and shadow unveil a hidden ambiguity and underlying unity.

Jerwood Drawing Prize judge Paul Thomas states this as the key criteria in assessing any artwork – “Is the language appropriate for the subject?” [xxii]

The Visionary artist speaks a grammar of exacting detail and subtlety. Whether the subject is the emergence of consciousness from the seamless unity of the organic world, or the liquid landscape of dreams, memories, and archetypes, the vision is expressed in a language that allows all authority and primacy to remain with the artwork. This lucidity is an artistic temperament that reaches back to Hildegard of Bingen, is given genius in Hieronymus Bosch, honed and mastered in William Blake and Gustave Moreau, and finds full expression in the modern masters of the art.

The challenge of an art establishment preoccupied with the deconstruction of modern trends is to demonstrate the validity and authenticity of such a temperament. To penetrate the aloofness of such an establishment requires a deep-rooting in ancestry that allows the Visionary artist both to anchor themselves in history and to justify their position on the contemporary scene.

To penetrate the aloofness of the modern art establishment requires a deep-rooting in ancestry that allows the Visionary artist both to anchor themselves in history and to justify their position on the contemporary scene.

Even the masters found this a challenge. Ernst Fuchs speaks of the difficulty he had at the beginning of his career in rooting his art in an authentic context. It was only later, when he began to master his craft, that he discovered his true ancestry, “scattered through many countries, they were members, as I understood it, of a secret lodge: the Masonic Order of Visionaries.” [xxiii]

This ‘invisible tribe’ is the same that has been working for centuries, often in isolation and ignorance of one another, to elucidate and expand the visual language that was initiated by our primordial ancestors. They have done so through a shared grammar, ‘ein verschollener Stil’, which underpins and justifies their vision.

De Es summarises the Visionary project: “Reading the story of the universe backwards is our method of reaching the beginning. We encounter all the images which form and direct our wants, needs, and urges imprinted on the core of our mind. We discover pictures there, as if carved from stone, prevailing through time and revealing what powers are holding the world together. If we could read these pictures, our vision would grow clear. We would find ourselves at the bottom of everything – holding it all together.” [xxiv]

In Visionary art, the artist has come full circle to apply a contemporary technique, honed and mastered over a long Western tradition, to illuminate a visual language rooted in our ancient prehistory. This is Ur-Sprache, the primal language, a language born in the caverns of pre-conceptual darkness. This is a language that precedes speech, a language given form tens of thousands of years before the word. The word may fail – may strain, crack and sometimes break, under the burden, under the tension, slip, slide, perish, and decay with imprecision – yet, where the word fails, Visionary art presents us with a language in which the image endures.

Rob Percival 2010
http://tetrahension.com

Bibliography

[1] Ernst Fuchs, Architectura Caelestis, 1966
[2] Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, 2009
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Pierre-Louis Mathieu (ed.) Un Ouvrier Assembleur de Reves, Gustave,1991
[6] This ancestry is not without its own bloodline, being descendent of L. Caruna’s Visionary Manifesto, 2001, which should be recognised as the patriarch of writings on Visionary art.
[7] See Richard Lacayo The Master of Us All: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1881981,00.html
[8] Quoted in Alex Grey – Sacred Mirrors, Introduction by Ken Wilber, 1990
[9] Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. See: http://www.levity.com/alchemy/blake_ma.html
[10] This Visionary nexus is further indebted to Caruna
[11] Ernst Fuchs, Im Zeichen der Sphinx, DTV verlag, (L. Caruna translation)
[12] See: Caruna, http://visionaryrevue.com/webtext/longman1.html
[13] See: MAPS, http://maps.org/ For further psychonaughtical exploration, see: Erowid, http://www.erowid.org/
[14] See: Temple of Visions, http://templeofvisions.com/
[15] See: Reality Sandwich, http://www.realitysandwich.com/slideshow/robert_venosa
[16] Ernst Fuchs, Architectura Caelestis,1966
[17] Ernst Fuchs, Im Zeichen der Sphinx, DTV verlag, (L. Caruna translation)
[18] De Es, Heavy Light, Morpheus International, 1993
[19] Interview with Tony Thorne, The Extraordinary Drawings of Laurie Lipton, 2009
[20] Ibid.
[21] H.R. Giger, Necronomicon, 1978
[22] See: http://www.jerwoodvisualarts.org/uploads/documents/Who%20would%20be%20a%20selector.pdf
[23] Ernst Fuchs, Fuchs de Draeger, Draeger Editeur, 1977
[24] De Es, Heavy Light, Morpheus International, 1993

[Show as slideshow]

When did you start developing an interest in art and what have been the major catalysts to your flowering as an artist ?

Mia:
Well, since I was a very small child I’ve had an obsession with drawing—both, my twin sister and I. Apparently, we would put toys aside for a crayon and a piece of paper. I was greatly encouraged by family, classmates, and teachers alike throughout grade school, so there was never any question in my mind that I wanted to pursue art. Reading storybooks, watching cartoons, and Disney animated films were a huge inspiration to me growing up, and I wanted desperately to become an animator when I was in high school. At around 15, I took my first formal art class— figure drawing over the summer at Art Center. It was a bit overwhelming, because I’d never been in a class where everyone was artistic. It was also terribly exciting, because it was my first time on a college campus that was entirely dedicated to art. The idea that I could study art institutionally was riveting, because I was used to the occasional craft or hobby-painting sort of art class up until that point. And of course, then there was Otis, which pretty much shaped my artistic development from the ground up.

The Four Seasons by Mia

You mention storybooks and disney cartoons. Your work does carry a strong narrative element, a compression of events and mythologies into a single instant. How do you feel the images come to you?

Mia:
It’s all rather spontaneous. My ideas first come in the form of words though, which I write down sporadically, usually while I’m working on another piece. When I’m ready to begin working on the new piece, I gather my notes and start sketching from the words I have written. Sometimes I’ll get stuck and have to put it aside for another day, and other times it just flows. I keep many reference folders full of images and am constantly looking through them. Tumblr is always on my homepage so that I start the day looking at random images. I sketch random observations to be sorted through later. All of the elements and details in my pieces reflect my interests and sometimes serve to document certain phases of fascination with various subjects. For example, I had an astronomy phase some months ago, and now I’m in a bit of a sculpture phase. Those things make their way into the pieces as just another way of communicating and interpreting the story that I’m trying to tell.

How would you like to see your art unfolding in the future?

I have so much to learn…I don’t think I’ve even scraped the surface yet. As far as technical skills go, I want to soak up as much as I possibly can and eventually try other media like oils, watercolor, and even digital. I have a lot to learn about myself, so I am always trying to explore new ideas, concepts, and subjects for my fine art work. I would also like to write and illustrate my own stories someday. Much farther down the line, I’d love to blend other art forms with my work (such as animation, sculpture, or even performance), whether that means collaborating with other artists, or learning new disciplines myself. As you can see, I have many dreams, but I have the rest of my life to busy myself with, so I want to keep things fresh and interesting.

Visit http://art-by-mia.com/

By Kashima Echo

Q) How do you begin a drawing?

A) First, I open my heart and my memory bank. I have many themes I would like to draw and I would be happy if I could finish drawing them during my lifetime. Depending on how I feel, the commission or the exhibition theme, I would chose one of the themes and start drawing. I tend to draw simple rough sketches, but not always. I just start drawing on the screen, and I add and subtract as I go along and complete it. My work is based foremost on ideology and philosophy. Even for a regular illustration of a girl, amongst the ambiguities there would be something I can clearly communicate why I chose ‘that’ (theme).

The other important thing is ‘curved lines’. As the world is full of spirals, I feel beauty in spirals and curved lines. The ideal balance and lines. These are important to me. Also, ‘colour’. It’s conspicuous in my gallery exhibition works, however, I personally do not like ‘aggressive colours’. I like calm, vague, cloudy, visually gentle, bright gray screens even for pastels. Even when I use dark colours, I would not use decisive primary lines. Sometimes the themes are peculiar, but it’s not that I want to hurt anyone, if permeated with kindness I can draw with a good feeling. Maybe that’s reflected in the colours.

Q) How do you know when you have caught a spirit in your lines?

A) It may be the fatigue I feel when I’ve completed the drawing. While I’m drawing I’m absorbed, am earnest, so I’m unaware of it. Though, I do always notice that ‘I must find this line the most beautiful’ as I find myself drawing the same line in different pictures as if I’ve traced it.

I myself do not have much attachment to completed drawings. I most enjoy the moment (time) I’m drawing as it absorbs me. Sometimes the completed work is good, other times it’s borderline. Either way, I secretly consider all my drawing to be ‘fragments of me’.

http://www.ne.jp/asahi/kashima/echo/

kashima@art.email.ne.jp

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Q：「カシマ様はどのようにして作品を描き始めるのでしょうか？」

A：まず、自分の心と記憶のストックを開きます。私には沢山描きたい「テーマ（主題）」があり、それは生きてるうちに描き終えれば幸せだなと思っています。それを、その時の気分や、依頼、展示テーマによって選び、描き始めます。簡単なラフは描きますが、描かない時も多々あります。画面にそのまま描きだし、作り上げながら足したり、引いたりして完成させてます。作品には、まず、思想や哲学ありきです。普通の少女のイラストでも、自分の中で「それ」を何故選んだのか、私は曖昧な中にも、明確に伝える事ができるものがあると思います。そして、もう一つ重要なのは「曲線（ライン）」です。私は世界が螺旋に満ちているように、螺旋や曲線に「美」を感じます。理想のバランスとライン。それが重要に感じています。それと、「色」。画廊展示用に作り上げる作品は顕著に現れていますが、私自身「攻撃的な色彩」が好きではありません。穏やかに、ぼんやりと、雲がかった、視覚的に優しい、パステルでも明るい灰色の画面を好みます。濃い色を使っても、主線をきっぱりと表現する事はありません。テーマが特殊な時もありますが、それは誰かを傷つけたいのでなく、優しさが浸透すれば良い気持ちで描いています。それが色にも反映されてるのかもしれません。

Q：「描いた線によって魂（本質）を捉えた時はいかにしてわかりますか？」

A：総て描き終えた時の疲労感かもしれません。描いてる間は、夢中というか、真剣であるので気づいてはいません。ただ、いつも思う事は「私は一番このラインが美しいと思っているのだろう」と同じラインを別の絵でもトレースしたかのように描いている時があります。

私自身、描き終えた絵に対して、執着はあまりありません。絵を描いてる間（時間）が一番楽しく、私を夢中にさせます。完成したものが良い物である時もあれば、微妙な時もありますが。どちらにせよ、私の描いた絵は総て「私の欠片（断片＝フラグメント）」であると、実は思っております。

質問に正しくお答えできたか解りませんが
うまく編集して頂ければ嬉しいです

Sing me to Sleep by Gregory Pettit

How did you discover your path into painting?

You know I never really had a strong interest in making art until I was 20. At the time I was enduring very terrifying recurring episodes of sleep paralysis in which I was certain that I was being attacked at a psychic level by malevolent forces that were either demonic or human in origin. I would awaken every night to find that a dark shadowy figure was standing at the edge of my bed or sitting on my chest attempting to suffocate me. The whole situation was truly maddening, but it was my first initiation into learning how to defend myself against the negative energies which are always attempting to influence us through the backdoor of the subconscious. Somehow I figured out that exteriorizing my anxieties and fears through drawing gave me power over these forces. I eventually challenged the entity by creating an image of it and invoking it in a lucid dream. By facing it head on I was able to dismantle its hold on me. My dream life began to change for the better after this period and making art became an all important bridge between my waking life and the interior archetypal realm that I would experience in sleep and pre-sleep visions. I’ve been making art for about 9 years, but as far as painting goes, I feel like I’m really just getting started. I took my first painting lessons in 2006 and didn’t really dig into it until 2007, though it has quickly become my method of choice.

When did you begin to discover these glowing alien realms?

I’ve always had a window into the hypnagogic. I remember when I was a child I used to stare at the ceiling until I would see my dream images forming out of the glowing miasma that would appear within my field of vision. As a teenager I took great interest in the fact that I could reproduce LSD and psilocybin like hallucinations by merely concentrating on an object. My eye for that in-between state has been greatly enhanced over the last few years by the twin practices of painting and guided visualization. My dreams often have a true beginning and end, where I can see the rudimentary phosphorescent geometries of the alpha wave state begin to crystallize into landscapes and personalities and then dissipate again into nothing as the dream dissolves. And of course I have to acknowledge my indebtedness to psychedelics in enhancing my experience of seeing the astral side of things. Though I don’t really have much interest in drugs at this point in my life, they’ve played a valuable role in my life in the past as a potent tool for exploring these same levels of consciousness .I’m content now to induce visions that are more controllable and of shorter duration. 12 hour LSD trips are a little more than I care to commit to nowadays.

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What are your own feelings toward these images?

It took me a couple years to get to the point where I could comfortably talk about why I make the kind of art that I make. A lot of people just don’t get it because they don’t share the experiences or the ideas that fuel it. By now so many people have contacted me out of nowhere with positive accolades that I’m a little more comfortable in my own skin now as an artist, and I see my work evolving pretty quickly from year to year, which really pushes me to work harder. Because painting is such an intense creative act that generally involves creating something out of nothing, it really has served as one of the best methods I have for studying the phenomenon of appearance; how a single rudimentary energy can diversify into all these specifics of form and yet still be homogenous underneath.

The dawning Aeon by Gregory Pettit

I can look at my paintings from just a couple years ago and feel that they are vibrating much more rapidly now, pulling me forward towards some realization that I can’t yet fathom. I’m climbing into higher and more abstract realms of the visionary experience and I feel that if I abandoned it at this point my mind would have no suitable outlet to organize all the subtle influences that come rushing through. Painting is how I keep an open conversation with the hidden side of my mind and equilibriate the imbalances within myself.

Crevasse by Robert Hardgrave

Robert Hardgrave, a self-developed artist based in Seattle, works with the present moment. Robert has exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at the Joshua Liner Gallery. Painting from the periphery of consciousness, Hardgrave evokes subtle assembly languages of consciousness, which flow quietly in the background of conscious awareness.

Within his paintings are implicated the ‘countenances of spirits’ – fleeting, subtle and enigmatic glimpses of beings, totemic forms, labyrinthine fluids, schools of thought, and diverse laws and customs in potentia, whispered through vortices conjured in flowing curves and lines.

It is with great happiness LILA can present this exclusive interview with Robert Hardgrave.

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Daniel Mirante :
How do you develop a piece? I am interested in the working method of spontaneous art as it seems to involve an opening to another level of organization to work through the artist – somewhat similar to the techniques that shamans and mediums use to draw from or represent non-ordinary forms of intelligence.

Robert Hardgrave :
I work in a sort of nonchalant fashion by working on a bunch of different things all at once. Whether its canvas, paper or panel I just start laying down marks to work with. With so many things to choose from I don’t get sucked into the feeling of making something too precious where the dread of ruining something is removed. This allows missteps to be destroyed to make something better. I believe work will always rise to the top and finish itself just by the mere act of trusting your ability to make something successful. While I am working I am searching for what the painting or how the materials are guiding me. At some point I find out what the painting is and develop the work in a more deliberate way.


Daniel Mirante :
It sounds like you have to stay in the moment to allow things to emerge, without falling into ‘painting a picture’. So what do you find useful in facilitating this flow state where you can allow art to self-organise without too much attachment or assertion of ego ? Have you always made art this way or is it something you’ve grown into…?

Robert Hardgrave :
You’re right. It also means I have to have a strong discipline of being in the studio everyday. Constant processing of the materials to maintain that flow is necessary. Before I leave the studio I take a digital photograph of whatever I’m working on so I can see it on my computer. It adds that need perspective you can’t get from being right next to the work. Often times if something isn’t feeling right I will put it away for a couple weeks and pull it our later to see if anything I’ve learned in the meantime can be applied to that piece. Working this way keeps me from getting “stuck”.

I haven’t always worked this way. Learning how to best utilize my time in the studio took a long time for me to understand. I used to try to have too much control over the work and it seemed lifeless to me. Understanding that we have such little control over how our lives progress is where I started to apply those principles to my work. I am much happier being an accepting vessel rather than being a taskmaster over my work.


Daniel Mirante :
One of the things noted about your work is the calligraphic mark-making element. It is almost like your paintings are written in a kind of ‘ur-sprach’, a primal language/syntax. Do you ever contemplate during painting or at the end of a piece an evolving narrative ?

Robert Hardgrave :
In studying different cultural design motifs I have discovered that there are many similarities in visual syntax throughout different cultures. Be it from the limitations of the hand or the nomadic nature of humans, writing and decorating can be a connecting thread to our species. I am a contemporary painter in the way a lot of things are synthesized from many different places. Collage for instance, in my opinion, is probably one of the most important and inevitable occurrence in modern image making and beyond. Since we all know there is nothing new, we tend to juxtapose disparate items to find new things. It happens in all art forms, be it music, dance, theater, painting, etcetera. For me it’s the work that was/is made as part of a lifestyle; clothing, rugs, pots, totems, spirituality. I don’t want to recreate that sort of work, but I want to apply those activities to the spontaneity of my process, challenging my perceptions and find things that I wouldn’t have normally thought of on my own.

The beauty of my current process is that there is this dream like interpreting that happens during and after the image is created. I don’t tend to remember my dreams from sleeping since I feel I dream plenty while I am awake. Most of the narratives that surface do relate to my life in general, or at least that’s how I interpret them.

Submerged by Robert Hardgrave

Daniel Mirante :
What is the role of the natural world in your life work? I see more relationship to the process in which the natural world develops and evolves, than in the kind of linear engineering processes common to the man-made world.

Robert Hardgrave :
You are correct. I tend to work in a completely organic fashion. Having a set formula wouldn’t be an interesting process for me at all. I have found that If I have a clear plan I end up being much less excited about the work. This also means that it probably takes me longer to produce work, but making the work is the best part anyway.


Daniel Mirante :
Thankyou deeply for sharing these insights into your artistic practice with us.

Bio :
Robert Hardgrave, a Seattle resident for the past 17 years, lives with his lovely wife Stephanie and two sweet dogs, a Beagle and a Pug. Visit his website at www.roberthardgrave.com

A relatively young artist, Sage has travelled widely across Indonesia, Europe and the United States, and studied with master teachers such as Ernst Fuchs. Having developed a strong studio practice, Sage has developed her painterly technique alongside a continuing blossoming and honing of theme and style.

Currently in artists residence at The Hive gallery, L.A, Amanda Sage generously shares her energies to discuss recent developments in her art life with LILA.

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Daniel Mirante
Thankyou for taking the time to engage in this interview. Could you tell us a bit about the significance of the egg motif that recurs in your work ?

Amanda Sage
The form of the Egg came to me in 2006, when I went on a 2 month painting sabbatical to Bali Indonesia. It had been 6 years since I had been to Bali, this trip being the 7th time I’d been there since 1996. I was at a turning point in many ways in my work and self, looking for reflection and new lenses thru which to express. I remember doing a small drawing looking to meld in some visual simplistic way, the three major locations on the planet that I had lived and felt influenced and connected too. Colorado, Bali and Vienna (they coincidentally also make a pretty good triangle on the globe). I had reduced them down to the primary colors of red, yellow and blue – trying to make some sort of sense of this balance I was observing, but still feeling uncomfortable and unclear in how I should paint this feeling I had, it being abstract in a sense and very personal.

One of the first paintings I did in Bali came completely out of the subconscious. I just started painting and went with the forms that developed. This painting became ‘Dreams’ and in it appeared a mystical snake with eyes on it’s scales and in it’s mouth it held an egg.

This is where the egg came into the picture, and it baffled me how it was exactly what I was looking for. The most reduced organic form, where in I could feel safe, indestructible and unique. New birth and new beginning in each piece, and it dawned on me that I could be painting eggs for the rest of my life. They became portals, doorways, something that I could put anything into and it wasn’t an oval, circle, square or rectangle – it was in itself the symbol of new life. As time progresses I am still painting ‘Eggs’ and long from being finished with them. I hope to paint them large enough to feel like one could step inside. I feel intuitively that this form is something so deeply imbedded in nature, as nothing is completely symmetrical. The term ‘organic symmetry’ seems to sum up this natural flow of multi-dimensions in these pieces. They have a language to them that hopefully speaks to a deeper level of our consciousness; calming, harmonizing and healing. (although not all of my ‘eggs’ are with the intent of healing, some I do just to see what will happen, and as we are all made up of dichotomies, some may seem brighter and with more intent then others.

Daniel Mirante
Has transition to America effected the theme and content of your work ? If so in what way ?

Amanda Sage
Yes I’m sure it has. Although I see myself being ever more a global citizen, my concentration is currently more focused in Los Angeles and the U.S. at the moment. I feel more empowered about the purpose of my work by coming here at this current time. That it goes so much further beyond creating aesthetic or even ‘new’ work in the eyes of the Art World. I feel a deeper calling to be more conscious about the current awakening that is direly needed in this world to transform into a global sustainable culture. Being in down town L.A, I feel I am at one of the epicenters of a new world. In the midst of the twirling thoughts of 13 million denizens, a massive piece of machinery hurtling towards what? There seems to be others that also are feeling called upon to bring balance and light. And I feel like I’ve fallen straight into a nest of these visionaries since being in L.A. The fragility of being on the ‘front’ so to say, is feeding the vision, keeping one on their toes – I find it totally exhilarating to be here at this point in history.

Daniel Mirante
You are an artist in residency at the HIVE. Could you tell us a bit about your art there and what projects you’ve been involved in ?

Amanda Sage
The HIVE is an amazing collaborative of Artists and creators, under the umbrella of Nathan Cartwright who is the owner and curator of the gallery. ‘Resident’ artists have honey comb spaces in the second half of the gallery, each renting out their spaces monthly with the freedom to create and exhibit what they want from their invidivual spaces. I arrived in a whirlwind of colleague visionaries for the ‘Temple of Visions – International Visionary Art’ show that premiered in January 09 at for the HIVE’s featured show, curated and conceptualized by L.A. artist Jimmy Bleyer. Being able to fly out for the opening of the show – blew open doors that I was not quite expecting. Over 600 people came to the opening and my piece ‘The Oracle sold’ before the show even opened. The response and enthusiasm that I experienced about my work really blew me away, I felt a strange familiar resonance with the HIVE and the whole artist infested building above it, that just goes by ‘725’, and had a little moment with the Universe and asked for it to give me some more clear signs in the ensuing few days, and if I should be here, I will come.

So low and behold I am working and living in the historic ‘725 Spring St’ building planting seeds and watching them grow in downtown L.A. with my artist and visionary yogi neighbors, such as Cheri Rae who is in the midst of building ‘PEACE’ a huge yoga and art studio down the street. Thrust into pre-destined projects and fate of finding, cultivating and creating new sustainable life in the midst of the concrete jungles. ‘You can’t get any further west from here, this is the final frontier’… said a fellow visionary artist that I’ve met here and greatly respect, Christopher Ulrich. Being the new girl on the block, I’m getting offers to participate in shows left and right, it’s hard to keep up with it all! Half of the shows are elsewhere on this continent and I find myself not having enough work to share in all these simultaneous shows!, but I love the challenge and am so inspired to be apart of the collective exhibitions and creating a larger awareness for this work. For example the IAM touring show that starts on May 3rd in San Francisco, Montreal’s first Visionary Show put together by Chris Dyer, as well as the PUSH studio show, ‘Catalysing Collective Creativity’ in SF and this is yet a small pocket of the events and exhibitions that are lining up around the world!, and the list goes on…

The great net of our interconnectedness is becoming stronger and more visible, as we nurture and stick to our intuition and visions. The most recent amazing crossing for me happened on my 31st birthday on April 19th (bicycle day- the day Albert Hoffman first experienced LSD in 1938) – I met Alex and Allyson Grey for the first time at CoSM’s temporary home in NYC for a talk Alex was giving. We shared and connected synapses of synchronicity, I always knew there would be a time when we finally would meet and it was so absolutely perfect that it was on this day… completely unplanned and perfect as I was in NY for a totally different artistic purpose. This amazing place that they are building and creating only an hour and half from NYC is going to be a mecca for the new world, a place of healing, growth, knowledge and inspiration and it brings so much hope and joy to know that it is happening. This is yet the beginning, and the network of light is strengthening, intoxicating those who have the receptors to expand.
I am so proud and humbled to be apart of this ever growing global community of artists, educators, musicians, dancers, writers, the list goes on and on who feel the drive and passion for bringing on a new way of living and harmonizing with the planet… to reflect and inspire and give thanks for the beauty that surrounds us and to strive for a sustainable future

Blessings –
Amanda Sage
www.amandasage.com
Los Angeles, April 2009

Artist Bio

Amanda Sage was born April 19, 1978 in Denver, Colorado. Starting in 1996, her travels and projects bounced her between Bali, Indonesia and Vienna, Austria. She studied traditional painting and etching for one and a half years with Michael Fuchs, and has been a student and painting assistant to Ernst Fuchs since 1999.

Amanda has been blessed with a beautiful studio in the WUK since 2000, a self-governed culture house in Vienna, as well as being involved in creating new systems of group-interaction and presentation.

Most recently she has become involved with the HIVE Gallery & studio’s, and is currently living and working as an artist in residence in Los Angeles.

She has exhibited in Galleries, Salons and in various projects/events worldwide, including London, Vienna, Munich, Bali, Colorado, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and most exotically in Entheon Village at the Burning Man Festival in Nevada, 2007.

“Through my work I aim to shatter the ‘illusion of separation’, to challenge the viewer to question, and evolve out of ignorance, conditioning and ingrained genetic habits. In life I strive to take responsibility for the effect of my existence, and through my actions and images, inspire others to think/dream beyond their immediate capacity. Ultimately I seek to create portals that open to the infinite possibilities of being and expressing, so that we may remember and re-discover who we are, where we originate from and where we are headed. My aspiration is to paint messages, visions and narratives that communicate with an ‘older & wiser us’, awakening ancient memory; as well as the ‘present us’, that we may grow up and accept the responsibilities towards ourselves, each other and the rest of existence on this planet… now”

Gil Bruvel grew up in France and began drawing lessons at age 9 and learning sculpture basics. He began working with oil paint at the age of 12 and the local environment had an enormous and lasting influence on his palette –giving him luminous colors he continues to use today. Gil Bruvel has been exhibiting his work since 1974 in various places around the world and including: France, Monaco, England, Denmark, The Netherlands, Hungary, Japan, Singapore, New York, Florida, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, California and Hawaii. His work has received many awards and his collectors span the globe. See more at www.bruvel.com

Daniel Mirante : What are your major artistic influences and themes?

Gil Bruvel : My work seeks to explore the intersection of the conscious and unconscious, to examine and, to some extent, negate the idea that there is a division between these two “worlds.” Instead, I’m seeking a new way of seeing–what I call “visionary”—a way of being in the world as it was really meant to be—whole, rich, profound, and absolutely magnificent in its precision.

What I want my work to do is open the realms of imaginative experience for audiences. So the canvases delve into deep personal mythology and explore visions as a way to create a link between the conscious and the unconscious. My intention is to get closer to the mystery of the transformative process of living and life—whatever is engendered by growth and metamorphosis in the world of human experience. So my paintings merge physical and organic forms to at once approach this state of change and flux and also represent it on canvas via an amalgamation that is part human, part idea, part consciousness, and part spirit. I think, as Joseph Campbell famously said, “The role of the artist is to mythologize the world”—that’s what I am trying to do. I’m working with a certain lexicon—the color, the figures, the forms—that produce a mythology that you can step into, that you can inhabit and share and make your own.

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My primary influence is the natural world and the startling geometries that occur in infinite variations all around us. From there, I ground my work in my training, which was classic and quite extensive. I studied at Laurent De Montcassin’s Restoration Workshop in France. And then as I grew as a painter, I admired and was influenced by the work of Max Ernst, The Fauvists, Francis Bacon, Vermeer, Gonzalo Fonseca, Antonio Gaudi, Noguchi and others. In Ernst’s work, for example, you see every moment is, as he says, “an invention, a discovery a revelation.” He invokes not “the plastic invention of a felt reality,” but really, to quote Shakespeare, “the thing itself.” So my work seeks that immediacy, that quality of fresh realization that is both surprising and stunning. That’s why the merging of forms, the fantastic visions, the use of color.

Lately, I’ve been also working with sculpture and functional art to find different expressions for my ideas and also bring my art from private collections out into the world. It’s exciting work, as it allows me to let my ideas flourish.

Daniel Mirante : What role does the computer take in your painting and sculpture?

Gil Bruvel : Well, the computer helps me design in 3-D when I’m working on functional art or with sculpture. It’s a great way to play a bit, but the original idea, the vision, the inspiration, the force behind the work is already complete in my head.

I don’t use the computer for my painting process whatsoever; instead I use my hand as a kind of seismograph that records the intuitive impulses of my brain.

So the computer is a tool, like a paint brush, and it’s useful to help me get where I want to go.

Daniel Mirante : Have you been to the worlds that you describe through your art?

Gil Bruvel : To the extent that this world exists for all of us, yes, of course. I reject the idea that my art displays a “somewhere else”; instead, it opens up a reality that is right here, right now, and I’m simply inviting the viewer in. Each canvas holds an experience, or perhaps many experiences, and I am simply providing the window, you see?

Art should be this “in the moment,” this inspirational. It shouldn’t take you away—it should bring you more fully to the moment and to yourself. That’s the revelation.

The organic and synthetic forms within Sakamoto’s work are enigmatic. Rendered in deep saturation, often deep red and green, the entities recall the folds and creases of renaisance robes and cloaks, except more plastic. Elsewhere, coral-like filigree structures grow with lace-like delicacy. Exploring the paintings deeper reveal all manner of suprises, deep oceanic caves, sperm-like rock clouds, molecular tubes and brain-like dwellings for unimaginable presences.

The refinement of Satoshi Sakamoto’s painting has been noticed by others:

In the Serious Artworld of International Fairs and Biennales…the word “Visionary” seems to have the pejorative stink of unsophistication. Many artists carrying this torch admitedly deal in a currency of formula and cliche (or maybe the word is “kitsch”)..but I feel like it would be unfair to dispense wholesale artists who are inspired by the fantastic. Artists such as Satoshi Sakamoto seem unconcerened with the self-conscious ironies of paintings recent history..and more energized by the fertile fields of their own imagination… (his) work might be able to appear comfortably in both Juxtapoz, Art in America….and maybe in a not so far fetched future…Artforum. Not that any of this matters to these artists, who seem enthralled enough with their own muses.

Jacques de Beaufort

In this revealing and inspiring interview with Daniel Mirante, Satoshi Sakamoto kindly offers his thoughts on the artistic process and the state of visionary art in Japan.

Daniel Mirante :
I was very interested, watching your photographs of the progress of one painting over a year, how it seems you start with a very abstract expressionist style of working, and then you draw from this potential the shapes and forms of your composition. This reminds me of the working method of Max Ernst, and also HR Giger, to draw a kind of order out of chaos. I have sometimes thought that such a technique is similar to divination and mediumship, allowing more subtle energies and patterns to come through. How did you develop such a way of working ?
　　　

Satoshi Sakamoto:
I tried to show the progress of the painting UNAWANG　because people wouldn’t know unless it was recorded day by day. People can appreciate the final details on the surface that hide so many improvisations behind it. But actually the progression is more meaningful for the artists themselves, I think.

I would like to expose something that already exists in potentiality. Although I dislike math, my operation is similar to math that which seeks the strict structures in a blank field. Mathematical theory even exists potentially, though nobody knows that.

Also my work is like mountain climbing with two movements of up and down. Actually climbing up to the top is much more important than descending. Imagine an exploration to reach the goal without a map or compass and it wouldn’t be necessarily a pleasant hike. Sometimes it goes through some kind of madness and uneasiness as if a small child is roaming alone in the intricate vast forest. In fact to depict the details, to finish the canvases is not a big issue for me. Because after the discovery of the top and seeing the whole perspective, it would be a safer route to the end. So I have two kinds of goals concerning my art to reach the top of the mountain and to get back onto the flat ground to make people understand with the details. If I had a clone assistant, and I wanted to leave the rest of my job to him for boring finishing work. I would say “ OK. I have found the top and caught a prospect to finish. I will let you work on it. I will move on to a new mountain soon, bye.” Sometimes depicting the details on the surface demands slavery from painters, meanwhile I know it is unavoidable labor.

Indeed Max Ernst was the first master who reminded me of profound memories of nature. But I have to say that my art working started around 1987 when HR Giger came to Tokyo and the unusual popularity arose among Japanese young generation. At that time we could buy his Necronomicon everywhere at book shops nation wide

Apart from such enthusiastic followers, I had been singly considering the nature of Giger’s art. When I was an art university student once I said to a teacher “ My master is Giger.” He replied “ It ’s not a good idea, you should stop it.”

I knew that superficial followers easily would come to a nonsense exposing their personal abnormality. But I believed Giger had established a quite fundamental principle of formative art such as Cezanne. I thought most of all descriptions about Giger’s art were not enough to explain his universal method. Those morbid themes like biomechanoid or black magic strike people and sometimes such an unusual eccentricity overshadows his genuine artistic formation of more truly abstractive level. I appreciated Giger’s art concentrating on the form itself rooted to certain archetypes resonating to each other like music.

In 1992 I began to use airbrush and oil paints to carry out my ideas. I thought it must be possible to visualize archetypes in an abstractive level without figurative shapes. Instead of psychological symbols I have been using more direct vivid colors than Giger’s. Now that many years have already passed, I still feel my trials were far from enough.

Inspirations on my art works are not such a dramatic experience, rather it is very subtle even sometimes tiny rubbish that people wouldn’t notice. Hands and paints are exquisite device to magnify the neglected senses into a grand scale. Yes, it is similar to divination and mediumship.

Stages in the evolution of the painting ‘Unawag’ by Satoshi Sakamoto

Daniel:
Does your painting combine with any meditation practice ? It must require much concentration to work on such detailed compositions.

Satoshi Sakamoto:
I have never tried any practice of meditation. I think nothing is better practice than painting for me. But as you suggested, everything is up to my brain state. I like walking and watching the skies to relax, also I won’t avoid talking with people to share the current social problems. Totally it depends on how to build my usual life in order to concentrate on the canvases, maybe as many artists know.

Also I read books a lot about spirituality like Rudolf Steiner to keep working, on the assumption that an invisible world exist. But I do not have a spiritual constitution which lets me see any invisible entities.

Daniel:
How has your work been received in your homeland ? Is there a strong visionary art community in Japan ?
 

Satoshi Sakamoto:
In my town some people may recognize me as a painter who is making peculiar images that ordinary people wouldn’t understand. And some friends are looking forward to seeing my next exhibit. But my family doesn’t like my art.

I have joined many competitions and held some exhibitions. They have ended up with a very small practical reaction. So a few years ago I decided to concentrate on the internet not to waste efforts.

In 2006 the Japanese visionary art group IFAA was established. As far as I know this is only community to exchange information about the international visionary art movement.

For the first time I participated in IFAA for the annual exhibition in Tokyo and Kyoto 2008. It was a pretty interesting show by around 40Japanese members and two foreign guests, Leo Plaw and Luigi La Speranza. This was a rare occasion to make me think as to what is the visionary art. As you know, because there is no strict definition for this genre.

Personally I think the Japanese prime visionary artist is Hayao Miyazaki the animation creator, but his works won’t be categorized as visionary art movement. Also, a very eminent Japanese artist like Tadanori Yokoo has been obviously standing by visionary and spiritual possibility. But his works should be categorized as New Painting movement.

The Japanese cultural scene is progressing in chaos involving various genres like anime or manga, and both contemporary art and traditional paintings without definite category and system. So it is hard to imagine how the Japanese visionary art movement will develop in the future in a very different climate from western civilization. Of course I am not familiar with the western situation though.

[Show as slideshow]

Daniel:
You say you like to ‘expose something that already exists in potentiality’… do you feel that these ‘existents in potentiality’ relate to what people describe as the world of spirits ?

Satoshi Sakamoto:
The phrase of “The world of spirits” indicates many aspects for each individual or group. So concerning theology or occult science, it is beyond me. At least “exists” did not mean entity like ghost or angel. “Existence” that I feel on my working is a quite normal sense to distinguish meaningful characters from senseless chaos. And subconscious body working gives me a little bit of trigger to start paint.

Sometimes I find spiritual doctoring to escape from body into what is called “the world of spirits”. But I believe that my corporal eyes are enough to find potentiality. The invisible world and the visible world are not separated. Actually potentiality already embodies in presence. Everything is up to the attitude of the observers.

Daniel:
Have you worked with psychedelics ? If not, how do you explain the sympathy between your work and psychedelic visions ?

Satoshi:
Definitely never. I have never regarded myself as a psychedelic artist. However I know my art shares with psychedelic vision in some ways. I am not familiar with the history of psychedelic culture.
But I think we should not care a lot about style or phrase, rather should go back to the original reason why we needed psychedelic style.

I think because we needed to find a vision by ourselves purely independently not as a slave. But psychedelics have a slight trick to harm our independence. We have to care about who made it. If we made it by ourselves for us, it would be no problem, I think.

A reason why I am making a kind of psychedelic is… I feel a necessity to stand on for those social collapses. Maybe it is close to the situation when the psychedelic movement began.

Other than that, I believe my vivid colors come from both Asian tradition and the Renaissance. I haven’t investigated on the cultural history of the world. But sometimes I imagine humankinds has been fascinated by the magical effect of vivid colors, maybe sometimes for rituals since the beginning. Vivid colors easily get faded over time. So we tend to imagine ancient worlds with monochrome. But it is not living history. Even if we imagine vivid old Asia, vivid old Europe ,vivid old Middle East, it wouldn’t be wrong.

Strong saturation effect overwhelms self-awareness also it stimulates our emotion. Red can change anger into mercy. Blue can change sadness into hope. About yellow, I am not sure yet. I think there is still much room to develop color techniques for the future.

Also I attempt to create images which will be able to deconstruct the self-image of human body into something unknown. I hope it would stimulate people’s desire to dance spontaneously. However I don’t like dancing by myself.

Daniel:
Thankyou very much for sharing your amazing work on Lila!

Short bio of Satoshi Sakamoto

“I was borne in Aomori prefecture in 1970. I learned oil painting in university in Tokyo. Since 1996 I live in Hirosaki city in Aomori prefecture.”

The images in Ann McCoy’s works come from dreams, a process known as incubation in the Greek world. Incubation, a “sleeping in”, was used to record dreams for therapeutic and prophetic ends. For McCoy, dreams represent a philogenetically older mode of thought linked to nature and very much needed as a counterbalance in our “rational”, scientific world. The unconscious is no mere repository of the past, but contains the seeds of future healing. Dreams are letters from the gods and the animal spirits. For McCoy, dreams are linked to an inner transformation process described in alchemical symbolism. The Alchemical Great Work, and the personal dream life fuse, as part of the path to the realization of the Self.

My mother had spent the last fifteen years of her life in an institution near Pasadena. She was considered a very difficult case, insulting nurses, asking for bourbon. She weighed eighty-five pounds the last three years of her life and was bed ridden. Her mind had clouded over with something called ”wet brain” ; she had never recovered from her last attack of the D.T’s. During my childhood she spent every afternoon in her room drinking, her will of iron and taught frame keeping the house in rigid order.

My brother, a kinder person than myself, had asked me to drive up to see her. It had been three years. The drive on the freeway was long. When we arrived, she was in a coma-like state. The nurse shook her and told her we had arrived. Her eyes shot open. “Go home”, were her last words to us. She died soon after at ninety-one. When the call came about her death, I went into shock. She was my adopted mother, my tormentor: we had a terrible relationship. I expected to feel relief, instead I found myself sinking into a deep depression that lasted several months.

The idea of a period of darkness being followed by a period of illumination or regeneration is found throughout literature. The fifteenth century alchemists referred to the darkness as the nigredo, and the lighter whitening process as the albedo. “The Dark Night of the Soul” by Saint John of the Cross, a Catholic mystic, describes this inner process. In psychoanalysis a period of depression means that one has to go to the depths of the unconscious before a breakthrough can occur; in this way depression can have a positive role in the life of the individual. Esther Harding, a member of Jung’s inner circle, wrote a wonderful article entitled, “The Meaning and Value of Depression”. After reading it I no longer feared depression, even though I had a ten -year clinical depression.

Years of analysis in the United Sates and Zurich, hours had been spent discussing my mother. I knew the Miller Fantasies, the Imagio Mater, the “battle for deliverance for the mother.” Ruthanna had filled pages of my dream notebooks. What could I possibly be left to say or feel about her? I thought of the duel mother, Melanie Klein, the two sides of my mother’s face. One side was radically different from the other, one totally mad and malevolent, and the opposite side more normal. My memories of this split as a small child made me appreciate Melanie Klein’s work as well as Jung’s.

I had a dream shortly after my mother’s death. I was in a bloody underworld not unlike the chamber of horrors described in “The Visions of Zosimos” of Panopolis from a third century AD alchemical text. I saw my mother as a huge spider with her face reflected in the eyes. I am on a slab being sacrificed. The dream was a wake-up call that parts of myself needed to be sacrificed and transformed. I was very much caught in a negative mother complex like the spider’s web. The “Mad Mother Series” came out of this dream.
 
My mother suffered from alcoholism, depression, and later dementia.  In my own life I have had to come to terms with those parts of the mother that had become parts of my own personality. We take on the parent as an internal figure, the imago mater.  I quit drinking at 24 but that was just the beginning. The rest of my mother’s personality was very rooted in my conscious and unconscious life. I suffered long periods of depression, paralysis, and isolation.

The breakthrough for me came when I had a dream that my mother and I were swimming in a river with the bodies of lepers.  I am in the water with my mother; we are in the same soup, the same complex. The work “Washing the Leprous Mother in the Jordan” came from this dream.

In the Bible, bathing in the Jordan cures Neumann, the leper.  In alchemy “the leprous of the metals” refers to problems in the process.  My mother had always kept a stone from the Jordan River in her ivory reliquary box, so the Jordan River had a personal association relating to my mother and the idea of religious pilgrimage.  In India there is the Kumba Mele, a huge festival where millions bath in the Ganges.  I have seen smaller examples of ritual river bathing in Nepal and India.  There is also a wonderful fresco, in a closed Roman convent, which shows Constantine bathing in a tub to be cured of the pox or some other disease. The bathing in the river is not only healing but represents a kind of baptism. 

For me the dream led to a rebirth of sorts and a path out of the negative mother complex and the depression. In the dream the water started to sparkle with bits of light, and changed in a wonderful way. This “solutio” began to dissolve the complex, put it into solution. I was able to dump a lot of the negative traits I had inherited and a new attitude could come forth.  The river was a kind of baptism, an entry into a new life. Even if our personality is a reaction against the negative mother, we are caught in one side of an opposite. I had been swinging on a spider’s thread between the opposites. In alchemy the opposites are brought together and a new third middle ground may be found.

 “Lunar Birth” shows a devastated landscape. I dreamed of such a place like a primordial swamp. You see this devastated landscape before the sun rises in plate 22 of the “Splendor Solis.” In my dream a glimmer of light began to appear over a blackened landscape. A group of crows flew from the area as a boat sailed in. One of the crows had my face as a child. The crow is a symbol par excellence of the Nigredo, the dark state in alchemy. For me this had to do with a dawn after a depression.

The child represents new possibilities in dreams and visions.  In a symbolic way Christ as a child represents spiritual renewal in the individual as well as the collective.  Erich Neumann has written a wonderful book on the meaning of the child in dreams. In the dream I saw a little girl child glowing like a lamp, illuminating the landscape. This was an “inner child” I had never been allowed to experience. The numinosity of the figure gives her another dimension; she has a link to the transpersonal. In another way the girl child represents the divine feminine so repressed in our culture. I drew the child, modeled on a Christ child, wearing a dress. The child represents feminine divinity.

Sanctuary comes from an experience I had in the temple at Ranachpur in India, one of the great Jain temples in the world.  The Jains are one of the oldest religions in India.  They believe in forgiveness and incorporate it in a confessional festival called Perysiana where all Jains spend nine days contemplating forgiveness as well as in a daily ritual.  The experience in the temple was what a religious writer would call a “peak experience”.  I felt that my inner sanctuary had become mirrored in this outer sanctuary. More amazing still is that the plan for the Ranakpur temple came from one man’s dream.  In the Catholic world the closest example I can think of is Santa Maria Magore in Rome which was built from a vision about snow falling in the shape of the cathedral.  Snow fell on the 5 August, 358 AD in the shape of the cathedral, this is called “the miracle of the snows”.   The temenos, or sacred precinct often exists first as a vision, or dream, and then materializes in the outer world.

As I was finishing “Sanctuary” a baby deer walked out of the woods into my garden. I saw it nose to nose with my dog. The deer followed us around for sever hours. I became concerned and said,”you must go back to your mother.” The deer followed us like a puppy back into the forest, and then stayed there as we returned home. In Ireland the fairies ride on the backs of deer. The deer goes from forest to city garden and is an animal of the liminal realm. I put the deer into the drawing. It had come to tell me I was on the right track.   

For me dreams are letters from the gods.  This is nothing new, Artemidoris of Daldis wrote The Interpretation of Dreams in the second century AD. Century A. D.  The Bible is full of dream prophecy.  Every major world religion contains examples of dreams as prophecy. If anything dreams were considered a philogenitically older mode of thought.  In Jainism, each Jina or saints birth is announced by certain dreams.  The Age of Enlightenment and the Reformations relegated dream prophecy to “superstition and fortune telling” even in the Catholic Church.  Once heralded as windows on enlightenment and revelation, dreams were tossed into the dustbin until the birth of modern psychoanalysis.  In the Jewish world dreamers like Reb Hile Weshsler (1881) who told of a forthcoming catastrophe “ a dark cloud descending over Germany” were ignored.  Freud interpreted dreams from the standpoint of repressed memories, instinct and sexuality.  Only Jung viewed dreams as windows to the soul.

For me the dream is a treasure, something of great value.  First I record them, then research part off their content and meditate on it.  If a dream resonates in a certain way or is part of a series, or is linked to synchronistic events in my life, I pay particular attention to it.  In the dreams I “see “sections of the drawings.  Usually one big dream gives me the core idea of each work.  The process is organic.  As I work I have new dreams which alter the outcome of the work.  No beginning sketch exists except a general idea in my idea.  As I work I rearrange the drawings, the final product is always a surprise to me.

A later dream was of 12 babies in a landscape. “White Birth” came out of these dreams. I was reminded of an alchemical drawing with 12 babies in alchemist’s glassware. I also thought of a drawing by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher where small wax figures are floating in glass globes. The babies were new possibilities; the unconscious was giving birth.

The white horse in the original dream was with the babies. In a most general way the horse represents horsepower, energy. An Irish museum guard told me about a white horse in Irish mythology. Perhaps this horse was in my genes; I come from a family of Irish horse trainers and was a rider.

Visit Ann McCoy’s website at www.annmccoy.com

“Visionary art seeks to return us, in our visions, to the primordial world that preceded history: like hieroglyphs etched on the walls of a long-lost civilization, leading us to a paradise of lost imagery or forgotten dream-symbols.”
Laurence Caruana, A Manifesto of Visionary Art

Maura Holden, born in Pennsylvania in 1967, is emerging as one of the most powerful and interesting visionary or sacred artists of the present time. Combining both excellent draftsmanship with a lucid sense of colour, Maura depicts the secret vistas of the collective psyche, the sunken, honeycombed ruins of mysterious ancient civilisations (see Travellers Moon), the paradisiacal and primordial bliss of our ancestors living within a shamanic dreamtime (see work in development), and, in one of her paintings, Thanatos Wave, (below) what looks like the sudden, mass-onset of transpersonal awareness or surfacing of deep unconscious material (represented by deep sea fish and ocean) overthrowing old and stagnant orders of being.

As I have familiarized myself with Maura Holden’s oeuvre, my sense of awe and wonder has deepened. What I observed on-screen could not prepare me for the impact of seeing her work full-size. Like a fractal, entire new levels of detail and intricacy are evident, invisible online. Each painting is a holographic gestalt, representing with minute detail the macro-microcosm of various archetypal realms and aspects of Consciousness.

The overall compositional and color harmonics, combined with this obsessive and miraculous level of detail, directed by a sincere, experiential, phenomenological spirituality, has convinced me that Maura Holden’s work can be considered equal to the finest sacred art of any world age.

- Daniel Mirante (updated Jan 2008)

Thanatos Wave by Maura Holden
1999-2000 / 38″X38″ / oil on panel / collection of the artist

Daniel :
Maura, since encountering your work I am revived and refreshed in my enthusiasm for the art of painting. I want to express my gratitude for the images you are evoking through this discipline. Your work carries a profundity that comes from direct experience, and resonates with the shamanic, mystical spirit in humanity.

Maura :
Thank you, Daniel. I am very happy to hear that your enthusiasm for painting is refreshed. (Too often this art – along with “god” — has been wrongly pronounced dead!) I find painting to be an ideal devotional art, as endlessly versatile as the mind, and as good a bridge between matter and spirit as I can conceive.

Daniel :
These paintings appear like representations of first-hand journeys into spiritual realms. Does your artistic practice integrate with some kind of shamanic practice ?

Maura :
Yes, the paintings are often representations of journeys, and I have various methods of unlocking gates, and of drawing aside worldly veils. Most of the practice is just concentration and meditation while painting, but I have used prolonged retreat in the forest, as well as plants which shamans use to take journeys. In conjunction with good planning, and a day of meditation and preparation beforehand, I have found the plants extremely helpful in translating multidimensional spiritual experiences into fixed visions.

Daniel :
It is very exciting that there is a new wave of artists who seem to be creating from a different frequency band. It makes me recall what the psychologist Charles Tart called state-specific knowledge, that fully coherent forms of vision, knowledge and wisdom can originate from multiple assemblage points of consciousness, not just the quotidian or everyday state of being.

Maura :
This state-specific knowledge you refer to is one of my pet preoccupations. I am particularly fascinated by the aspect of knowledge called “being at one with the whole” in which, in a transcendent state of meditation, I am vividly aware of the interconnectedness of all creation – something most humans dont consider while cooking an egg or tying a shoe. Reconciling the fact that “I am at one with the whole” with the more generally accepted fact, “I am an individual”, is a little bit like reconciling the square and the circle. It is tricky, and there is a secret to it — but geometrically, mathematically, the circle and the square can be reconciled, and so can the individual and the whole. One of the many things I love about imaginative art is that it reconciles another dichotomy: the rift between reality and dreams. In imaginative art the two worlds are harmoniously married in one form, and this is very exciting for those of us who love both worlds and experience them together. I am extremely encouraged by the new wave of talented artists who understand this.

[Show as slideshow]

Daniel :
How did your amazing painting technique come about and are your paintings recieved in a complete gestalt or built up through spontaneity and exploration ?

Maura :
That is a good question. My painting technique is always changing. I started out drawing visions in pencil, but a desire for color, transparency and luminosity led me to try oils. At first I used oil paint with turpentine only. After I had done a few paintings that way, I tried other mixtures: alkyd medium, stand-oil based medium, egg tempera, egg and oil mixtures and so on.

Since I was my own teacher, I experimented freely, by intuition, but I also read books about pigments and media, and began to formulate my own theories and methods. I wanted to make paintings that were lightfast and durable, and I also wanted otherworldly effects. Striking a balance between effects and eternity remains my fixed goal, but all other variables in my technique are subject to change. Generally, I let a painting grow like a plant, training it and pruning it as needed. I begin with a multiplex chaotic vision — the proverbial mustard seed.

Next I devise a structural framework, such as a geometric form, intended to serve as a support, or trellis, for the vision to grow around. The rest is just training the figurative elements of the vision around the structure. Key points in the structural skeleton correspond to important junctures in the pictorial composition. In the past, my compositional structures were more loose and intuitive. In recent years, though, numbers, proportions and geometry have become increasingly important to me.

Daniel :
Your attention to detail, luminosity and way with colour is beautiful, and it is all the more wondrous that it is mainly self-taught. The Vienna school of Fantastic Realism seems to be emerging as quite a strong technical and philosophical catalyst upon contemporary visionary painters. What artists do you consider important today ? And do you believe the traditional gallery context provides an adequate vessel for visionary paintings ?

Maura :
The Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, and specifically Ernst Fuchs, was one of my personal icons of artistic excellence. When I was first learning, I spent countless hours studying a book of Fuchs? paintings and drawings. My other main icon, Oliver Benson, is an extraordinarily gifted artist of my own age, who at present keeps a low profile by choice. When you compare the very famous Fuchs with the more obscure Benson, it is obvious who most people today will consider important. Yet, Benson has the greater influence on my own art and train of thought, because, not only is he as talented as Fuchs, but we are friends and we paint together. These private connections are as important to the intricate web of art as the public ones…

Enlightenment of the Dominators by Maura Holden
Oil on panel / collection of the artist

Today there are more talented fantastic and visionary artists than I ever thought I would see. It is a truly fabulous time to be here. For one thing, the movement is global, largely thanks to the internet. Artists with e-mail can communicate and send pictures around the world easily and instantly. Now, regardless of country and connections, we are all on a more level playing ground, and art lovers have a better chance of seeing the work of great artists who are unrecognized and/or of modest means. Of course, some of us are very enthusiastic about using the web tool, and some of us would rather just paint. Just painting was always my preference? Only in the past six months have I learned to use a computer and cobble together a simple website — and from most accounts people believe I have suddenly fallen from the sky! Out of the blue, my work is accessible to many more people; instantly I am able to communicate with other artists, art lovers and people in the industry; the results have exceeded my every expectation.

I am excited about the future of an art world free of dictations from on high, where no authority need intercede between artists and art lover. That said, however, I still see a place for traditional galleries and museums. While I understand and feel the limitations of galleries and museums, there really is no better way to experience the mind-blowing presence of some of this artwork without planting your feet solidly in front of it, and gazing at its physical substance – millions of times more powerful than what we glean from a digital image on a screen. And the professional expertise involved in respectfully preserving and displaying artworks to their best advantage is a gift to the artist from the better galleries and museums. I think the key to showing art today is diversity. Galleries are good; museums are good; showing art in your truck is good; festivals; open studios; coffee shops; artist-run collectives; the internet; books, magazines, cards, prints and posters; and whatever else people think up next.

My personal dream is quite “outsider” : to own my own home, and to craft it into a fantastic-sculptural-environment/little-museum-of-visionary-art – a place that is out-of-this-world, but makes people feel relaxed enough to spend lots of time looking, and enjoying themselves.

Many thanks to Maura Holden for giving her energies to this interview and for allowing her fantastic work to be presented on Lila.

To see more amazing paintings by Maura Holden go to http://www.mauraholdenartworks.com