Lila

Daniel Mirante:
Mark, thanks for taking some time to discuss your work. What does art mean to you ? What motivates you as an artist ?

Mark Henson:
I like to make art that stimulates thought and provokes an evolution in consciousness. My ideas tend to be visual and so I share my thoughts by placing them on canvas as paintings. My theory is that Art has the magical power to evoke emotional as well as intellectual thinking, which can foster changes to our world, and that if I can create something that is both fiercely truthful and compellingly beautiful at the same time, it will speak to the most people with the strongest voice. I have discovered that the more intensely personal my vision is, the more universal its appeal. Art has the power to make and change culture, and to evolve our humanity, and knowing this, I like to create art using imaginary but realistic images to explore themes of awakening consciousness, divine sexuality, and political realities. My work is intended to bring about positive and beneficial changes to our culture, particularly in the way we relate to each other, to nature and to the universe divine.

Daniel Mirante:
Do you spend a lot of time out in nature ? It really looks like you have let Gaia completely saturate you with her luminosity.

Mark Henson:
I wouldn’t call myself an avid outdoorsman as I mostly use my time painting or travelling and have to work on art projects, sp my time is limited, but I love to be around natural settings, and I do like to spend time hiking and exploring and being out in the woods, or near a lake, or by the sea. I also enjoy traveling to other exotic places in the world and seeing what natural (as well as the man-made) wonders may be found.

I have chosen to live away from cities, out in a rural setting where the hubbub of city life will not distract me from my work. I live near enough to a major megalopolis that I can be a part of city life without having to actually live there!

It seems to me that all things human are but a small are part of the greater being we call Gaia, though I’d have to expand Gaia to universal proportions to include the entire cosmos. As an artist I find that amazing variety of expressions of nature that we see all around us, from stones to stars, to be an infinite source if inspiration. All sounds, colors, shapes and designs can be found somewhere in the space between the universe and our minds. The sheer beauty of the natural world is enough to excite the eye- after all, that is why we have them!

Moondancer

Prayer for Peace

Winging On

Because I tend to paint in a representational way, it is important to me to understand the workings of nature, so that I may recreate it in my humble way in my paintings. When we are painting, we can play at being gods-creating something out of nothing, or at least the illusion of creating something out of nothing. It is a challenge to me to be able to imitate nature in paint, and so I try to pay close attention to the natural experience. I strive to be observant of the world around me! Without understandng how to draw and paint our natural world I’d have a much more difficult time imagining the inner one.

Of course this is only part of the story, because I am also fascinated by the realities of this inner world, and I love to evoke the magical realms of the mind and heart in my work- but often using metaphors of nature!

Daniel Mirante:
Skillfull use of metaphor seems to be a core element of shamanising ! Shamanic myths express deep structures of relationships, through metaphoric coding, between mind and matter. Or put slightly differently, they serve as bridges between the false dualism of inner and outer worlds and act as conceptual mediators between the two. Metaphor and analogy connect different levels of reality.

In this light I was wondering about your gorgeous tantric paintings. To me it is very refreshing and positive to see the union of the masculine and the feminine seen in the light of the sacred, when there is so much in this culture that tries to polarise the sexes in order to divide and conquor (and then sell us more things). I was wondering if you could talk about your tantric paintings a bit, in terms of what inspired you to persue this theme, and what kind of responses they’ve been met with….

Mark Henson:
I think that I have been interested in erotic art ever since I saw my first Playboy magazine. In the days before I discovered sex and drugs, some of my comic-book loving friends and myself would somehow get ourselves downtown to the only bookstore in town that actually stocked comic books. They had an awesome back room stuffed full of old comics and magazines, and if you paid them $.50 you could hang out there all day reading everything and hunting for that elusive Weird Tales, Superman, or Mad magazine needed to fill out the collection. They also had a box or two of nudist “sunbather” type publications that piqued our interest- and sometimes you could slip one in with the comic books when we paid for the stuff we were buying.

A couple of years later I started getting interested in sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll- funny how these things go together, but that’s how it was!

So we had organized our little cadre of proto-hippies for party fun and social education. My first real sex experiments were usually conducted under the influence of LSD, which imbued the whole thing with a sense of cosmic romance. While my high-school peers were hoping to get their dates drunk enough to “put out”, we were entering states of tantric bliss. It was wonderful, and I just had to express this new-found source of joy to the world through my artistic skills. I made quite a few drawings with erotic themes. but unfortunately I was very naive about documenting my work- I had a gallery show and
most of the drawings were sold, without having been photographed, so I can’t show them to you…

We live in a really weird society when it comes to sex. The idea of sex is used to sell anything and everything, from soap to cigars. Explicit pornography is common, but a photo of a nursing mother in an exhibition is controversial. Women are urged to get breast implants because they aren’t big enough (for what?) but you are not allowed to see one pop out of Janet Jackson’s top on television. Our entertainment consists of murder and abuse, primarily of women. Peeing in public is a sex offense for which one may be branded for life as a social pariah, but strip clubs are in every town, and one can buy a hooker anytime from the local want ads. We are supposed to revere women and children, but neither one is recognized in our constitution as having equal rights to men. Our religious institutions forbid the dissemination of sex knowledge yet claim to respect the sanctity of life. Fashion and Beauty magazines exploit our sexual desires to sell us stuff we don’t need, and when the act itself is depicted it us usually in a situation of dominance and oppression. Music extols the virtues of romance while labeling our partners as bitches and whores. What are we to make of all this?

The Hindu idea of tantra as I understand it is that we should be able to develop an unconditional love for all of creation. It is referred to as the Left-hand path of desire, as opposed to the right -hand path of asceticism. The concept here is that if we satiate our every desire, then we will come to the realization of what is our our true desire, not the wanting of food, money or sex, but the desire for union with the divine.

Illusion of Reality

Between Worlds

Sunset Sacrament

I believe that all we really want is a loving, trusting partner to travel through this life with. At least that is what I would desire. Through this love and trust I we can discover the magical divinity of sexual union. This is what I strive to exemplify in my erotic images. In the centuries to come, assuming the survival of humanity, what evidence will remain to give witness to the kind of world we were living in? When I see paintings from past ages in a museum I can instantly time-travel back to those days, and get a feel for what life was like across time and space. We have so few images of the joy of Eros in our world- By creating my erotic pieces I thought that it would be a good thing to bestow upon our culture some images of pleasurable loving, shown as an integral part of the natural world we are all a part of, in the hopes that some future generations will be able to see that our time was not just a time of war and oppression, but also a time of the joyful discovery of our potential as conscious
beings.

Daniel Mirante:
Your paintings are exceptionally beautiful and its great to hear you share about your work. Thankyou.

“Nature, the psyche and life appear to me like divinity unfolded”

Carl Jung