“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

” “In the collapse of history, which is the end, the archaic, the beginning is all that remains: Ouroboros once again. Whereas history is built on temporal ephemera, the contents of the archaic are embedded in the self-renewing cosmic experience that transcends time.”

Arguelles, The Transpersonal Vision, pg 278

Caught in the Web by Martina Hoffmann

The transformation toward transpersonal awareness beyond historical constructs is what defines the times and the themes of contemporary visionary art : the emergence of a humanity that experiences its existence through cosmic and gaian relatedness, which exists in the ever renewing cyclical time of cosmic play, beyond the socially constructed dialectic of linear technological progress.

A trans-historical condition is emerging, the awareness that we are more than our social categories within a particular date on the Gregorian calendar. This is not just 2005, this is a moment within a vast and primordial mystery, a cosmic play of energy. We humans are timeless life forms in an infinite universe beyond comprehension, flame-like vortices of consciousness in a mysterious cosmos that vastly predates the language we use to describe it.

The visionary art of Martina Hoffman explicates this territory of expanded, transpersonal, spiritual, shamanic awareness, that leads the witness of the art into experiencing wonder and an inexplicable familiarity, through archetypal resonance with these images. When receptively witnessed, these images serve to take the mind outside of the conventional historical narrative and into the realms of the primordial.

In the shamanic visionary experience, the self is unfolded through a dance of pattern and meaning, and this synergy of ‘abstract’ and ‘figurative’ is found represented in the transpersonal-based art of many different cultures. Such images reflect the nebulous ‘web without a weaver’, the jewelled, interdependent realm of spirit that we ultimately are, and chose to evolve out of, into the fractal realms of biogenesis and experience of personality.

The universe is a hierophany of luminous and evolving intricacy. It is this richness of form and diversity of experience that demonstrates the fullness, fertility and abundance of Spirit. This abundance is unbounded. Martina’s artistic praxis does not reduce, clip or flinch from this transcendent generative complexity but rather opens to this infinity. Martina describes how she trusts in being a open in the flow of transformations and pattern of relations that is matter, life and mind.

Martina demonstrates the richness of our cosmic heritage through images full of wonder and created through alignment with the creative unfolding of the universal process, as it moves through as spontaneous living creative expression.

Daniel :
Your work has that connection to the ahistorical realm.

Martina :
Yes, my visionary work is a direct channel of those otherworldly realities that are impossible to describe in words, as their language is one of colour and form and the message is encoded therein.

Daniel :
I have a lot of respect for your work in the transmission of knowledge on painting methods such as the mische technique that yourself and Venosa are passing onto your students. Why don’t they teach techniques like this in art school any more?

Martina :
The art world would be a richer place if the Mische Technique were still taught in art schools. But most artists are not taking the time anymore, to spend months and months on a single canvas. Creating art as part of a meditation has been mostly lost in a goal oriented materialistic world view.

During our painting workshop Robert and I teach the Mische Technique. This technique is unbeatable when it comes to creating detail, luminosity of color as well as translucency. We teach this approach within the context of Visionary art and we encourage our students to reach deeply within their souls and spirits to express their own inner landscapes. Also during the workshops we present several slide shows to conceptualize visionary art today and to illustrate its long history. This workshop is for people who dare to express and play in the medium of oil, in an inspirational setting that cant be beat, together with a group of international artists, while living two weeks of true Spanish life.

Daniel :
Why did you choose to initiate the artists workshops from Cadaques ?

Martina :
Cadaques is our true home and was very instrumental in both of our creative developments. It is without a doubt one of the most beautiful small villages in Spain, if not on the entire Mediterranean. The energy is powerful due to its location between the mountains and the sea. The culture (Catalan) is as independent as the Basque and very different from the rest of Spain. Catalans are gutsy people, opinionated and rightfully very proud of their rich heritage. Beauty is abundant in nature and in the people that this place attracts. Dalis presence brought most everybody of artistic as well as intellectual notoriety to this town and has made Cadaques a place of pilgrimage. So no better place for a painting workshop and the setting for our event is quite spectacular also. The workshop takes place on a private island just a stones throw away form the main land and allows us to have the luxury of a beautiful old villa to create and live in while having easy access to a vibrant town with a well developed local and typical nightlife. During these two weeks we have the opportunity to create or own world and to weave and live within our own special creative matrix.

La Chacruna

Cusp

la_petite_mort

lysergic summer dream

Spirit Wind

Daniel :
How did the painting Cusp come about?

Martina :
To answer this question properly I will have to explain how I work. Most of my images are largely unplanned. The inspiration for a new piece might get sparked by a specific experience, visual or otherwise, and there might be a central figure. But often I will start a canvas in a very immediate way by laying out colour in a purely emotional fashion, just following my instincts. Later on I will then proceed to detail and bring out those forms that call out strongest to me. In this way the canvas will act as a mirror for my subconscious or for my higher self, and reflect deeply situated feelings, and/or visions obtained in heightened states of consciousness made conscious and manifest in this way. I trust this process explicitly as it is the most immediate. And the meaning of my paintings becomes clearer to me once the pieces have been executed. Inner dialog with the piece, reflection as well as the viewers reactions, will then help me decode the deeper layers and meaning in time.

Cusp was created much in this way. The central figure portraying the archetype of the spiritual female warrior, as many of my paintings do, came first, and the image developed from the center outward. This warrior princess remains present and centered in the midst of duality, and has attained perfect balance herein. This balance has allowed her to build a bridge to the state of transcendence and helped her to create permanent peace in her heart. Many different cultural elements are represented in this painting, and merged into one coherent piece, to represent the numerous traditions that brought us to this place in time. I guess to put it all into one line; this painting is about finding and maintaining balance.

Daniel :
It sounds like you create a kind of stochastic, creative chaos from which a deeper realm of psyche can find expression. This reminds me of Max Ernsts comments about being witness at the birth of an art. Rather than calculating and plotting a composition, we trust that as we come from this ancient and beautiful universe, we are one with its creative unfolding. These primordial realms will come through the artist and their medium if a space of unformedness and evolving possibilities is held.

Martina :
Your read on my answers is pretty accurate. Max Ernst has certainly used a large array of wonderful methods that allowed deep exploration of the unconscious for creative purposes. To guaranty the successful portrayal of otherworldly realties we have to become the ultimate opened vessel as artists.

Daniel :
It reminds me of the entheogenic process, where deep shifts occur in the emotional body, and the process of integration of these powerful energies occurs through archetypal, primordial, hieroglyphic transpersonal symbology.

Your paintings, such as Caught in the Web remind me of these journeys of occasionally challenging, sometimes overwhelming experiences of holistic learning and integration brought about by holotropic techniques. The inspiration from such shamanic journeys is obviously a major force in your work.

Martina :
Shamanic journeys are certainly a major inspiration for my very visionary work as they are so very powerful and allow me to glean such brightly coloured realms of cosmic code. But I also derive much information and material from my meditations, the dream state as well as during the hypnogogic state before I fall asleep at night. The latter provides me with a very rich and powerful source of insights and this portal is especially active during the days leading up to the full moon. The visual language I perceived in all above-mentioned states of higher awareness are very similar to me but vary in intensity, meaning that they may be more or less pronounced. So really, there are many ways of exploring, and it depends on our comfort level as to how vivid we wish them to be. And I find that any technique used with diligence and skill may produce powerful results.

Daniel :
Your work, as well as somehow being birthed from the visionary realm, also includes in much of its imagery symbols of gestation, germination and fertility. This is especially true of the ‘Goddess Triangle’. I would love to hear something about this powerful work and how it was created.

Martina :
This piece is very special to me because it deals with everything that lies at the heart of a womans being. I created this multi-media installation piece over the course of several years, letting it grow organically as it demanded. My first inspiration was several women friends in Cadaques, all pregnant at the same time. Needless to say, this potent presence of fertility demanded artistic expression as well as interpretation. The Goddess Triangle started out with three large canvases of pregnant nudes and over time turned into a 20″ x 10″ structure. It is my altar to the feminine principle and wants to express gratitude to the women who have offered so much of themselves to ensure our existence today. It means to honour womens special gift and to remind us of the Goddess whose worship for millennia was based on living in harmony with the earth before male doctrine forced itself on the planet and made warring for survival the status quo.

More details on the art and workshop training of Martina Hoffmann can be found at www.martinahoffmann.com

“Beautiful rhythms come when fear is gone and affection leaves. Perception is clear when the mind is calm, and becomes pure and virgin, when dualities are overcome. Consciousness returns to its Source… Son returns to his Father.”

Oleg Korolev

Daniel
When did you decide to be an artist ?

Oleg Korolev
I have never decided it. I always drew and painted. It is my natural inborn state.

Daniel
What spiritual influences find their way into your work ?

Oleg Korolev

Well, this is complicated question, because usually the influences are higher than a realizing of the fact of the influence.

To put it simply, I am Christian and have respect for the Internal part of the teaching, like Hesychasm. For maybe 12, 13 or more years I have studied various kinds of theology, philosophy and psychology, so for sure these influences can speak for themselves, reflecting in my paintings

Daniel
Many people attribute religion as the cause of war. What are your thoughts on this ?

Oleg Korolev
Only an external religious approach can be a reason of a war. Internal mystic schools see the world as an illusion ( maya) and a divine play ( lila .. or as it is in Christianity : “this world is evil one” ( means it is an illusionary world of the social relations). An Illusion can not be changed ever “to the better”, because it actually doesnt exist, but a perception of the givenness can be changed, so the Ultimate reality will manifest Itself.

So Internal meditative schools see all differently and usually never take part in “this world vain passions”… though their adepts act in the outside, even participate in the wars only when the Spirit moves them, but not because of some political, patriotic, moralistic or other reasons.

Daniel
One thing that interests me is how you paint. How you approach your compositions. Do they arise through contemplative activity. Do you draw them all out and paint them, or do they arise as you work with the paint ? Do they come from dreams and visions, or though aiming to evoke the highest sentiments that you can ?

Oleg Korolev
Well, I think that all things manifest themselves starting from the abstract and unspeakable in the noumenal, subjective to the phenomenal objective reality. A painting follows the same principle. An individual artist directs an attention to some subject, age, place or a person, sending an energy and activating the information in the consciousness.

Prodigal Son

Images appear as a reflection in the mirror.., and the stronger the concentration on the noumen, the clear the image as a phenomenon, the brighter the impression and a realizing of it. An artist contemplates the realities and sees not necessarily the essences, but better to say a contemplator sees “how to be” the essence. A visual manifestation comes spontaneously, and here the less from the artist, from his ego, the better for the Art.

But when we mention ego neutralisation, using our “spiritual knowledge” taken from books, we have not to cheat ourselves. The point is we approach all the incoming information only be means of all our consciousness layers. We have influences of all previous generations, from our genetics, gender, nationality, religion, culture, education of all sorts, political preferences etc. , which still exist.., stay with us and built our self reflection.

In the Absolute all these relative things cease themselves,( Colossians 3;11 Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all.), but before the Absolute condition all the consciousness levels remain and rejecting them by some thinked-up reasons, we do not neutralize them , but only suppress to a subconsciousness space. That is why a not mutilated Art must contain all influences of all the previous generations, from genetics, gender, nationality, religion, culture, education of all sorts, political preferences in that measure, in which they really present.

All these must work, and energy must go through all of them and manifest all the personal consciousness compounds, only this will bring an artistic truth. Otherwise if an artist still has not reached a personal level of an ultimate enlightenment, where “Christ is all, and in all” and where “cannot be Greek and Jew”, but by some ideological reasons tries to show in his art that he has no any influences from which his person (gender, nationality, religion, culture etc) consists of, than his art will not be authentic and pure, it will false, but he himself, suppressing all these, will get a neurosis. So in Art almost always must be reflected a gender, nationality, religion, culture etc of the artist, even an artist as meditator individually stay transcendent.

Returning to the art production, I can say that at first spontaneously making sketches ( I call them “irresponsible sketches”)., on some sheet of paper, I do not think about them as about “piece of art” or something which relates to it. This is just something non-realized.., sometimes the images appear and I just try to let to the flow to manifest itself on a paper surface and the less I control them the more authentic and pure they may come of. Later, using the sketches, I work with a painting further, more and more going to the objective artistic criteria, not avoiding a dialectical way.

Apophatic Summertime

Daniel

Your experiences with Maestro Fuchs, did you find this valuable

Oleg Korolev
I participated in the St.Egyds chapel murals project of Maestro Ernst Fuchs in Klagenfurt, Austria. Formally, I studied the famous “Mische” technique, but since according to my diploma I am an Art teacher myself, and by myself I can learn various techniques, so to study some technical issues in a time when Maestro Ernst Fuchs is one of the most greatest living masters in the world, would be a great mistake.

All that I studied from Maestro Fuchs has a different level of education. Ernst Fuchs is a unique person, who has reached unique levels. What there is to be learnt from him is how to be such a unique person and how to reach the unique levels.

Actually he is just an object for a contemplation, and object for a meditation. He teaches by his presence, his emanation. To cognize a master we have to listen him by all our essence. He is like a sort of a magical music, it is necessary to come to such an inner silence where the melody can be perceived and understood.

As for the other outer technical things, yes he is a brilliant painter and illustrator. It is pleasant and even aesthetic spectacle to see how he holds his brush and works with it. I find a communication to such a master not just “valuable”, but a precious gift of the divine.

Daniel
Thankyou for sharing something of your incredible craft with Lila.

_______________________________________

Many thanks to Oleg Korolev for spending time helping to put this together,
and granting permission for his outstanding images to be shown on Lila.

To see more amazing paintings by Oleg Korolev go to http://www.koro-art.com