Sue Hoya Sellars

Whether I am doing studies of deer in my meadow or painting an angel moving between dimensions, there is always a glimmer of the cosmos showing through their bodies and parts of the landscape. My work has one primary concept: exploring the formation of our bodies from the cooling of gaseous material originating from the beginning of the universe. I use this cosmic matter as the background for the painting and sculpture I create. I do this in order to provide us with a visual, mental and spiritual reference for our place in the universe. One unifying all encompassing elegant Creator is behind all that there is. This includes every single thing, every tree, thought, idea, being, star, tiny frog and the clay that I sculpt with.

I am in agreement with the premise that shape is dictated by content. How we live in these bodies that are made from atoms that are older than the planet that we live on, has been an obsession of mine for some time. This obsession has compelled me to look into diverse materials...metaphysical, scientific, spiritual and how they're all talking about the same thing.

Having illustrated biological, anthropological and psychological text books for over forty years the question that continued to resurface was always the same: who lives in these bodily constructions? Since we are not the people that we are becoming, I love digging in my mind for new ways of depicting our being by graphically exploring our possible shape and form.

When I begin a painting, the background of cosmic clouds of solidifying gases eventually becomes trees or wings and other minutiae that supports the primary element of the painting. These rich textures are the stuff that the figures emerge out of. Often in my paintings I enjoy using two different applications of paint on the same piece which implies more than one dimension. For example I may use a classical style on the picture plane and then move into a more contemporary and loose style where the “elements” (star stuff) move out into the actual framework. That framework is the actual frame, and the extension of the painting which literally and visually expands by the addition of another dimension; a window to the cosmos. I build and carve and paint that frame custom for every painting, using materials of wood, clay, metal and other organic matter. I also print my own giclee' on canvas and paper in my studio in Mendocino County. Often I will make a hanging for the print, reminiscent of a Japanese scroll with a bar of metal and wood and fittings on the ends. The ends are individually sculpted and are made of clay that I dig and process on my land.

 Shiloh Sophia McCloud

What is love when it is truly expressed? What is it to tend the language of the heart? How does one share beauty? What is compassion in action? How do I touch suffering in myself, and in others? What is a life lived as art? What are the thoughts I haven’t thought yet? These are the kinds of questions I ask myself every day. I am in a continual inquiry about who and what and how all this came to be and how we can participate in it with our very aliveness.

Painting for me is a devotional act, a spiritual practice, a prayer and a way to share my love. My creations are the bountiful harvest from a life lived in service to Beauty and the Divine. I feel like a tree whose branches offer fruits and flowers to the sky – that must be -because they do not belong to me. My creations are both my offering and my overflow.

When I create with inquiry and intention, I am able to open a door to the sacred space between worlds. That is where I paint from – straddling spirit and matter, unmanifest and manifest, broken dreams and dreams fulfilled, suffering and healing. It is here that I find I can synchronize my own heartbeat with that of the world. Where I am in some small way one with all that is, even just for a few moments.

I have long had a sense that almost every painting I make is for someone else – or created for some sacred space. While I am painting it – I think of that nameless person – and ideas come to me. Impulses that I add through symbol and shape and pattern that are somehow in the magic world of art, connecting to or attending to that person’s specific need. And when people find the painting that is theirs they often know and remark on which stroke, which symbol, which color, was clearly just for them. In this way I would say that I paint intuitively, and in many respects I am not in charge. I follow where the canvas and my muse lead me. My paintings seek to image a moment in time when all is well. A place where beauty exists and no harm exists. A moment when we feel as we wish we could more often, at peace with ourselves and the world – in love with one another and creation, and experiencing the miracle of life.

I owe deep gratitude and influence to my mentor Sue Sellars and my mother Caron McCloud who taught to believe that what I have to offer is important. Many of the artists who influenced me are a part of the symbolist movement: Mucha, Klimt, Chagall, Kahlo, Redon, Cassat, and others who hold the space of beauty and original voice and image. It has been said, and so I like to think, that my work is a part of a Contemporary Symbolist Movement.

I experience my artist life as a privilege. I have owned art galleries for over 15 years – and represented, coached and trained thousands of women artists. I have authored several books, and am currently working on a volume of my poetry as well as a book of my research about Intentional Creativity.

I find so much joy and self reflection in the creative process, I cannot help but share it with others so that they can honor their own divine spark through creativity. I often paint in my nightgown in the morning at my home studio in my dining room which I call the Red Thread Café, where I have tea with the muse and my future husband, Jonathan Lewis.

When I paint, I feel moments of pure bliss. I think of life as a legend being written, not just a story that happens to me. And my legend is that I am an artist, that life can be art when we choose for it to be, and that life is a great adventure.

May love be at the center of all choices.

Emily K Grieves

I approach my art making as an opportunity to embark on a journey, to open doorways and to walk along that fine line that separates the visible and invisible worlds, attempting to build bridges of connection between the two. This is a pilgrim’s path, at times treacherous, at times ecstatic, but I am always aware of the symbolic signposts along the way that direct us with specific intention toward the sacred. Something is sacred when it reminds us of our connection to the Divine, when it opens our hearts, when we remember a sense of union with our Creator. The path I walk with my art is intended to lead both me and my viewers toward a deeper communion with Divine Source.

The making of art is a type of navigation, as if I were rowing a boat across the seas of life with only an oar to maneuver through the waves. I observe every aspect of my environment, the direction of the current, the rotating display of coded stars overhead, and the pull of intuition on my heart telling me which way to go. The act of painting is just like that, a fine balance of analysis informed both by experience and pure inner knowing and delight, always pointing toward a destination of visionary surprise, of revelation, of unexpected heart-thumping recognition of something much greater than my tiny human self. I would dare to call the making of art a navigation of miracles.

Art makes living in the world more tolerable. Art illumines the unbearable beauty and the unbearable cruelty of the human experience. We wrestle daily with trying to feel big in spite of our smallness, prostrate to a vast wall of mortality looming before us like a tidal wave, poised to consume us within its microcosms and macrocosms, its infinite life splayed out between mitochondria and mythology. Just looking at the sky with its rutilated clouds or at crystalline grains of dirt on my fingers is enough to break my heart most days. Art is the only way to wonder at the great beyond that lies just on the other side of the sun and to bring enough of its mystery into the fetid side of earthly life, this life that flails lilac pollen at us as readily as fish bones, as desperately, clawing at us, begging us to live life in awe of the wrenching poetry of its duality.

I also believe that while we live in a world of duality, it constantly seeks union within itself and my artwork is an inquiry into and an expression of this ongoing quest. Connections that I look for in my work are the line between heaven and earth, between ancient and new, between life, death, and rebirth. Even my palette often reflects my inquiry into duality as I frequently place complimentary colors side by side to allow them to vibrate together as they mirror each other. I look for meaning in symbols that are millennia old, trying to glean glimpses into lives past and into perspectives of reality that the modern world can’t even begin to understand.

Much of my work is inspired by my environment around my home in central Mexico, by the 2000 year old pyramids of Teotihuacan, a city created by masters who reminded themselves of their innate connection to all life by adorning everything from the most mundane tiny bowl to the most massive temple walls with symbols of that connection. To this day, the world left over here on the fringes of one of the world’s most important archaeological zones dances constantly along the borderlines of duality. It is a world of cheap cinderblock houses built within hollering distance of ancient majestic structures, with mangy stray dogs chasing past temples, with people poor, jealous, guarded, and conflicted walking in the shadows of their ancestors who were known masters at overcoming precisely those ever-historic human conditions.

Finally my artwork is about the core theme at the center of all humanity that we crave union, that we optimistically and perhaps idealistically dream of breaking down the sense of separation that seems to define every aspect of our everyday lives. Even if we are living in the midst of total chaos, conflict, and tragedy, we humans dream of love and being loved. We dream of comfort. We dream of belonging. My intention with my work is to prod the dream along a bit for the sake of us all, to pour a little fuel into the collective dream and offer up a vision that we can change that dream by changing our perspective, by what we choose to believe, by moving beyond mere belief and questing tirelessly into a pure experience of Life.

JASSY WATSON