LILA

Visionary Art, Contemporary Sacred Art, Outsider Art

Kicking the Cigarette Habit

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While there are a number of stop-smoking products on the market (and increasing), the bulk of smokers do not use stop-smoking aids or organized programs when attempting to quit, as reported by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine (Volume 28, Number 1). The rate reporting seeking assistance or smoking cessation aids ran around 22%, meaning that more than three quarters of all smokers go it alone when trying to stop smoking. This may due, in part, to the cost of cigarette stop smoking products/services and also to some of the problems noted with various stop smoking drugs like Chantix.

Some stop-smoking products and programs do work for some smokers, but many smokers find that dealing with nicotine addition is a private battle and prefer to quit on their own terms and in their own ways. For these individuals, a holistic approach tends to work best with some tapering down on smoking and others going cold turkey.

Smokers need to identify the needs filled by smoking and find substitute activities or coping skills for best success. For example, a smoker who uses cigarettes during stressful situations needs to identify stressors and also work on new ways to alleviate and deal with stress. Celebration smokers can brainstorm other “treats” that serve as rewards for life successes. Those who smoke to drop or maintain weight might focus on dietary changes to reduce the need to use cigarettes to maintain a smaller jean size. Social smokers may need to develop new interests and activities that restrict or limit smoking.

David Hewson’s “Mother Earth”

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This beautiful guilded painting by David Hewson, Mother Earth, is 4 X 8 feet and was installed, on the 9th of January, in the entrance of a heart center for a hospital in the United States. David Hewson started it about a year ago, inspired by a doing a native ceremony outside of Cusco, Peru.

David Hewson’s unique artwork carries within it the heart and beauty of the Amazon Jungle, in which he lives, and its inhabitants: plants, animals, people and mythological beings alike.

Water Spirits

“This work derives from a personal vision I had while communing with the Orejone Indians. They spoke of the water spirits in certain forms, and through their stories I envisioned a masculine serpent entwined with a mermaid.”

Madre Ayahuasca


“Ayahuasca is an ancient traditional medicine that induces visions and can lead one to deep insights and great personal revelations. Once, during an ayahuasca ceremony, a native came to me in a vision and told me to use my abilities as an artist to show ‘my people’ (Americans) the beauty of the Amazon, and also make them aware of its ongoing destruction.”

More of his art can be found on his web page amaruspirit.org together with links and information about the other aspects of the jungle… the uglier truths of contaminations, roads buildings, injustices and deaths. His older website is at www.davidhewsonart.com

The Man with the Golden Coin

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Similarly to all objective processes, Art represents an energy flow, which has its own beginning, length and end. Like all things, it has own conception, birth, childhood, youth, maturity, old age and finally death, with the destruction of the body. The energy duration could be imagined as a sinusoid, with its starting point at the zero ground, which goes on upwards to its culmination of development–the Apogee–and then it descends back again to the point of zero. This way, it could be imagined as one of those thousand-year cycles in a chain. Countless cycles preceded it, and new countless cycles to come will continue this eternal vibration, like the heart beats, like inhalations and exhalations, like ebb and flow, like day and night, up to the end of being. A force for the continuation of the everlasting immanent sinusoid comes from the zero point, which is always unchangeable. The point of Zero, although it depicts an image of the nothingness, is a symbol of the ultimate Transcendence and this is the only unchanging Eternity.

A starting process is always constructive, and therefore any beginning cannot start from destruction. It means that art in its youth, in its starting point could be only constructive, purely spiritual, and in this state still close to the Transcendent. Even if the art was not so technically developed, it was still healthy and had a huge potentiality of growth. Such a sort of art we can see in the history of the early ages of the present humanity on the murals of the caves of Altamira and Lascaux, in sculptural works, such as Venus of Willendorf or Venus of Kostenki. This is a sacred and shamanic art, wild and rough, but there it is already possible to notice a way of a certain stylization and one can find there some sort of an artistic language. As an example of the highest point of the sinusoid, as a point of the perfection of the technical skill in the visual arts, where ripe, matured human personality had been harmoniously combined with the still non-lost connection with the spiritual, we can probably point out the Renaissance, as well as the Baroque.

The whole period of the art historical and simultaneously a social development of a human person had very bright evolutionary features; everything followed in order and could continue this natural flow for ages, until the process of evolution was blown up by a revolution. The European “Enlightenment”, with a help of a mass education has become a catalyst of a new civil self-identity. Since then, the process has changed a nature and trajectory. The Pre-Modern part of the white man’s history has ended, and a new “educated” person has got new features: “own will” and “own concept”, which could differ and which could contradict or be even much more advanced than that one, which was accepted by the state and church hierarchy. If in the past it was a fate of the individuals, like Galileo Galilei, Leonardo

Interview with Amanda Sage : Painter of Revolution

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On a rainy night in downtown Los Angles, I was invited to the studio of Amanda Sage, a Visionary artist who shows with the likes of Alex Grey and Robert Venosa. We ascend in an old elevator to a warm nook of this dilapidated high-rise where she leads me to a corner inside her studio. Beyond the other colorful paintings, Amanda pulls something out that had been tucked away. Unrolling the large linen surface, there was something quite unlike any of her other spiritual, psychedelic work. This was something frightening and exhilarating. Facing me was a woman wide-eyed and mouth open in a cry of power. While I have seen many paintings, I had never seen anything like this. The woman depicted was raising her skirt in both hands to reveal her bareness. From her vagina emits an egg descending toward a table of a corporate board. Thousands of people march forth from either side of her feet, from the left issue forth armed military; from the right, are the working people evacuating the polluted, industrialized world. The lightning of life issuing from the vagina of this great woman provides the first green of new life in this dying world.

CAB: What is the title and meaning behind this work?

AS: The painting is titled ‘ANA-SUROMAI’ which quite literally means ‘to lift the skirt’ derived from the Greek language. This painting is an outcry, an ultimatum, a visual denouncement of the system that has brought our world to a state of chaos with an ever widening gap between those that make decisions and those that are subject to those decisions. It is a wake-up call to humanity. Also known as Anasyrma or plural: Anasyrmata; women have been lifting their skirts for centuries to ward off evil and enhance fertility. This symbolic act is also found in mythologies of various cultures all over the world, and more specifically in those of ancient Egypt, Greece, Persia, Ireland, Africa, Indonesia and Japan.
It is said that the evil averting gesture of women individually or collectively exposing their genitalia has the power to shame & defeat an advancing army. The act of revealing publicly the hidden core of womanhood initiates a process of change that operates on a world scale, as well as, on an individual level.

CAB: Why did this painting require six years?

AS: It took time for me to find the right place to unveil this piece, as well as, be ready to unveil myself before the world… not to mention that I needed to be very clear about why I would lift my skirt. This painting is a rite of passage for me; it symbolizes me blatantly standing up for what I believe. I did not paint this to sell it; I painted it because I had to.

I chose to unveil this painting at the 2011 Burning Man Festival in the Nevada Desert. The theme was ‘Rites of Passage’, and I brought a scaled reproduction of the painting. It

Sukhi Barber: Beauty & Emptiness

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“In many of her enthralling pieces the human form is a catalyst for exploring such themes as immateriality, metamorphosis, and transcendence.”

Wow, so this was really the height of the 1960s psychedelic revolution. What connection does your image making have with the other breakthroughs of those times, such as psychedelic rock and the explosion of awareness in psychedelic substances?

While I was familiar with the pre-psychedelic rock that was popular in 1966-7, my initiation into the psychedelic culture that day in San Francisco included attending a concert that featured Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Big Brother & the Holding Company. This was my first exposure to extended rock pieces and light shows that were mesmerizing and trance inducing. I had what they call a “contact high” that night. It was truly what Richard Tarnas might call a Promethean and Dionysian experience. I first experimented with marijuana and LSD the following year and this awakened me to the potential of entheogens for stimulating one’s own inner imagery. A mescaline experience in 1971 took me to what some call “I AM” consciousness. From then on my art became more mystical.

 

The deep heart and clarity in the work is very strong. Have you had any prophetic experiences with your work, or experiences whereby personal meanings or events symbolised in the work actually manifest later on?

Only one instance immediately comes to mind. In 1984, while living in New York, I arranged to learn the mische technique from Carlos Madrid. I did a sketch for my first painting “Lovers Dream Journey.” At this time I had just learned of Jungian picture analysis and took a Saturday workshop from a Jungian analyst. I took along the sketch to show him. While he thought the image had beauty, he also found it disturbing for two reasons. In this picture the movement is going towards the left, which the Jungians consider a movement from consciousness towards unconsciousness. Secondly the flying image of merged couples with eagle heads and foetus was ungrounded. I wonder if all flying images are seen this way. As this sketch was on tracing paper, I switched sides to see how it would look with the movement to the right, but didn’t like it. Thus I painted it as I originally sketched it. About a year after I made the sketch, my girl friend became pregnant. We were not in a good financial situation so I persuaded her to get an abortion, something I have never been very proud of. We soon broke up and I have largely lived a solitary life since. I have always wondered if the outcome would have been different had I painted the picture differently.

How do things manifest for you with the art? Are they primarily based on dream, vision, intentional engineering of composition or spontaneous surprises? What do you feel facilitates your own creativity?

First of all, to facilitate one’s creativity, the most important thing is to have an expanded