LILA

Visionary Art, Contemporary Sacred Art, Outsider Art

Maura Holden

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“In a dense phosphorescent fog, I have been searching for things which can never be found: the journals of Adam and Eve; a photographic record of the cities of the interior; a map charting the soul’s disasters and renewals; the keys to locked dimensions; the point at the centre of everything …”

“My paintings are a residue of this effort. But they are only shells, fossil imprints around the things I truly meant to give existence to – those lost moments when my identity fell to the ground like a torn dress, and I moved through non-human spheres with X-ray vision and a compound mind, seeing and being all of those impossible things.”

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

Robert Venosa

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“Venosa submerges into the cosmic mysteries and brings back fantastic visions dressed in the perfect and classic technique of a painter who completely masters his art.” – Jean ‘Moebius’ Girard

 

Robert Venosa (January 21, 1936 – August 9, 2011) was an American artist residing in Boulder, Colorado, USA. He studied with what are termed the New Masters. His artworks reside in collections around the world.

Robert Venosa has been exhibited worldwide and is represented in major collections, including those of noted museums, rock stars, and European aristocracy. In addition to painting, sculpting, and film design (pre-sketches and conceptual design for the movie Dune, and Fire in the Sky for Paramount Pictures, and the upcoming Race for Atlantis for IMAX), he has recently added computer art to his creative menu. His work has been the subject of three books, as well as being featured in numerous publications – most notably Omni magazine – and on a number of CD covers, including those of Kitarō and progressive metal band Cynic. He is a member of the Society for the Art of Imagination, Surreal Art Collective, and the Labyrinthe group.

He first studied under Mati Klarwein in New York. Venosa then went on to study with Ernst Fuchs in Vienna. In the early 1970s he moved to Cadaques, Spain. Here he met and befriended Salvador Dalí.[citation needed] He later introduced H. R. Giger to Dalí.

Venosa traveled the globe with his partner Martina Hoffmann, teaching their painting technique. The technique is a derivative of what Venosa learned from his teachers. His technique differs in the material used for the underpainting (caesin versus egg tempera) but largely follows the same processes.