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| The Seer |
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| The Gifting |
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| Deirdre of the Sorrows |
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| Hyrdrangea Faerie |
Interview with Tammy Mae Moon:
Most of us knew our soul’s purpose better when we were children then we do as adults. Three of my biggest loves as a child were mythology, anything having to do with mysticism or the occult, and drawing medieval women. The first two loves I had to really search out as I grew up in a small Southern U.S. town where there were only two religions: Southern Baptist and Presbyterian. My love for art was not nurtured and I never thought that becoming an artist was even an option for me growing up.
In college I studied antiquities and had planned to become an archaeologist, but instead I married another archaeologist and became a massage therapist after college. I started to have a lot of psychic openings in my early twenties, and after being trained in Reiki I began to commune with the spirit guides of my massage therapy clients. My own guidance led me to learn to draw these guides for my clients. It took me two years before I felt confident enough to start doing this. During those two years I reconnected with this deep yearning I have within, and have had since I was a child, to draw and create art.
Doing the spirit guide portraits was an interesting way to learn to do portraiture. The sole purpose of doing those portraits was to manifest spirit into the physical. I still feel this is the main purpose of my art today. I would spend a lot of time on the eyes of the guides, as I really wanted people to feel like the eyes of the guides spoke to them. People are always commenting on the eyes of the women in my paintings as if they are really alive. We are so inundated with imagery in this modern world, and very rarely does it feel like it is filled with spirit. I think that one consequence of the Modern art movement is that art has become more and more lifeless. I feel it is very important for people to reconnect with art that is tangibly alive.
Along with drawing the guides, I would channel a lot of spiritual information for my clients. This information was dominated by past life information. The guides were usually people that my clients knew in a past life, or sometimes, were the clients themselves in a past life. This was always intriguing to me as it showed that we truly are our own guides and reminds me of that old Native American saying
“We are the ones we are waiting for”.
My fascination with past lives grew as I did the readings, and I eventually got trained as a hypnotist and began doing past life regressions. This helped me to journey into my own past lives and to uncover my own soul’s story. I know I was a gifted artist in a few past lives, and that is why I was able to reconnect with this skill in this lifetime with no formal training. I also uncovered the skill of reading tarot. I was always a little frightened of tarot readings before discovering this. I found a lifetime where I was tortured as a Romany gypsy and I was a tarot reader.
Today I am a busy mom of two and I have cut back on doing the readings. What little time I have for myself I enjoy spending it painting. I think creative energy is something that you channel up through your root chakra from the center of Gaia. The more you open up to the energy the more it floods into your system. Learning how to balance this creative energy is a struggle for every artist. Images are constantly flooding into me and sometimes all I can think about is getting them out and onto the canvas.
My art is always centered on two themes, the sacred feminine and its connection to nature. I work with a lot of mythological stories to show this connection. I am most drawn to the ancient Irish myth, as I have a lot of past life connections there. I am borderline obsessed with the stories of the Tuatha de danann and the Sidhe (the Irish name for faeries). You will find in a lot of old Celtic lore the idea of the sovereign goddess. She is the physical embodiment of the land or the earth. She has to be treated with respect and nurtured for the land to be fertile. In most myth the goddess herself is symbolic of the human psyche. I feel there is a strong connection between the health of the human psyche and the environment. When we have a balanced psyche the land will also be in balance. This is the basic meaning behind the Beltane festival. It was the coming together of the god and the goddess (the balancing of the male and female aspects of the psyche) to insure the fertility of the land.
One of my favorite teachers of myth, as I am sure he is many peoples favorite, is Joseph Campbell. On many occasions he commented about how it was the role of the artist to create the myth of today. One of my favorite quotes of his says: “Artist’s are magical helpers. Evoking symbols and motifs that connect us to our deeper selves, they can help us along the heroic journey of our own lives.” If I can help others on their soul’s heroic journey with my paintings, then I know I will be following my bliss.
