Visionary Art

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The Gaian Tarot - Interview with Joanna Powell Colbert

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The Gaian Tarot website.
Last night as we stepped into the second step of The Path Within we looked at the beautiful new Tarot deck created by visionary artist Joanna Powell Colbert, The Gaian Tarot. I have also begun reading for clients with this beautiful Tarot deck and have already noticed that it's imagery and message of connection to Mother Earth has brought a wonderful new pathway to hope for many. 
Last year I had the pleasure of interviewing Joanna about her creative process:
Well known for her Goddess portraits and mythic art, Joanna Powell Colbert has created a Tarot deck dedicated to Earth Spirituality. Just looking at The Gaian Tarot images makes me feel instantly calm. I am forever inspired by Joanna and her ability to juggle her work as an artist, writer, teacher and deep love of Tarot & the Earth. The Gaian Tarot took Joanna nine years to complete - 9 the number of completion -  and the 9 of Earth features Joanna herself in a field of lavender. Often it's hard for us to keep inspired about our creative projects & so I asked Joanna how she managed to keep up her ‘fire’ during the long and necessary gestation of her Tarot deck. 
What was the first 'seed' of inspiration for your deck? 
Joanna: ‘I was at a festival in late 2000 where a dozen or so people came up to my vending table, looked at my Goddess art, and said:  "Didn't you do a Tarot deck?"  It felt like a divine message to me.  As I went out for a walk one day, trying to choose a theme for the deck, it hit me all of a sudden:  I needed to merge my love for my naturalist studies and my love for Mother Earth with my love for the Tarot.  That was a theme that would interest and sustain me over the long haul.

How did you 'fire' yourself up to create your deck over such a long period of time & what were the benefits of taking your time with it? 
J: ‘Well I never intended to take such a long time with it.  Life just got in the way — earning a living, caretaking my elderly father, etc etc.  Plus I chose a medium (colored pencil) that is extremely time-intensive.   But every time I started a new card, I did get fired up — very excited by the idea behind the card, the symbolism, the color scheme and composition.  I always said that my favorite card is the one I just completed.  I was always a little bit in love with the most recent one.
    I grew into my elderhood during the nine years that I created the deck.  I moved from my 40's into my 50's.  I buried my father and became a grandmother.  I left my beloved island home and moved back to (small) city living. I dealt with some significant health issues. So there were major life transitions that took place during the time I created the deck.  All of my life wisdom up to this point is wrapped up in those cards.  

What beliefs or old patterns did you have to cast into the fire of transformation to embrace such a project? 
The feeling that I was a fraud as a professional artist because I work from photographs; the belief that I wasn't good enough to pull the project off and that it wasn't good enough to be published.  The community of people that followed the evolution of the deck on my blog really helped me to stay focused and excited about the deck, because they were all waiting for it and gave me such great feedback on it.’
     

Thank you again Joanna! 
I look forward to teaching and sharing this deck with you all in our classes, healings and Tarot Readings. May the Gaian Tarot inspire you to have trust in your own heart's dreams and patience as as they take root at the Spring Equinox this Friday. 

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Happy Birthday to the Wilde Vixen

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Photograph of Vali taken by a very young Mary Ellen Mark in Positano.
www.valimyers.com
In our world, Australian artist Vali Myers would have turned 81 today - in her worlds she is eternally spiralling, diving, and dancing in a cosmos of energy as wild, ancient and mysterious as her beautiful self. Love to you Queen of Foxes, may your memory and visionary art keep inspiring us all. 

Wu man, Vali Myers
www.outregallery.com

Desert Fox, Vali Myers (prints available from Outre Gallery)
Moon Hare, Vali Myers

Vali and her owl Jonnie

Vali playing her gramophone on the beach, photo: Flame Schon

Self portrait with Foxy
Vali & I in Naples 2000

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We are all works in progress...

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When we let go of perfectionism we can enjoy just being great artworks in progress. Here are some incredible artworks in progress by my friend and artist Patricia Ariel. Whenever I look at her creations she reminds me of just how beautiful we all are...

To view more of Patricia's visionary art please go to:
www.patricia-ariel.com  
www.mesmerizedbythesirens.blogspot.com

Love you Patty!

Experiment in progress by Patricia Ariel
Still untitled. Acrylics and pencil on gessoed masonite
The Travelers
The Travelers, acrylics and pencil on masonite board. Patricia Ariel
Sunny [illustration]
Sunny, pencil on bristol board. Patricia Ariel
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The Mythic Tribes and Wondrous Hands of Illustrator: Nadia Turner

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Druantia and Ava

When I first saw the beautiful drawing of ‘Druantia and Ava,’ I was stopped in my tracks. I had heard about the druid goddess Druantia but had never seen her ‘made flesh’. I love it when an artist can make a story real for you & how wonderful to discover that the talented illustrator, Nadia Turner, lives right here in Melbourne. 

Fire King
Nadia: 
'I have been drawing and creating for pretty much as long as I can remember, always very happy to just sit with pencil and paper in my hand. When asked when I was a child what I wanted to do when I grew up it was always ‘I want to be an artist!”  So I’m very grateful that’s how it’s turned out.

I don’t think I really realized until I started studying illustration that I’ve always been an ‘illustrator’ in that it was always the story and narrative that I was interested in. Of course it’s the characters themselves that make these stories enticing. As a kid I was always to be found drawing pictures of characters from fairytales – Cinderella, the little mermaid, sleeping beauty (most definitely influenced by Disney like so many other little girls!) And I still adore fairytales and stories for children – much more likely to find me in the kid’s realm of the bookstore than the adult section!  I was, and still am, fascinated by the exotic and otherworldly and I love costume and how what someone wears can tell a story in itself.

Mythology and magic have been a constant source of inspiration but most especially I’m intrigued by this idea of urban fantasy-that magic is only a step away, just a footstep through the veil and into the spirit world - a couple of my favourite authors like Charles de Lint and Neil Gaiman explore this idea a lot in their books – this notion that the gods and creatures from mythology could be walking around with us, even perhaps in everyday, human form.  And those creatures of fantasy don’t just exist in fantastical otherworlds but also in our own, just out of sight, glimpsed in the corner of our eye or just around that corner....
Wind and Sea

"He was conscious of any number of bodachs and spirits, shadowmen and border folk, faerie and ghosts, all going about their business. They were under the trees behind him and up in the boughs of those same oaks. They wandered along the streets, keeping to the shadows. They slept in gardens, poked through dumpsters. They scurried about in the sewers and alleyways, crept along rooftops or along windowsills, peering into people's apartments".


- Charles de Lint, excerpt from "Spirits in the Wires"

After all these myths and legends must come from some central truth far back in history, surely?!

I love that sense of mystery – when you see a fascinating looking person walk by in the street or find an amazing old forgotten sepia photograph – I love to wonder about who these people really are, what their story is – maybe old trickster coyote is running around in human form or that woman wandering through the spring markets is really Kore ....come back from the underworld for a while to remember what it’s like to be among humans again....

So that’s an idea I like to explore in my art. Often I don’t start a painting or a sketch with an idea of what or who it is I’m about to draw, the title or meaning often comes to me afterward.  While it might be loosely based on a myth or a character from a story, I don’t want this to be set in stone. The story is up to the viewer to imagine.  Often all I know is a name and not necessarily a story to go with the face.... After all, personally I believe that good art should strike a chord with the viewer and you shouldn’t have to know the full story of what and how and when it was created in order to understand it or ‘get’ something out of it.

I just hope my art entices people to use their imaginations and helps them to remember that the world can be a magical place!
Drabarni
To look more at Nadia’s illustrations & creations (and you really must) please go to: www.waywardharper.com. You can also purchase original drawings and hand-painted oak brooches from Nadia’s shop. Thank you so much for sharing Nadia.
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Interview with the Visionary Artist, Tammy Mae Moon

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The Seer
The Gifting
Deirdre of the Sorrows


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.
To see more of Tammy's beautiful art, please go to : www.moonspiralart.com