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| Illustration by Carl Jung from The Red Book |
INTRODUCTION
to "Dreams, Deities and Archetypes: A Visionary Art Exhibit"
"Visionary seeing" is a force against the tyranny of "literal mind", a movement into a larger dimension that honors our connection with archetypal powers beyond the local self. According to Carl Jung, much of the vacuum of meaning from which contemporary people suffer results from isolation of the "ego-mind" from "archetypal unconscious"…….Jung even went so far as to say that myths are more sustaining in our lives than economic security."Suzi Gablik, The Re-Enchantment of Art (Thames Hudson, 1991) p. 52
It was my privilege, in the late 1980's, to share conversations about art, spirituality, and cultural transformation with some extraordinary artists as I pursued material for a book on Visionary Art. I travelled across the country to interview artists, and I realize now that I was also trying to understand my own reasons for making art. The contemporary "art world" seemed dry and disconnected from a deep well of inspiration I recognized in my conversations with the artists I met.
In New York City I met Alex and Alison Grey, who told me of the profound visionary experience they shared together that became the Genesis of the "Sacred Mirrors" * for which they became famous. In California I met sculptor Lorraine Capparell, who told me she had dreamed of her amazing sculpture "Hands", fully realized, before she made it. And in Arizona I spoke with Sarah Mertz, whose "petroglyphic" paintings seemed like a forgotten tribal language, glimpsed among the valleys of the Rincons and Sarah's imagination. Mertz reminded me that once upon a time: "Everything was made for the greater meaning and use of the tribe. A spoon was more than a spoon, and a sacred pot was also used to store grain in - because they understood that there had to be a weaving between the material world and the other worlds in order to live right and well. An artist was one of those who did the weaving."
Those conversations still infuse my creative life. In our Exhibit, artist Carolyn King reaches into the heart of myth as she shows us "ancestral roots", seen as hieroglyphs or elemental beings, just beneath the skin on women who, as she puts it, are "memory keepers of myths and deep relationships with Nature within their cultures." Carmon R. Sonnes in her painting "The Ancestors Speak" also envisions iconography of her Native roots, imprinted in the present life of a woman's body.
Myth is intrinsic to much that is visionary, and myth is one of the foundations on which cultures are built. Mythos is the sometimes-fluid template of religions, and ultimately the means by which we decide what is sacred and what is not. Artists, as technicians of story, possess the means to "re-myth" not just their personal lives, but culture at large.
In Kathy Keler's "She Approaches" Keler envisions the approach of the Divine Feminine, adorned with the sacred Earth serpents of antiquity, rising amid the destructive forces of Patriarchy. Judith Austen paints the invisible hand that creates a lotus, an ancient symbol of spiritual transformation, and faith that we are not alone in our striving. And Maria Renee envisions the magical intelligence of nature, of the Sonoran Desert she lives in, as she "seeks to understand the roots of disconnection and engage in practices of re-connection with others – at the center of this is listening to and building relationship with the animate, more-than-human world." "My work" she asserts, "holds a vision toward justice, stewardship, and belonging."
Visioning can also be abstract, and subtle, requiring a kind of deep quiet to fully perceive. Kelly Sinclair's symbolic paintings envision the experience of Love as a "symphony" of color and vibration, with many distinct forms and expressions. Abstract painter Ingrid McCarty further abstracts to an energetic essence, states of emotional and spiritual transformation. And Betina Fink's plein air paintings subtly capture the quiet sentience and conversant Mystery inherent in place - "what is unseen" unless one sees/listens carefully.
Lisa Hastreiter-Lamb makes Icons to "intercede with the divine". Inspired by the Catholic Icons she grew up with, her bas relief sculptures are Icons representing visual prayers for strength, protection, and transformation. Michael Pellegrino's whimsical paintings are "snapshots" of the ineffable. The viewer is left to interpret them as one might interpret dreams. A goat called "Capricorn" leaps over a snow-clad mountain, leaping from day into moonlit night. A grieving monkey holds prayer beads. In "The Egyptian Way" A great condor flies over a man and his long shadow. And in the vibrant visionary paintings of Mary Theresa Dietz we also enter the paintings as "windows" into story as well as metaphor, complex in their layering.
I agree with the writer Ursula Leguin when she said in her 2014 speech that we very much need, at this time of social and environmental crisis, what she called "realists of a larger reality"* - visionaries who can envision new worlds and ways, who can renew and re-define the sacred, pollinating the future with hope and, for lack of any better word, "enchantment". All these years later, it's my privilege to enter that Conversation again, though the works of Tucson's extraordinary Visionaries in our Visionary Art Exhibition. Listen with your eyes and imagination to these works, because they speak of the numinous Mystery of being, in each unique way.
Lauren Raine MFA 2025
for SAFOJ
* See, "How Art Can Change Consciousness" - TED talk by Alex Grey on Visionary Art.
* The National Book Awards (2014) where she received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
In New York City I met Alex and Alison Grey, who told me of the profound visionary experience they shared together that became the Genesis of the "Sacred Mirrors" * for which they became famous. In California I met sculptor Lorraine Capparell, who told me she had dreamed of her amazing sculpture "Hands", fully realized, before she made it. And in Arizona I spoke with Sarah Mertz, whose "petroglyphic" paintings seemed like a forgotten tribal language, glimpsed among the valleys of the Rincons and Sarah's imagination. Mertz reminded me that once upon a time: "Everything was made for the greater meaning and use of the tribe. A spoon was more than a spoon, and a sacred pot was also used to store grain in - because they understood that there had to be a weaving between the material world and the other worlds in order to live right and well. An artist was one of those who did the weaving."
Those conversations still infuse my creative life. In our Exhibit, artist Carolyn King reaches into the heart of myth as she shows us "ancestral roots", seen as hieroglyphs or elemental beings, just beneath the skin on women who, as she puts it, are "memory keepers of myths and deep relationships with Nature within their cultures." Carmon R. Sonnes in her painting "The Ancestors Speak" also envisions iconography of her Native roots, imprinted in the present life of a woman's body.
Myth is intrinsic to much that is visionary, and myth is one of the foundations on which cultures are built. Mythos is the sometimes-fluid template of religions, and ultimately the means by which we decide what is sacred and what is not. Artists, as technicians of story, possess the means to "re-myth" not just their personal lives, but culture at large.
In Kathy Keler's "She Approaches" Keler envisions the approach of the Divine Feminine, adorned with the sacred Earth serpents of antiquity, rising amid the destructive forces of Patriarchy. Judith Austen paints the invisible hand that creates a lotus, an ancient symbol of spiritual transformation, and faith that we are not alone in our striving. And Maria Renee envisions the magical intelligence of nature, of the Sonoran Desert she lives in, as she "seeks to understand the roots of disconnection and engage in practices of re-connection with others – at the center of this is listening to and building relationship with the animate, more-than-human world." "My work" she asserts, "holds a vision toward justice, stewardship, and belonging."
Visioning can also be abstract, and subtle, requiring a kind of deep quiet to fully perceive. Kelly Sinclair's symbolic paintings envision the experience of Love as a "symphony" of color and vibration, with many distinct forms and expressions. Abstract painter Ingrid McCarty further abstracts to an energetic essence, states of emotional and spiritual transformation. And Betina Fink's plein air paintings subtly capture the quiet sentience and conversant Mystery inherent in place - "what is unseen" unless one sees/listens carefully.
Lisa Hastreiter-Lamb makes Icons to "intercede with the divine". Inspired by the Catholic Icons she grew up with, her bas relief sculptures are Icons representing visual prayers for strength, protection, and transformation. Michael Pellegrino's whimsical paintings are "snapshots" of the ineffable. The viewer is left to interpret them as one might interpret dreams. A goat called "Capricorn" leaps over a snow-clad mountain, leaping from day into moonlit night. A grieving monkey holds prayer beads. In "The Egyptian Way" A great condor flies over a man and his long shadow. And in the vibrant visionary paintings of Mary Theresa Dietz we also enter the paintings as "windows" into story as well as metaphor, complex in their layering.
I agree with the writer Ursula Leguin when she said in her 2014 speech that we very much need, at this time of social and environmental crisis, what she called "realists of a larger reality"* - visionaries who can envision new worlds and ways, who can renew and re-define the sacred, pollinating the future with hope and, for lack of any better word, "enchantment". All these years later, it's my privilege to enter that Conversation again, though the works of Tucson's extraordinary Visionaries in our Visionary Art Exhibition. Listen with your eyes and imagination to these works, because they speak of the numinous Mystery of being, in each unique way.
Lauren Raine MFA 2025
for SAFOJ
“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of those who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, artists, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.”
........ Ursula K. Leguin
* See, "How Art Can Change Consciousness" - TED talk by Alex Grey on Visionary Art.
* The National Book Awards (2014) where she received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
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