Mysterious Ways I have Imagined: The Art of Gail Potocki

I found the work of Gail Potocki on the Anna Nathan (Chicago) Gallery website and was intrigued by her beautifully painted image of a honeybee. From there I found out that her November 2008 exhibition had featured several images of honeybees in surrealistic and symbolic, dream-like situations.

When I was about eighteen, I carried a book of surrealist poetry with me everywhere, and it fed my mind and dreams delicious spoonfuls of the wild dark.
At left: a study for "Thaw" in which a woman is washed up on glaciers and a honeybee hovers over her head, carrying fire

While there are many pieces of surrealist art that I can’t relate to and which make me feel cold and alienated (De Chirico comes to mind, Dali) I still believe that the surrealists have come as close as possible to the dream visions of shamans, so the work continues to magnetize me. I think I may have to dig deeper into exactly what the difference is between visionary art and surrealist art. It may be as thin as the hair of a mouse.

Gail Potocki is a masterful painter, in the style of the 17th Century Dutch masters, with just a bit of Spanish mannerist attenuation thrown in. Her images are lush and riveting and multi-layered. Visionary writer Grant Morrison says of her, “…brilliant occult portraits from the Symbolist underworld of the 21st century. More than just paintings, Gail Potocki conducts séances on canvas…” This is very well put.

Indeed, she seems to be in the act of placing moments of distilled high climaxes of Gaia's unconscious on her canvas, as if the veil has been ripped away - the immediacy of the timing of each event is baroque. She expresses more than her personal view, so her environmentally-charged images don't come off as an axe to grind - more like a clarion call to action. Like all great art, she has put down what we didn’t even know we were feeling. The way a shaman would, she sees environmental issues embodied in the mythical beings, gods and goddesses which have the contemporary faces of her models.

(I have posted here a few details of her work, since they are already posted and since it is for the purposes of education, which is within Fair Use.)

"Angel" at right, in which bees create winged presences on a red clad woman.

The HI-Fructose online review of her 2008 exhibition has reproduced some of her work in a grand scale: have a look at Red Spirals, Tiara, the complete Thaw and Corrupted Mother. Her own website details the progression of her paintings from 2000 onwards, although it hasn’t been updated for a few years. She also has had a book produced by Thomas Negovan of Century Guild.net, a surrealist and symbolist art website.

Boing Boing also reviewed her 2008 show, of which she said:

"I've addressed my concern with the plight of the honeybees quite a bit in this body of work. The mysterious loss of such a huge percentage of the bee population is one of the most alarming collapses and seems to be happening so silently with little press or media concern. I wanted to show the importance of this issue by making the bees larger than life while meeting their death in mysterious ways that I have imagined."

"Shipwrecked" at left in which honeybees are washed up against rocks from an ocean swollen with glacial melt within a stormy seascape.

The last exhibition for which I can find any information was titled “Opened Apples.” This for me was breath-taking synchronicity, as I have been lately remembering the arcane tradition and symbols of the apple in my family/spiritual heritage line.

"I think of the apple as a symbolic representation of the earth and of course, from the story of the Garden of Eden, as paradise. In the painting "Opened Apples" for example, a woman is taking bites out of apples and throwing them to the ground. It represents humans' careless disregard for the natural world and wasteful consumption. The idea of "Opened Apples" made me think of how we have savagely bitten into the symbolic "earth" apple and left it to turn brown and rot. Also, I was thinking of the opening of Pandora's Box as a metaphor of what we are doing by "opening the apple" and unleashing unforeseen consequences."

Restoring the Oracle

William J. Broad's The Oracle: The Lost Secrets & Hidden Messages of Ancient Delphi is a fine mystery book that chronicles how easy it is to lose the thread-of-reality connecting ancient historical evidence (of narratives and description) with physical evidence when archeological and geological losses and alterations occur in the landscape over the centuries.

He describes how French excavations of the late 19th century, which failed to find an underground cavern to support an entheogenic origin of the Oracle of Delphi's visions and prophecies - instead relegating her to a charlatan despite hundreds of years of centrality to Greek culture - became the standard line which paralyzed the evolution of all other studies of the Oracle of Delphi.

For a hundred years in archeology it was simply taken as fact that the Pythia had no consciousness-altering underground cavern, no vapors with a distinctive aroma which had been repeatedly described in the historical record.

Then Mr. Broad goes on to describe the remarkable geologist and archeologist who worked together to find and mentally reconstruct the underground area of the omphalos, the fissures in the rocks and the traces of ethylene which made it clear that the pythia/priestess indeed had a bit of euphoric help in accessing her visions.

Ethylene, however, is a relatively light drug. Laughing gas: I had lots of it as a child in the 70s as I had my teeth moved around, and I remember floating about and mentally making patterns in the pierced ceiling tiles at the orthodontist's office, or staring into his freakish sunglassed eyes. I can imagine it kicking off the relaxation required to enter an altered state, but not sustaining entire prophesies over the course of hundreds of years. Having experienced states of oracular shamanism myself without any drugs, I believe the gases from the omphalos functioned as an atmosphere-shifter, rather than the source of her visions.

Humphry Davy describes a nitrous oxide trip in 1798:
"I felt a sense of tangible extension highly pleasurable in every limb; my visible impressions were dazzling, and apparently magnified, I heard distinctly every sound in the room, and was perfectly aware of my situation. By degrees the pleasurable sensations increased, I lost all connection with external things; trains of vivid visible images rapidly passed through my mind, and were connected with words as to produce perceptions perfectly novel. I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas."

This is likewise the description of a kind of deep shamanic trance state, without drugs. I would only add that containing another spirit can be physically intense rather than exactly pleasurable: I felt my heart beating faster, and my entire sense of self filled with another being whose access to ecstasy was nearer than my own. I felt I was only just containing this presence.

I especially liked Mr. Broad's Epilogue where he reveals a personal message that the spirit of the pythia reveals to him. I admire that he is willing to go there. It is, in fact, his own oracular reading...however it came through to him.

"Be sensitive to the lessons of liberality, she seemed to be saying. Cherish your science but understand it as a finite guide to the immensities of time and space. It's not a religion, not a worldview. Will it save you? Can it explain my insights and actions? With Delphi, do not let knowledge of the vapors blind you to other truths, other vistas. Look far. Dance with the world rather than trying to explain it away. Consider the boat, not just the planks. Seize knowledge. But know, too, that your intellect is a small window and that its views can be surprisingly incomplete. Feel deeply. Revere truth in all its forms.
Yes, she seemed to be saying. (because she was.--ed.) You have discovered one of my secrets. I have others."