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."
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."
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