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."

Endangered Languages

Post move...letting Mr. Davis do the Talking

We have moved from Germany to Colorado. Back to, I should say. Here is where half the family is, and where we have been for the past two months after almost seven years of exile.

It has been a culture shock, and yet also quite comfortingly familiar. The good and the bad blend, the past with the present blend, all like oils on a sheet of water when you're marbling paper. That is: they don't blend really, to make mud, but they stay resiliantly separate, swirling next to each other, constantly contrasting. What belongs there, what belongs here...what belongs no longer in either place and time.

Today. Earth Day. And I'd like to share with you one of my very favorite talks given, ever, by anthropologist and world explorer Wade Davis. More writing later. And not so vague.

The Zerner Method

I've admired the work of Amy Zerner for many years. She makes pieces of textile art that fuse traditional occult symbolism with multi-layered, appliqued techniques. I love how she basically recycles the scraps and fabric ephemera that have traditionally cluttered women's lives into powerful, resonant talismans.
Her series of Goddesses were singular for defining the cultural subtext of each Goddess by using textile scraps that reflected each area of the world from which each Goddess came.

That said, for the past ten or fifteen years, Zerner and her husband Monte appear to have concentrated primarily on turning the images of her textile works into twee advice books, tarot card sets and pre-packaged divination systems and peddling them as hard as they can. I find their website with its self-congratulatory, new agey tone and photos taken with celebrities to be somewhat crass...cheesy...undignified. That's how I see it. I ran across their site and was astounded to find how the artwork I have come to love felt so marketed. The deep and resonant tone of the work doesn't align with the promotion of it.

However, I believe Amy Zerner works in an enchanted way with her materials. The following is a description of how she begins a textile piece, and it describes very well the instinctive, poetically resonant state of receptive meditation that one enters when beginning to work. Amy Zerner's enchanted process, from Monte Zerner:

"She begins her complex accretions of fabric with trust in the fragment. She goes to her little trunks or bags or boxes, haphazardly pulling out this little clump of remnants, that wisp of lace, those shreds of metallics and threads. She is performing a ritual act, an incantation, a ceremony that was decided a long time ago, for which she is the medium.

She scatters her pieces in heaps in a ring on the floor. She sits down in the center of it all and waits for the first impulse. The first move will set free the many others that follow. Suddenly she rises and goes like a sleepwalker straight to one of her piles of textile fragments. She picks a piece of iridescent netting, takes up her scissors, and cuts a shape. She has already prepared her "canvas", the rectangular fabric backing with the outer border already sewn in as a frame. She places the first fragment in the middle of the lower portion of the backing.

She does not know what she is going to do next, which of the hundreds of fragments or rags she will turn to, separating it from its own little heap of related pieces (not similar scraps, but pieces related through source or time or some other association). It is all decided intuitively, on the spot, layer on layer, as she goes along. She is not aware of any conscious thinking as she moves from one piece of cloth to the next. She is totally in her own world, at one with her obsession, unaware of anything else going on around her.

She spreads each fragment on the backing, putting this one on that one, this next to that, silently for hours. Gradually, miraculously, images begin to emerge. They are as surprising to Amy as to those watching her work. Generally, she is entirely alone during the process of composition, sitting and rising from the floor, pausing, bending to place this patch and that piece, turning and reaching in the midst of her multitude of bags and boxes.

She moves constantly, unaware of anything else around her, gradually building detail. Many of these fragments are old, precious, and costly. She will risk them for the spiritual treasure she pursues. She has no preparatory sketches. She simply recognizes what happens as it is happening, without really knowing how it happened. It is amazing, even to the artist.

Each work emerges the way Robert Frost, in a letter to Louis Untermeyer, described the emergence of a poem: "A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins with a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness. It is never a thought to begin with. It finds its thought and succeeds, or doesn't find it, comes to nothing. It finds its thought and the thought finds the words."

The Farther Out the Better

Here, by the way, is the plexiglass bee house I mentioned in an earlier post. It is the work of Aganetha Dyck and is owned by state art museum of North Dakota.

It's like Habittrails, only for bees. I wonder if the light bothers them. However, as the animal communicator said, the bees would like a variety of houses to experience, it's just the love that matters, the joy, the fun. I think it should be made of glass, at least.

Worth the trip

I want to see the Linden-Museum of Stuttgart's current show which features a bunch of Siberian Shamanic items that haven't ever left the area before. 200 pieces. Museums are a great love of mine, because I tend to be able to feel the waves of experience coming off the stuff, and can just sit there and bask in the glow of a psychic history lesson.

When I was little, the Denver Art Museum put all the Native American Indian things in a jumble in floor-to-ceiling glass cases. Nations, tribes, were mixed, tourist-trade items with authentic tools. It sure wasn't anthropologically clean, but it was a banquet for the imagination. The mad mix of it developed the child's artists' eye. I didn't care then that Harvey tourist trade items were set next to rare and authentic parfleche purses. All the dresses decorated with elks' teeth were together. It was like a group of women were really there. You could feel it.

Then someone got the brilliant idea to Teach the Public what They Should Know about History. Some body thought it was better to inform and teach and bore-to-death, than to ignite the interest. This is why we now have museums filled with items, 90% of which can only rarely be viewed, tucked safely away from our greedy eyes. This is why now, there are what feels like 18 items in the Native American area, isolated from all the others in plexiglass cases and spot lit so as to keep everything uncontaminable as an operating theatre.

It means everyone has to walk around the exhibits whispering as if they are in the presence of the Holy Grail and it is a Privilege to Even be Able to Witness them. No mad jumble of actually-used implements, here. No chalk and plaster mannikins of babies stuck in the papooses to make you love them. Just objects, displayed with the precision of an obsessive-compulsive archivist.

Give me the real disorder, instead. I learn more from a person at their yard sale, surrounded by their once-loved or simply-collected things, than I would by seeing eight of their possessions reverently framed on the wall in a white gallery.

The show in Stuttgart, I might just be able to swing getting to. I know it will likely feature the modern style of museum curation, and give me nibbles rather than big bites to fill my mind with. But it would be a great chance to see and feel these things. Sure, it would be even better if they were in a real yurt on the wind swept plain with ponies nickering under snowfall and the scent of boiling komyss.