Taken With the Wind

Visionary, self-taught folk artist Vollis Simpson has stopped work due to advanced age, and his collection of intensely detailed whirligigs (aka kinetic, wind-driven constructions) are going to be sold and redistributed.

http://www.reflector.com/mixer/artists-famous-whirligigs-be-moved-new-home-42093


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38311137/ns/travel-destination_travel/


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/arts/design/06vollis.html

"The main part of doing anything that turns 

is to get it centered." 

– Vollis Simpson, whirlgig artist

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."

Artist Profile: Minnie Eva Jones Evans (1892-1987)

Minnie Evans is one of the first artists I think of when I think of shamanic art, because she made no secret of the fact that a spirit, an angel, stood near her and counselled her as she worked. (She said: “God has sent me teachers: the angel that stands by me, stands by me and directs me what to do.” And, “(I’ll) Say, “What on earth this picture be?” And I keep putting it down, until after awhile He’ll say, “That’s right. Minnie, that’s right. All right.”)

Her work glows with power, repeating ancient symbols and shapes which merge and morph with faces and nature images, resonant of the spiritual tradition in which she was immersed, that of American Southern Baptists. Many of her paintings show animals and beings that God told her were on earth before the flood, but are not on earth now. Her friend and agent Nina Howell Starr said, “Minnie Evans wondered at, but welcomed the ‘lost world that no one has history of’ that was so freely revealed to her.”

She was born in North Carolina in 1892, a descendant of slaves from Trinidad. Her mother was young teenager at her birth, so she was brought up by her Grandmother, with whom she was close.

She described being different; having waking visions from a young age: “The moon was shining and it drew my attention. He showed me the animals on that ring around the moon. Children said, “Minnie, what are you looking at?” Said, “I’m looking at those elephants going round the moon.” So they laughed at me: “Minnie crazy. We don’t see no elephants. We don’t see nothing.” I thought everyone could see them. I wasn’t like the other children.”

At thirteen she began to have a deepening of contact with spirits, as her dreams intensified: "Well, my whole life has been nothing but dreams. When I was thirteen years old I started having those terrible dreams. Old men dressed up like the old prophets; they would carry me down to the soldiers’ cemetery. I have woke up more times in that cemetery. My grandmother told me they wasn’t dreams that I was having. I was having visions."

Later, she worked selling oysters, was married at the age of 16 to Julius Evans, and gave birth to three sons. Within days of her Grandmother’s death, Minnie first began to draw at the age of 43: “So one night I was so tired and sleepy I had a dream. This voice spoke to me, “Why don’t you draw...or: die?” I said, “Is that it?…”

Her place of employment would play a major role in her art: she was the gatekeeper for a lush public garden ( a metaphor for paradise, reflected in her work) from 1949 until 1974, where she would later sell her works for fifty cents a piece, roughly equal to half her daily wages. Her husband often resisted her art-making, saying she was going "crazy."

Her first works were small drawings of talismanic symbol-like designs which morphed with faces and shapes—she made exactly 144 of these before going on to make larger pieces, colored with crayons and mounted on paperboard.

Surrealist artists had earlier given a name to the technique of spontaneously letting the unconscious move through the body and onto the page: automatism. This came quite easily to Minnie (she felt “something had my hand”) and she referred to this as “an engine” driving her hand.

She was mystified by her own work. She asked her friend Nina Howell Starr to interpret her work. (“She often volunteered that her pictures ‘are just as strange to me as they are to anybody else.’”)

Yet Gylbert Coker, a curator who knew her, said she was “cautious about letting other people become aware” of the thinness of the veil between her dreamings and so-called reality. He confirms that she had a shaman-like understanding of multiple realities: “there were times when Evans could barely distinguish between dreams and visions, as well as between dreams and wakeful experience.”

Many of Evan's works recall the folk art Green Man symbol, with faces emerging from plants. Other ancient symbols such as curliques, yonic leaves, lemniscates, serpents and its mandala-like symetry places her work in an visionary folk art tradition that has been expressed in various but visually-related ways, worldwide.

This skill has been variously interpreted as “recurring hallucinatory experiences (which) lead to a confused sense of reality”—although I have not found anything which confirms that Minnie’s own experience of reality was “confused,” or “hallucinatory,” according to her.

Minnie Evans experienced some of (what might be called) the secondary hallmarks of the “typical” shamanic calling during her life. She was an unusual child who had waking visions, she was challenged in puberty by deeper and scarier contact with the otherworld, she was identified as having unusual talent by a relative. She was given the choice directly by Spirit to express her spiritual arousal through art—or leave this world. She was driven by unusual fervor and energy to do her work, working on it for hours at a time, seemingly obsessed, and she followed Spirit’s counsel in guiding her work, which makes it shamanically collaborative.