OPHELIA'S VISIONS

OPHELIA’S VISIONS (1985-1987)

Oil on Canvas

Ophelia Myers was a maid who came to help my mother take care of her three little girls in the mid 1940’s when we lived in Arizona for a brief time.  Ophelia became my spiritual teacher. From her I learned about re-incarnation, how to be true to myself, how to access “other worlds”. When I had visions as a child, she taught me to go there and honor what I saw.

Later, I began to do Shamanic work, absent healing, soul retrieval, past life regressions, studied Astrology, Numerology, Kaballah, carrying Ophelia’s teachings into my mature life.

I worked with a shaman, who danced around me for two hours using a lady eagle’s wings and talons, and blowing a reed pipe into my head, creating a transformative state of being. 

As I painted in my studio, I envisioned what it would be like to experience myself as a bird comparing the wind, waves, and plant fronds to a feeling of being tiny in the midst of the birds’ wings. The ability to pass from one world to another was my focus. Giving up my Self (in this instance to be the Bird or Shaman) allowed me to discover an abstract expression of being a bird without painting an actual bird.

This work is about a state of Change, the Wisdom of Nature and its ceaseless transformations, the primordial mysterious insight that can be found in chaos. “I see the artist as a shaman interacting with the viewer to embrace the sacred mysteries of Nature and rediscover the power of a deep immersion into the World of Possibilities.”