Welcome to Timeless Rhythms Studio, online art journal! Look at some of my posted art (above), read my entries and feel free to comment on any part of the blog that interests you! Most of my art is available for purchase and I can also be commissioned for a variety of custom painting projects, from portraits to murals. Contact me here by leaving a comment on any post. I look forward to hearing from you in my Timeless Rhythms Studio, online art journal!

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Two-year Job Search Comes to an End!

I am elated to finally post that after a grueling two-year job search, I am finally rejoining the ranks of the employed, as a Project Coordinator for an Alternative Wellness Center in my area!

This is a brief post because I am still jumping up and down for sheer joy!

Enjoy the photos from part of my week-end celebration during the local festival in my community. Rain or shine, everyone came out to play!



For anyone continuing to experience the long job search, do not give up, and keep at it unequivocally, no matter what! This IS what I had to do and did.

Nobody can abandon you, if first you don't abandon yourself.
Nobody can betray you, if you don't first betray yourself.
Nobody can despise you, if you don't despise yourself first.
Nobody can hurt you, if you don't hurt first yourself.
Nobody can truly be in love with you, if you aren't first in love with yourself.

Blessings and actively share your joy, because the world is full of people who need what we each uniquely have to share with one another!

Sunday, May 29, 2011

Leonora Carrington, artist and surrealist muse, dies at 94

By Adam Bernstein, Published: May 26

Leonora Carrington, who gained a cultural foothold as the muse and lover of painter Max Ernst and later emerged as a significant artist in works that fused surrealism with the occult and mystical explorations of femininity, died May 25 in Mexico City. She was 94 and had pneumonia.

Surrealism — by turns macabre, sexually overripe, whimsical, subversive and fantastical — suited Ms. Carrington’s creative journey.



She was widely, if belatedly, regarded as one of the most imaginative artists of her generation and one of the last links to the surrealist movement that included Salvador Dali, Joan Miro and Marcel Duchamp. Her paintings fetched hundreds of thousands of dollars at leading auction houses.

Ms. Carrington was born in England to an upper-crust family that stifled her artistic impulses. She went through the motions of being a debutante before managing, at 19, to broker her independence and study painting.

Smitten with surrealism — and its use of art to explore the psyche — she became in 1937 the lover of one of its masters, the German-born Ernst, who was 46 and married.

They retreated to a farmhouse in southern France, where they put on plays and tended vineyards. Guests were welcome, to a point. When surrealist visitors overstayed their welcome, the interlopers were treated to an omelet — of their own hair, which Ernst and Ms. Carrington had secretly cut the night before.

Their idyll in the French countryside was interrupted by the German occupation during World War II. Ernst eventually found sanctuary in the United States — and, once there, married arts patron Peggy Guggenheim.

In Ernst’s absence, Ms. Carrington fled the Nazis and suffered a mental breakdown in Spain. When her parents sent an emissary to find her, she escaped to Mexico, a haven for European emigres during the war, through a marriage of convenience with a diplomat.

In the 1940s, her work was shown in important New York galleries. Her paintings were “heavy with sex and horror,” an art critic at Time magazine wrote, noting a body of images freighted with melancholy: “Feathery, hairy, horny, half-luminous creatures merged imperceptibly into birds, animals and plants. Painted with cobweb delicacy, they conspired and paraded before misty landscapes and night skies thick with floating islands.”

Her artistic reputation was initially handicapped by her relationship with Ernst, said Susan Fisher Sterling, director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington. She was seen more as a muse than an artist in her own right.

But Ms. Carrington remained a vital figure in the art world long after the surrealist movement dimmed in the late 1940s. She bridged the psychological aspects of surrealism with her growing interest in the roles of women as muses, mothers, goddesses and foes of patriarchal oppression.

Her paintings, murals and sculptures, which featured dreamlike images of animals, sibyls, animals and deities, reflected her study of alchemy, Mayan magical traditions, Buddhism and the Jewish mystical writings known as the Kabbalah.

“The strange, enigmatic and subtly humorous anecdotes that appear in her work were the expression of a profound inner world, a mythology of her own making, which although terrifying protected her from the aggressive banality of the external world,” arts scholar Jorge Alberto Manrique wrote in the “Grove Dictionary of Art.”

Ms. Carrington was rediscovered by feminist art historians in the 1970s and ’80s, Sterling said, prompting renewed interest in her work as well as her compelling life.



Elusive about the meaning of her work, Ms. Carrington tired of interviewers who tried to make her an object of fascination.

“Everyone’s had an interesting life,” she told a reporter. “Unless they’re interested in business or something.”

Leonora Carrington was born April 6, 1917, in Lancashire, England, and grew up in a shadow-filled Edwardian mansion called Crookhey Hall. She described her father, a textile magnate, as a philistine who thought that “you didn’t do art — if you did, you were either poor or homosexual, which were more or less the same sort of crime.”

Rebelling at London’s social whirl, she studied art and found a new world when her mother sent her a book about surrealism that featured cover art by Ernst. At a dinner party soon after, they fell instantly in lust and spirited away to Paris and then to Provence.

In her paintings of the era, notably the self-portrait “The Inn of the Dawn Horse,” Ms. Carrington was drawn to images of horses, mostly to depict states of arousal and fertility. Many of her equine-inspired images showed up in a Paris exhibit of surrealist painters in 1938.

The Germans marched into Paris in 1940, and Ernst, whose art had been labeled “degenerate” by the Nazis, was rounded up as an enemy alien and taken to an internment camp.

Alone for months, Ms. Carrington grew despondent and tried to starve herself. She sold her home for a few francs, liberated her pet eagle and drove to Madrid.

“In the political confusion and the torrid heat,” she wrote in her diary, “I convinced myself that Madrid was the world’s stomach and that I had been chosen for the task of restoring this digestive organ to health.”

She became hostile with police at the British Embassy and was committed to an asylum, a period she wrote about in her acclaimed memoir “Down Below.” She was given drugs that caused her to hallucinate and go into spasms.

Her parents sent a guardian to get her, but Ms. Carrington was determined not to return to England. In Lisbon, she escaped by hailing a taxi and asking to be driven to the Mexican Embassy. She married a Mexican cultural attache, Renato Leduc. “It was the only way of getting out,” she later said.

They settled in Mexico City, and the marriage crumbled. Ms. Carrington took up with Emerico Weisz, a Hungarian emigre photographer who had covered the Spanish Civil War. She and Weisz marred in 1946 and had two sons, Gabriel and Pablo. Weisz died in 2007, and the sons survive.

Ms. Carrington counted many European exiles among her friends in Mexico, including surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel.

A former Bunuel assistant told the Sydney Morning Herald in 1997 that when the filmmaker visited Ms. Carrington’s home one day, the artist greeted him.

“You look very much like my guardian at the insane asylum,” she said. She proceeded to step into the bathroom and take a shower, fully dressed.

Bunuel was vexed, but he stared at her, thinking, “After all, I am a surrealist, but at what point does it stop?”

*This article originally appeared in the May 26, 2011 edition of the Washington Post.

Monday, May 9, 2011

Brain scans reveal the power of art


View on the Stour near Dedham 1822' by John Constable
Photo: Bloomburg News

By Robert Mendick, Chief reporter 8:00AM BST 08 May 2011

Human guinea pigs underwent brain scans while being shown a series of 30 paintings by some of the world's greatest artists.
The artworks they considered most beautiful increased blood flow in a certain part of the brain by as much as 10 per cent – the equivalent to gazing at a loved one.
Paintings by John Constable, Ingres, the French neoclassical painter, and Guido Reni, the 17th century Italian artist, produced the most powerful 'pleasure' response in those taking part in the experiment.
Works by Hieronymus Bosch, Honore Damier and the Flemish artist Massys – the 'ugliest' art used in the experiment – led to the smallest increases in blood flow. Other paintings shown were by artists such as Monet, Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci and Cezanne.
Professor Semir Zeki, chair in neuroaesthetics at University College London, who conducted the experiment, said: "We wanted to see what happens in the brain when you look at beautiful paintings.

Related Articles:

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Art and soul 08 May 2011

"What we found is when you look at art – whether it is a landscape, a still life, an abstract or a portrait – there is strong activity in that part of the brain related to pleasure.
"We put people in a scanner and showed them a series of paintings every ten seconds. We then measured the change in blood flow in one part of the brain.
"The reaction was immediate. What we found was the increase in blood flow was in proportion to how much the painting was liked.
"The blood flow increased for a beautiful painting just as it increases when you look at somebody you love. It tells us art induces a feel good sensation direct to the brain."
The test was carried out on dozens of people, who were picked at random but who had little prior knowledge of art and therefore would not be unduly influenced by current tastes and the fashionability of the artist.
The magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan measured blood flow in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, part of the brain associated with pleasure and desire.
The study, which is currently being peer reviewed, is likely to be published in an academic journal later this year.
Professor Zeki added: "What we are doing is giving scientific truth to what has been known for a long time – that beautiful paintings makes us feel much better.
"But what we didn't realise until we did these studies is just how powerful the effect on the brain is."
The study is being seized upon as proof of the need for art to be made as widely available to the general public as possible.
There is currently concern in the arts world that widespread budget cuts could affect accessibility while also slashing acquisition budgets.
"I have always believed art matters so it is exciting to see some scientific evidence to support the view life is enhanced by instantaneous contact with works of art," said Dr Stephen Deuchar, director of the Art Fund, the national fund-raising charity which has spent £24 million over the last five years helping to buy art for galleries and museums.
Last month, the organisation launched a National Art Pass giving free entry to more than 200 museums and galleries and 50 per cent off entry to major exhibitions.
The Art Fund has pledged to increase its funding by 50 per cent to £7 million a year by 2014 to make up for widespread budget cuts in the arts world.
The charity has been praised by Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt for showing that "philanthropy can be about small as well as large donations".

This article originally published by The Telegraph, on Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Imagery niggling

I post a collage of some old & new works. Some finished_ others, in-process.

I am reading, "expressive Drawing" by Steven Aimone, and loving how it validates the looking/seeing experience of our individual humanness! You can make anything that you see, the WAY you see it_ your art!

Here too, are some inspirational quotes for today and everyday they serve your own higher functioning:

"Before I go I will remember that there’s someone out there who needs me.

I am living my life so they can find me!" _Someone said a Balinese dancer first said this!


"What you radiate in the world comes back to you!" _Nicholas Bellamy, a wise friend and fellow artist!







Saturday, March 19, 2011

The National Museum of Women in the Arts, in Washington D.C.



In conducting research during my undergraduate studies on women in the arts, I could not find any information locally that gave me enough of what I needed to treat my subjects fairly.
What a victorious thrill it was when I discovered that the NMWA would give me the supportive access I needed to over 250 names for French Women Artists in particular_ since this was my research focus!
I wound up writing two papers for two different projects on my subject, the second of which I wrote in both English and French.

Thank-you very much, National Museum of Women in the Arts!

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Beautiful permission-giving inspiration!


Check out the details to get involved on any scale that fits for you, right here at: Inside Out

I have never felt so finally identified until seeing two projects today of this scale and magnitude by just one person (at least out in front)!

I am looking for this kind support in the world! Who wants to help me be an Inside Out Artist in this world?!

*Leave your comments and contact info here!♡Thanks

Who Are you? Who? Who? Who? Who? I REALLY want to know?

In my newest incarnation at a local museum, I am absolutely struggling to learn the art of telling people, primarily children, what looking at art is!

That the value of a person's own eyes (consciously) looking at what is called art, is a valuable act. Actively building on looking together, through facilitating each person speaking about what and how each one sees, in an organized, non-judgmental and encouraging manner, so as to empower the act of looking differently through shared conversation, what and how each person sees. Thereby, taking ownership of the art and the experience of looking_ together.

For example the current feature exhibit, outside of the many permanent, residency and visiting exhibits available to see at the museum_ is work of contemporary photographer, Chris Jordan. The exhibit of his work is titled: Running the Numbers.

*Watch the TED video of Chris' talk about why he does his photography, and notice non-judgmentally how you respond. Then, share it with friends and see how you all do!



I thought titling this post after the Who was appropriate. After all in light of this exhibit's message and mirror, who are we_ each one?!!



Then, some partial answers provoked by this particular exhibit's invitation to see deeply into one's own self, and one's own subsequent (lifelong) choices (in some cases), as documented and mirrored back to us by Chris Jordan's photography_ may for some, be found in these quotes that have recently crossed my own radar:

“I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.”

_ Don Delillo

“Love does truly come to those who still hope although they've been disappointed_ to those who still believe although they’ve been betrayed, to those who still choose to love

although they’ve been hurt before, and to those who have the courage to build trust again.” _ Paraphrased from Anonymous, posted to the Internet

Monday, February 14, 2011

Rediscovering Outstanding Women Pop Artists



*The following article as posted on artdaily.org

Christa Dichgans, Stilleben mit Frosch, 1969 © Christa Dichgans, Privatsammlung, Berlin.

VIENNA.- Rediscovering outstanding women Pop artists, POWER UP fulfills Dorothy Iannone’s combative promise after fifty years. Currently on display until March 6, 2011 at Kunsthalle wien, the show aims at the reinterpretation of an art movement that until today has primarily been associated with male protagonists. Plastic, loud colors, reduced forms, and graphic contours – the nine women artists’ works on display resemble those of their male colleagues in many respects.

Whereas their works appeal to the taste of the masses, these artists, as pioneers of Feminism, have remained belligerent and critical. They reveal the consumer culture’s superficiality, exposing the commodity myth as an empty shell like Christa Dichgans, ironically transforming everyday objects to oversized kitsch objects like Jann Haworth, or exploring mass media clichés and superstar constructions like Rosalyn Drexler. Like Sister Corita, a committed peace activist, they took a clear stand on the sixties’ social and political events such as the Vietnam War.

The exhibition pursues its political perspective in those instances where the era’s current notions of what a woman is are revised by different views: Kiki Kogelnik and Marisol describe the corset in which the representation of women by themselves and by others is caught, while Evelyne Axell or Dorothy Iannone provocatively display the nude body, love, and sexuality, and, like Niki de Saint Phalle, attract the viewer’s attention with sophisticated modes of self-presentation.

The next great moment in history is ours! - Dorothy Iannone

“We choose to LOOK at LIFE all the TIME, and though we realize that they are in one sense adult comic books, they are also full of things that speak…“ For Sister Corita, the world of signs, advertising slogans, and the culture of logos was not just some vast wasteland, but a sphere that supplied her with input for an art nourished by everyday life. Her work, like that of Evelyne Axell, Christa Dichgans, Rosalyn Drechsler, Jann Haworth, Dorothy Iannone, Kiki Kogelnik, Marisol, and Niki de Saint Phalle, stands for feminine strategies of artistic self empowerment during the Pop Art era, particularly in the 1960s. While from an art historical point of view Pop Art is mainly associated with male protagonists, POWER UP – Female Pop Art intends to undertake a revision of this understanding through the presentation of outstanding women artists’ positions.

Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, commodity cult and critique of capitalism, high and low art, the women artists’ works on display in many aspects resemble those by their male colleagues in terms of material, subject matter, style, and working method. Documenting and hypostatizing the prosperity of the postwar era and reflecting upon the superficiality of consumerism, the artists unmask the commodity myth as an empty civilizational achievement like Christa Dichgans or affirm certain items by turning them into oversized kitsch objects like Jann Haworth with her Soft Sculptures. Through the graphic character of their simple language of forms, their use of new materials like plastic, and their choice of garish colors, women pop artists, as feminist pioneers attracting maximum attention with their self presentations like Evelyne Axell, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Kiki Kogelnik, satisfied the taste of the mass and yet remained militant, critical, and exceptional. The exhibition does not postulate some genuinely feminine art, but strives to focus on a number of outstanding women artists’ oeuvres in the field of Pop Art and to shed light on their identity creating practice and their view of women’s role in society which was very much determined by patriarchal notions in the 1960s.

These artists’ approaches have revised the male regime of viewing and such representations of women as Tom Wesselmann’s deindividualized matrices of the female body, Mel Ramos’s picturesque fusion of advertisements with lasciviously rendered nudes featuring as objects of desire, and Allen Jones’s sadomasochistically arranged female sexual companions. Instead, they describe the corset in which women’s self representation and representation by others seemed to be caught in those years like Jann Haworth, Kiki Kogelnik, and Marisol, highlight the attempt to shake off the fetters of domestic life and become visible in public by means of art like Christa Dichgans, and provocatively expose the female body, love, and sexuality like Evelyne Axell and Dorothy Iannone. Painting over newspapers in an iconoclastic gesture, Rosalyn Drexler explores the creation of clichés and gender typifications in Hollywood films as well as the construction of superstars. Open toward the popular culture surrounding her, Sister Corita, in an early act of culture jamming, relied on advertising propaganda for creating new messages which were democratically and serigraphically produced and sold at a low price. Her works, like Kiki Kogelnik’s, Marisol’s, or Niki de Saint Phalle’s, comprise critical commentaries on contemporary events and political contexts such as the Vietnam War.

The ladies of the “Les Années" present strategies of self empowerment, celebrate female sexuality and lust, draw on pin ups, excerpts from consumer culture, and fragments of an occasionally very banal everyday world in a bad girl manner, comment upon social changes, and translate personal issues into political ones in their clearly autobiographically tinted oeuvres. Their proto feminist works counter the affective death of classical Pop Art and its cool and anonymous style. By also employing a traditional female language of forms, using textiles and ornamental elements, and relying on a naïve imagery, their approach idiosyncratically extends the established canon of art. What they share with this style is the humor and lightness of an attitude toward life whose facets and variations are still unfolding in today’s art.



Kunsthalle wien | Dorothy Iannone | POWER UP | Christa Dichgans | Vienna |