“Cluster” my first veil painting,  2013 14×17”

From my children being students in Waldorf Schools, I was introduced to the outer expression of spirit through exploring the slowly revelatory practice of Veil Painting.

I’ve been instructed and inspired by many teachers, both regional and global, Pamela Whitman, of CA, among them:

“Veil painting involves …successive washes of transparent watercolor….[where] each wash, or veil, must dry before painting another one in the same area.”

General Principles, excerpted

“The first stage of painting is to create a color atmosphere that is in dynamic movement, creating what Collot d’Herbois refers to as a transparent color space. Light, space, and movement are the essential ingredients of a successful veil painting. She emphasized this idea that behind all color is movement, and as Rudolf Steiner notes, ‘Form is movement come to rest.’ Form emerges out of the color in the late stages of a painting. 

-Movement:  transformation, one thing becoming another. This can be achieved through building up veils that create gradation, metamorphosis and openings in our picture.

-Gradation:  change in value from lighter to darker; change of hue; change of tint, tone, or shade; dull to bright; hard to soft to diffuse edge; metamorphosis depending on what’s around it.”

From Pamela Whitman, Fundamentals of Veil Painting

-Leave openings in or between washes, or change the contours to “see through” to other colors, especially in the beginning stages of a painting–this adds transparency and creates a feeling of depth. Overlapping portions of openings helps maintain some lighter areas as we build up color intensity.”

-The archetype is in light, color, and darkness, not in shapes. We sense spirit through light, space, and movement. We don’t go into the soul/spiritual world through form, but through color. Through movement, color leads us to imagination. We go from moving color to gesture to form.

Pamela’s website, including info on Liane Collot d’Herbois:  https://www.lightcoloranddarkness.org/

Portland Workshop:  https://thearthall.wordpress.com/2016/03/20/pamela-whitman-opening-and-weekend-workshop/

Liane Collot d’Herbois, Color, Part 1:

“One began a picture with an already completed concept, a form was ‘thought out’ and the form was then colored.

This was done at a time when the accepted path to the worlds of spirit was through feeling, as expressed in the mystics and in the monastic orders of the medieval centuries…”

“Today the process is reversed, through the step which is taking place–and has already taken place–in our inner theatre. This same path can be pursued in the full light of our consciousness based on our thinking, whereby through recognition of the laws of light, darkness and color, these laws lend themselves as instruments to the hands of human beings to be used again, through them, in the process of creation.”

“Therefore today painting can take part in a process of becoming through the building up, veil by veil, in accordance with the all pervading enlightening laws of light and the impulse of darkness:  a spiritual experience , and of moving color:  a soul experience.”

“And in the daily painting-exercise it all comes together:  the concentration of the waking consciousness of the head, the thinking of colour that is in the heart and the act of will that is the actual activity of painting. Painting in veils is then a very useful technique:  one works at a picture from day to day and so one is able to take it with oneself into the night where the colours work deeper into one’s being. And so painting becomes more and more an activity in which the spirit is involved.”

This is brought about not merely through a process of subjective suggestion, but through our conscious intention, utilizing our understanding of the properties of color to achieve our aims for the painting. Paintings based on the laws of light, color, and darkness can have a therapeutic effect on the viewer, as well as the painter, nourishing the soul and enlivening the spirit through the reflection of cosmic laws in the human being.”

CONTAINERS SERIES

Inspired by the full physical and spiritual experiences of my prenatal motherhood toward birthing.

VESSEL-

Standing upright, curving from an open top to a capacious center down to a balanced base:  

the vessel is likened to an inverted womb. The state of pregnancy, of potentiality, whether mammal or plant.

Surrounding the form are layers of blue-violet signifying the spiritual realm holding the vessel protectively.

The center is green, of growth and  the heart chakra. Reddened browns of earth feed the lighter green areas.

While mostly in a firm stillness with hard edges, there is an internal energy coiling up and out the top. 

DANCE-

With its golden ovoid center, edges of layered colors are softened, creating a form in graceful movement.

Again the presence of the spiritual swirls around the form, supportive of the overall transformation.

Here we witness the progression of growth, its tipping and twisting akin to a dancer’s spin.

BLOOM-

Birthing from one internalized state, transitioning into the external, the form reaches a point of culmination.

Colors of earth, of blood, are met with green areas that gather as a pool of light surrounding a flower pod lifted upward. A stream of yellow comes forth from it to combine into the air just outside itself and breathe.

ELEMENTS SERIES

The five physical elements of metal, water, wood, fire, and air mix with their own essences. 

MOUNTAIN SKY EXCHANGE-

The symbiotic relationship of earth consolidated into a mountain overlaid by the etheric forces of air and light. Solidity and the vaporous, interplaying, seen and unseen.

CRYSTALS-

Under myriad conditions, fluids can become a wide range of crystalline solids. Forming from essences into periodic arrangements, the mineral kingdom presents itself as complex and multifaceted, both grouped and individuated.

RISE-

Fire felt as elemental beings, drawn up into the green ethers of the outer flame, while being fed by the wood element below. The warm reds from the bottom left corner rise towards the upper right in urgency to be released into the air.

GROWTH SERIES

From their small scale, seed forms yet stunningly contain components of vast universal knowledge.

SEEDS-

Here the warmth of the earth holds two seeds angling towards the light that’s gathering on the earth’s surface. The third seed, while partially held like the others, has not yet found its way to source as directly. 

DEBUT-

Prior quietude is replaced with the dynamic turmoil of all elements enlivened at once, each pressing upon the other to show as a one orchestrated force.

BURST-

A golden seed has released into the earth its winding main root and then into the air the first of its leaves.

Usually more sequential, here these initial actions are shown simultaneously, as in Debut, but gentler.

Quick Bio: MJCD is an internationally collected mixed media artist specializing in collage.