Wow, you know, you can find some really heavy stuff in the art world when you search a little. That photo is Hilma af Klint, born in Sweden in 1862, painter of portraits and traditional-style landscapes by which she made a living. She never married and never had children, but produced an entire body of art that’s really mind-blowing to study. She also hid many of her special paintings, insisting that her work remain almost unknown until twenty years after her death.
This was because she felt her transcendental paintings were so far out, most people (and especially the art critics, I’ll add as my personal opinion) wouldn’t understand them or the messages she was trying to make clear to the world.
You can find documentaries on this unique woman painter on YouTube. (And I’m going to be searching out as many as I can find. Her work is beyond cool.) She painted many works which were finally starting to be shown in exhibitions in 1968, and these are the paintings and drawings which she felt were influenced by otherworldly factors. She was a believer in Theosophy (the spiritualist group which included Thomas Edison and Arthur Conan Doyle which states that at their core, all religions of the world share a common base) and she firmly believed her works came from a place beyond what her own mind could conceive.
Heavy, yeah. But that also makes me wonder if her creativity helped her reach that deep place within all of us artists which we look for as inspiration and like, maybe, soul?
I’m setting a little time aside to research as many women artists as I can find bios on, because there’s a whole world out there of work that most of us have never seen or heard of. Like Mary Cassatt, who I wrote about in one of my blogs.
So join me in exploring this topic? Hey, it’s not homework, you know. But it’ll rev up your brain. – A.R. Tist