Shelli Renée Joye

“Energy Is Eternal Delight” ~ William Blake

“Egyptians, even at the highest point of the evolution of their culture, kept a primordial magical relationship to matter. All chemical substances were divine, they even were the gods.”
~ Marie-Louise von Franz, “Psyche and Matter in Alchemy and Modern Science”, p. 147, (1988: Boston)

When paintings come alive they are truth and the truth is a form of beauty and the beauty a form of truth, as Keats says:
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'
‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’

Painting is to me as mysterious and magical an act as it was to the painters in the caves of Altamira and Lascaux at the end of the last ice age 14,000 years ago, and I approach it reverently and organically. I often begin a new painting under a full moon. While wet, a painting is an animated creature that changes every moment, needs coaxing and attention, interaction and communion. If everything is right, the process of painting becomes a doorway to the heart of things, and if I’m able to get my linear spacetime-mind out of the way, I can see and feel creation flowing through the heart of matter, water, colors and the texture of the materials that are brought into play together on the canvas. Painting is dancing with the living energy of matter. Observing wet colors, the iridescent textures flow and mix feels like I am viewing archetypes of creation revealing the birth of a cosmos. Painting, for me, is an alchemical art, a transformative process, an energy dance of the gods.

I believe paint is alive and that the paintings they create become new life, not plant life, not meat life, but spiritual life, consciousness. I am a panpsychist and I feel the life and awareness of the colors, sense life in each and every dancing molecule and vibration of the paint, so alive that it interacts directly with our deepest neuronal systems. Through this resonance between the consciousness of the creator and that being created, paintings become continuations of the dance of liquid colors, the liquid mind of the artist, and the planet in time, space, and the hidden dimensions that revolve and vibrate at the boundary between the still point and eternity.

For over forty years I have been dancing on this planet with paint on canvas, linen and wood, ever searching for the still point around which we all circle. My early influences began with Kandinsky, then Pollock, eventually moving toward the flowing paintings of Georgia O’Keefe and Morris Lewis.

“At the still point of the turning world… there the dance is…
Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”
~ ‘Burnt Norton’, T.S. Eliot

Painting is also an act of co-creation between the personal and the transpersonal, the heart of the human and the wider bandwidth of the noosphere, the co-creating artist and the All; the spirit enters and energizes the material that become the painting (see Neuman’s book, Art and the Creative Unconscious). At numinous moments of integration I become a brush in the hand of God, working with Gaia in time and history, both of us working as midwives over the painting artifact through the intensity of flowing fragments in a historical process: an act during which the dynamic of material energies becomes slowly fixed into the painting-become-artifact, which then goes out into the world, birthed.

I’ve always done my paintings horizontally, usually on the floor or on wooden blocks, providing three dimensional surfaces for the paint to flow by inserting objects in various places beneath the unstretched canvas, coaxing the flow into organic patterns, much as the living earth creates geologic patterns, and I use heat lamps and warm air and directional electric fans to evoke evaporation patterns and crystalline shapes from the seas of color. I control the viscosity of the paint with organic and inorganic chemicals, both natural and industrial.

My painting is a geologically dynamized dance upon the canvas: colors, textures, myself and my own history and culture and technology and the living forces of gravity, heat, time, and light, weaving together into ever new possibilities of reality. Gravity is my paintbrush which I share with the living spirit of the paint, working through the flow of time and dipping into the various viscosities of color material to mix along geologically mirrored boundaries. Watching and influencing the effects of the changes in a painting as the materials spread, dry or coalesce reminds me of things I’ve seen on a grander scale in the Grand Canyon from an airplane, or in close up photos of the Moon or Mercury.

To me, the heart of painting is pure experience within the contemplative mystery, both for the painter and the artist: it is a revelation of the great Cosmos, a sacred threefold fusion of Color and Form and Spirit, embedded in my own awareness and past memories and growing with power with each future encounter of others coming into visual proximity to the paintings. The search for this pure experience has led me to explore deeply traditional and non-traditional contemplative practices with the intent of deepening my contact with the sources of creation and with painting itself. In some real way the process of meditation is similar to the process of painting: one is reaching out into the silence and moving beyond previous limits to reach the vast mysteries of the Other.