GODDESS COUNTRY VISIONS

Visionary Artists of Northern California

Foreword: Norman Stiegelmeyer and Jess Collins

Norman Stiegelmeyer was a Visionary Surrealist who died far too young, while his dream of bringing visionary art to the world was still in progress. Sandra has collected a memorium to Stiegelmeyer by talking to his students, friends, and his second wife, Ailene Sheriden, who is also included in this book. Many consider Stiegelmeyer a better administrator, teacher, and catalyst of visionary art than he was an artist in his own right, but wherever his major talent lay, he was instrumental in assisting the first visionaries in their quest for recognition. We think he would like the renewed interest in visionary art today, and the accomplishments his protegees have made, singly and together.

Norman Stiegelmeyer was loved and admired by many of our contributors, too many to name each of them. Ailene Sheridan holds his memory and his work in very high esteem.

"He was zany and whimsical, and I was very much drawn to that when I first met him. He was a Scorpio, very organized, and had the ability to organize other people. In fact his obituary called him the `father of visionary art'. I thought, `OK, how about Blake?', but it was fitting."

As far as visionary art on the west coast went, it certainly was true. He was an instructor at the San Francisco Art Institute, and his gentle influence was felt by many students. He had a respectful style when it came to critique, and never tried to force a student into a style that wasn't their own. Even more importantly, he organized shows, got people involved and just generally shared his profound dedication to artistic endeavor wherever he went.

He both painted and created three dimensional works; he wasn't limited as to style and that makes a concise description of his body of work difficult. Suffice it to say that it was frequently mystical, and those pieces I have seen seem to characterize the flow of life and spirit.

On a lighter note, which I can only hope Mr. Stiegelmeyer would appreciate, Lois Anderson told me he was a `hunk', sexy and charming. Others had said he was attractive, but not with the verve of Ms. Anderson. I gained a very clear image of a vibrant, amusing man it would have been a pleasure to know. Anyone she was attracted to would have possessed a strong sense of humor. It would be a mistake to solemnize such a person. I can picture him better now, entering a gallery, with many a female eye turned in his direction, and fully appreciating that fact. Which makes it seem hard that he left this world at the age of forty-seven, before Debora or I ever met him.

Jess Collins, now in his eighth decade on the planet is one of the foremost Surrealist visionaries of our time. Renowned long before the California visionary existed, during the 1950's he was an innovator in the collage technique. Due to his extremely reclusive nature and advanced age, we were unable to interview Collins, but Via Davis, one of the younger visionary surrealists, had him as mentor and teacher during her formative years as an artist.

Jess, known simply by his first name, was born Jess Collins in 1923, according to his official biography. The first major retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, in 1994. The following is excerpted from the show program:

The hermetic symbolism and meticulous craftsmanship that characterize the work of Jess is explored in Jess: a Grand Collage 1951-1993. Informed by a deep appreciation of myth, fantasy and allegory, Jess' work spans four decades and incorporates a wide variety of media. Using painting, drawing, and collage, Jess created works in groups: Paste-Ups are intricate collages; Translations are reproductions of photographs or engravings, or black-and-white reproductions; Salvages are repainted versions of the artist's earlier abstract and semi-figurative paintings, and of some discarded works by amateur artists.

General Introduction

The Illuminists

They call themselves The Illuminists, a term favored by gallery-owner Barbara Rogers for the first show at her Northern California gallery, Vision and Magick (August, 1992). They have also been called Visionary, fantasy artists and Cosmic Romantics. Their work is based on pagan and religious myth and the traditions of nature, and these artists are far from the ordinary. In a time when men are castigated as being insensitive and out of touch with their feelings, Richard Ward, Welton Rotz and Brian McGovern have managed to create a world of magic and light far removed from the mundane. Barbara Kahn and Josie Grant use the traditions of their Jewish heritage and their new beliefs in Buddhism and the Mother Goddess to create wondrous worlds of illusion and myth. Mark Henson uses nature and the ways in which man is misusing his world in order to create some strange and wonderful (sometimes horrifying) paintings of great magnitude. So much of art has become commercial and unreal, it seems almost otherworldly to see painting and sculpture that can capture the emotion and feeling of the world beyond the everyday.

Warren Percell is a `shamanistic' visionary, painting and recording the myths and legends of the American Indian peoples. Jeffrey Bedrick and Kevin Kihn represent the newest generation of the Illuminists, who combine traditional myths with the technology and fantasy of the modern world, venturing into the realm of SuperHeroes and Heroines, and Science Fiction.

San Francisco native Richard Ward studied at the California School of Art, the Jean Turner School of Commercial Art, and The Chicago Institute. In addition to Fantasy art, Ward is a renowned Plein-air painter, and attributes his amazing ability in portraying the `other world' to having viewed its' inhabitants for so many years.

Sculptor Welton Rotz came to the bay area in 1963 to attend San Francisco Theological Seminary, where he soon abandoned his graduate work in favor of sculpting. Now a professed lover of the `Great Earth Mother', Rotz uses mythological subjects for many of his marble sculptures. He studied Celtic mythology in Ireland and the working of marble in Italy.

Brian McGovern began his professional career at the age of twelve, when one of his paintings won a competition in a local mall and sold the same day. McGovern , who died in 1994 before he reached his fortieth birthday, considered his style of painting Cosmic Romanticism, and Sandra commented that The Illuminists `have a love affair with the universe'. McGovern's murals can be seen in the AT&T building in San Francisco; Harvey's Lake Tahoe; and in the Old Main Street Saloon in Sebastopol, California.

One of California's first visionary painters, Barbara Kahn has been a professional artist for thirty years, since her graduation from The Rhode Island School of Design at the age of 21. Her fantasy paintings are drawn from visions and dreams, executed in watercolor and acrylic on canvas. Her subjects are strongly metaphysical and oriented towards the female principle in all of us.

Marin County artist Josie Grant is a well-known muralist, part of the Street Artist Advisory Board in San Francisco. Before she was thirteen, Grant had already won international poster awards from the Lathem Foundation, and at fifteen she began college-level courses at The San Francisco Art Institute.

Warren Percell started out as a commercial artist, but his scope in the realm of fine arts, on which he has concentrated for the past ten years, is remarkable. It is his marine paintings and 'Shaman Women' that place him in the realm of the Illuminists, the latter in particular showing another view of the wild beauty of the Southwest.

Mark Henson paints beautiful, erotic scenes of people who are frequently part of the landscape around them. He also paints beautiful, frightening pictures of technology and ecology run amok, set askew by man and rampaging over Mother Earth until she looks like a holocaust scenario.

Jeffrey K. Bedrick is the youngest of the Illuminists, younger than Brian McGovern by five years. His background is an extraordinary one, studying with the visionary masters from the time he was a boy and beginning his career while still in his teens. He has something to say about visionary art and some artists who categorize themselves as visionaries:

"Gustave Klimt and some artists like him were called visionaries during the 1920's, but the true meaning of the word has to do with art that's inspired by a vision. Almost a religious vision, a revelation. A lot of the artists who claim to be visionary can be very pretentious. They claim to have had some kind of a revelation, when all it really is is a unicorn in a poppy field."

Kevin Kihn is the gentlest of the Illuminists, in that Brian McGovern and Mark Henson ventured over into the realm of horror with some of their work, mostly meant as a commentary on our world. Kihn draws his alien landscapes as escapes from that world, and they are ultimately peaceful and soothing, while bizarre and other-worldly. His 'globe' process draws the viewer into the work and makes him/her a part of the whole.

The Goddess as Art

The tradition is older than written history, and though suppressed for many years by patriarchal societies and religions, art inspired by goddess-traditions is enjoying a resurgence in the Western world. Revived by men and women tired of the rape of the planet, overpopulation and the repressive nature of traditional religions, goddess-inspired art exists in many forms. The second show at the Vision and Magick gallery (November, 1993) was a menage of multi-cultural art, inspired by and based on goddess traditions the world over. 'Adorning the Goddess' continued Barbara Rogers' work, begun with 'The Illuminists', in presenting the unusual, beautiful, and magical in art. Multi-media artists Motik, Katya, Joslin and Pamella Nesbit (along with Illuminist painters Barbara Kahn and Josie Grant) put together a fabulous presentation of clothing, jewelry, paintings and sculptures incorporating their favorite theme.

Motik's name is Hebrew, but her ancestry combines Christian, Hebrew and Arab roots. Among her ancestors were many who strayed from the accepted path to follow that of Wicca, the Old Religion. each of her paintings is of a different goddess archetype, and also included in the show were her exclusive `goddess silhouettes' painted on wood.

Jewelry designer Katya works in sterling silver and gemstones, and also comes from a Hebrew tradition. Katya was trained as a Metalsmith at the University of California, Berkeley (something students can no longer do, she points out, since the Reagan budget cuts), and has been a professional artist for twenty years. Abby Willowroot was the first contemporary Goddess jeweler in America. In the late 1960's and 1970's she designed Goddess Jewelry with Crolyn Whitehorn and M'lou Brubaker. She created and directed the Goddess Project, that had over 20,000 folks making Goddess Art in 52 countries.

Marin artist Joslin designs kimonos to `make a woman feel like a goddess' and woven necklaces to compliment her creations. Her paintings are water-color flowers in vibrant colors, or shadowed women who fit well with their landscape.

Sonoma County fabric artist Pamella Nesbit has been doing fabric art for twenty years. It was while traveling around the world with her husband, during the early 1970's, that she began her fabric art. She designs tapestries and `shields'.

Beth Ann Watt lives and works in the little town of Sonoma. She works in oil paint and achieves great fluidity in a style that she describes as `organic'. By this she means that many of the shapes in her paintings are reminiscent of the inner organs of the physical body. She celebrates the goddess in all of us.

Jane Sipe and her now-renowned Jane Iris Designs take the jewelry of the Goddess (many aspects of her, actually) all over the world, where they are well-received. The designs are simple, and sleek, and pleasing to the eye. And Jane employs a team of women at her Sebastopol studio, making her one of the most successful of the visionary designers.

Lois Anderson makes art out of what many people would consider junk, though she is by no means a 'junk' artist. She is rather an embellishment artist, who celebrates the goddess and all religions with her works and icons. She received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1978 for her largest and most famous work, 'Altar'.

The Transformatives

They transform the world from the mundane to the delightful, the bizarre and unusual. The Transformatives see reality differently, as if they were peering through a transparent Kaleidoscope or into another dimension. Bonnie Bisbee and Cynthia Grace work on a grand scale, in bright, primitive colors. Their people may be riding unicorns or sitting by purple waterfalls -- they evoke the child in all of us, longing for a gayer, brighter world.

Ceramic sculptor Victoria Whitehand uses animals and the symbology of Eastern myth and religion in her delightful figures. Marilyn Watkins paints `healing' images of nature, animals and angels -- she particularly favors black angels, which she uses as symbols of great healing power. Both began their careers in other areas totally unrelated to art, but were drawn to create, taken over by their art until they finally devoted themselves to it.

Bronze sculptor Ron Rodgers is unusual in that he creates works of astonishing beauty and amazing eclecticism. His life-sized bronzes grace shopping centers, hotels and corporate buildings all over the world. His smaller `fractured' bronzes show his own vision of transforming reality into a series of fragmented and twisted images which are still somehow empathetic.

Linda Ross Larson is part of the new generation of California visionaries, working in different media and attempting to give their paintings and creations a strange, otherworldly appeal.

Ailene Sheridan of Petaluma works in a variety of mediums - oils, pastels, pen and ink and much more. Her series `Ballcarrier and Beast' is a monotype pastel - an intriguing type of print. When we talk of a mixed-media artist, Ailene is what we mean. She's even managed to find a use for dryer dust ...

Bill Martin is the most commercially successful of the early visionaries, and it is easy to see why. His paintings are calm, and soothing, but at the same time they are miracles of adaption...using nature as we see it all around us, he adds another ingredient so it is like stepping through a gateway into another dimension, one a few degrees off from ours.

Christine DeCamp is a painter and sculpture who captures the wimsical and magical in her work, through the use of bright colors, primitive images and more than a little tongue-in-cheek humor. From her life-sized mermaid sculpture complete with a necklace of beads to her 'under the ocean chair', it's certain that a piece of Christine's art in your house will become a starter of stimulating conversations.

The Surrealists

The original Surrealists believed that art, like life, should reflect ugliness and chaos. Visionary Surrealists certainly believe in the last part of that dictum, though nobody could say they create anything ugly. Unusual, certainly -- bizarre, probably. But beautiful? Definitely.

Sharyn Desideri is a woman who wishes she had been born a dragon (or perhaps remembers that she was one, in another life). She brings a sense of the `other' to everything she creates. These include paintings and sculptures, and some other pieces that are difficult to define. Mostly self-taught, she inhabits her own private Twilight Zone that produces some curious and awe-inspiring art.

Caroline Ferris is one of the artists who illustrated Timothy Leary's 1994 book, Cyberpleasures and Politics. Her early work comprised what she terms her `mosaics', paintings consisting of people, animals, even landscapes done in a mosaic of colors that boggled the mind and the imagination. Ferris turned in a slightly different direction in 1994, beginning a series of surrealistic erotic paintings.

Collage is Via Davis' form, and her work brings new depth to the art form. The images have more to say and the viewer is more involved than is usual with the form. It's hard to say how she does it, but somehow it is easy to get lost in her collages.

Gage Taylor was one of the best-known of the early visionaries, one of the same group as Martin, Watt, Kahn, Grant...you get the idea. Known for his surrealistic landscapes during the 1970's; when he met ex-wife Uriel Dana his whole perspective changed, and Taylor/Dana art, while still in the school of Visionary Surrealism, was something rich and rare, and changed slightly with each new series.

Uriel Dana began her professional life as an engineer, and saw Gage Taylor's work before she ever met him. He was her inspiration as an artist, and her husband for ten years. Though now divorced, they continue as good friends. Her solo work has gone more in a Goddess-central direction.

Paul Nicholson leans more towards the Surrealistic side of visionary than some of the other artists we've interviewed, and is a definite crossover in the fantasy vein. Living in the woods of Sonoma County, Nicholson incorporates many of the commercial and mundane symbols of everyday life in the 1990's into his work, and somehow makes them all seem fantastic in the extreme.

Dario Campinile is a native of Italy, transplanted to California in his early twenties. He painted the incredible new logo for Paramount Pictures -- check it out next time you see one of their movies. The surrealistic element is evident, but perhaps more subtle than some of his other, less commercial work.

Clayton Anderson is also a transplant to California, first from Louisville, Kentucky and then from Philadelphia, where he first made his name. Much of his work is more in the line of Abstract Surrealism than any of our other artists, but it still has the rich, evocative content and texture needed for a true visionary.

A discussion of psychedelic and surrealist visionary art (and, some would argue, all visionary art) wouldn't be complete without the mention of drugs and the role they played in the process of the early visionaries. Josie Grant discusses this ...

"I think it's important to mention the use of psychedelics in the visionary process. Although I myself limited its' use to say once a year or so, I would use something to look at my paintings and to become closer to the spirit and the god/goddess source. I had very gracious connections, so I never had a `bad' trip, as it were ... but I must emphasize that I believe my paintings as well as those of my contemporaries, if not all art are really in a state of frozen animation, and truly take on a life of their own when the doors of perception are opened with the use of psychedelics.

I believe that these tools, when used by people of conscience, opened up a beautiful and spiritual reality, and that we as painters are putting these feelings of vision through the palette into a material realm.

This is important to explore and document in terms of `visionary' art, and here is where the argument between `drug' induced or `alcohol' induced art (as in the abstractionists) came into play in the graduate seminars (at The Art Institute during the 1960's)."