Beyond the surface, inside a painter's process
I had the idea of stretching portraits a few years ago, when I was in a very demanding place in my life. I literally felt like I was being pulled towards something, like I was stretching myself to achieve my goals. Imagery and ideas pop into my mind all the time. I never have trouble finding material to paint about, rather it’s choosing which idea to bring to fruition. Yoga and guided meditation often create pretty, fantastical landscapes in my mind. Sometimes initiating bizarre, Salvador Dali meets Alex Grey-like landscapes or completely strange, almost comical ideas. When teachers say things like “imagine a point of light going through your entire body”, in an artist's mind, this sentence alone creates some pretty wild places to explore. It was in learning how to strengthen my inversion practice that the image of a human portrait being stretched, popped into my mind. I created 2 smaller oil paintings about it and continued to evolve the concept.
Original oil painting available for purchase
“Stretch in the Light”
16 “ x 30” Kelsey Anne Heimerman
Executed in 2018
After my recent trip to the southwest, exploring Santa Fe and the Canyons in that region of the United States, I fell in love with this idea of canyons, caves, and deserts as metaphorical spaces within us. They are not what they seem, teeming with life, with quietness, expansiveness and majesty. This idea of canyons as inversions of mountains fell right in line with the stretching of the self and was a perfect parallel to an inversion yoga practice. Mother earth, she is the most magnificent sculptor. Using water, wind and time as her tools she creates the most stunning landscapes. Taking billions of years to perfect her masterpiece. Vast stretches of land that have been worn, stretched, pulled, eroded, collapsed, built up, and sculpted into divine perfection. Her knife slaying our eyes with beauty as the wind and water cuts into itself to reveal layers upon layers of form, color and texture that has long inspired and commanded great artist, poets and musicians for what seems to be all of time. Her marks resemble a scar, the earth being windswept and cut into… creating gorges and canyons where her superlative, omnipotent interior is revealed.
Much like the way humans become scared… physically, emotionally, and spiritually. It is the growth that forms as we heal. Sometimes those scars are what help us grow and transform the most. They become reminders of where we have been and where we are going. They are the imperfections that give us our admirable, flawless individuality and strength. We often keep our most personal, yet exalted parts of ourselves deep with in our own interior. Life becomes a process of uncovering the self, diving inward deeper and deeper to experience the large expansiveness of who and what we are. It's all a metaphor. We are these beings carved, eroded, corroded, destroyed, consumed, re built, defined, refined, masterfully formed and sculpted by our reality, our choices, our environments and ultimately if we can master it… ourselves. We are a part of nature although society often makes us feel separate from it. We are one with nature even though society is brutal to it.
After working on this split portrait and landscape for about a month, I had to tackle the background. I had several ideas passing through my mind… a night sky, a gradient, all blue, some sacred geometry and so I created some test pieces. In dealing with small bouts of anxiety about the state of the world due to the Covid 19 virus, I wanted to make something free. I wanted a radical and energetic approach. So, I made one giant solid blue line, a swirling motion of my own movement, creating a net… to hold it all.
(Detail) of Kelsey Anne Heimerman’s
Canyon in the Mind
The background is created by one mark. It is one moment in my historical life recorded. It is a net of ideas, catching all the pieces of color and gold. It is the connectivity that I see within everything and everyone. It is the integration of chaos and order. It is the line where everything can exist in harmony. It is intuitive, free flowing, mark making in the vein of some of my favorite abstract expressionist artists Cy Twombly, Mark Bradford, and those involved in the Japanese Gutai movement. Later after creating this background and 2 other large abstracts that are still ongoing in the studio, I stumbled upon an article from the New York Times from 2017. An artist new to me who has created works doing this same method. The female Turkish painter Zeid Fahrelnissa whose painting sold in the Sotheby’s auction house for 999,750.00 Euros.
Perhaps this is a sign of collective consciousness… or the tapping into the willingness to be free and expressive. The mark contains circles within circles, within circles, mimicking the sacred geometry that is the arc of the creator’s individual motion. The initial market a defining, captivated moment and the filing in becomes a slow, dedicated , meticulous practice of meditation.It is finding order within chaos and realizing that the chaos is actually order to it all.
Fahrelnissa Zeid
TOWARDS A SKY
oil on canvas
593 by 201cm.; 233 1/8 by 79in.
Executed in 1953.