projects

Blue Sky Prayer Flags

“The blue sky flags were dreamed and imagined several years ago, and evolved through many proto-types, but took their present form after this Half Moon Bay artist spent a seemingly unrelenting 35 foggy summer days at home following a back injury. As one grey day followed another, i yearned for blue skies, and yearned to create again. Unable to travel, or even to paint in her studio, i started making art again with her personal trove of blue sky photos. i’d been “collecting” blue sky images for several years, by taking photos of amazing “found” skies wherever i roamed. The first pieces i made were hung in my house to cheer me up.

The flags exist not only as a personal prayer for blue skies, but are also made as an offering—a way of giving beauty back to the winds and the sky.

The first cloud flags to float were artists’ prints made as giclées on chiffon a few years ago. The images were so subtle that i ended up hanging them 3-deep, one in front of the other, to achieve depth and a sense of movement as the delicate cloth shifted and wafted.

The next versions were printed on paper, which were torn on the edges and hung on sticks as sky ladders. Along the way, i did an installation of large scale paper clouds in Pt. Townsend, WA, in the summer of 2012. These were, as always, a prayer for blue skies.

 The first evolution of the flags on cloth were 10”x10” each, custom printed in San Francisco on silk, and sewed to a cotton ribbon in sets of 12. The images were prints from original digital photos i continue to take of the Northern California skies, hanging inside or outside, and were meant to be ultimately composted—to send their message out to the winds and back to the earth.

Heart spiral: an on-going journey

“I encountered the original heart spiral diagram while researching energy spirals in the body. Smitten with the form, which felt so accurate to me for how the heart relentlessly drives itself and cycles lifeforce through the body, I began working on creating a painted version of the diagram, playing with ways to get the heart spiral effectively onto canvas.

The first version I painted was 20” x 20”, acrylic, essentially torso-size, intimate, but not tiny. The colors I intuitively mixed up and used were the same colors I’ve since dubbed ‘the color of love’—rose pinks, plums, violet. I painted a second version of the heart spiral shortly after the first one that was smaller, 12” x 12”, and brought it to the hospital, where my mother lay dying. I hoped it would give her some peace or a moment of “ahhh,” or maybe help her feel loved when none of her family were present. It seemed that the heart spiral could BE love, in form, and hold that energy in her room. She died in great pain within days, and I took the painting back home, broken-hearted. Its function had been set though, and I subsequently used it in a number of other healing spaces.

Over the next few years, my sister-friend Dayna and I began making prints of the pink heart spiral on cards and shirts, and even on prayer flags. The heart spiral became a powerful healing and meditation tool for ourselves and others.

In 2010, Dayna and her husband Scott birthed a second daughter, who was diagnosed at 3 months with a congenital heart defect that ultimately led to 9 months in the I.C.U., and a heart transplant. The anguished and overwhelmed parents hung a print of the heart spiral in baby Dyllan’s room at Stanford Hospital, above the altar they kept there. That heart spiral symbolized their hope and love, and set a tone in the room that was palpable (along with other images and their on-going intentions for healing). To this day, there is a large canvas copy of the heart spiral hanging in the pediatric cardiac ward at Stanford hospital. (11 operations later, they finally brought their daughter home.)

Recently a whole new dimension of the heart spiral saga has unfolded for me. In the last year, I painted a green version of the heart spiral, on a 20”x20” canvas square, mainly because I needed it for my own healing. I wanted to be with whatever was in my heart, deep within, and let go of whatever was toxic, fearful, unhelpful. I wanted to love what I could, and let go of what I could not.

in the Fall of 2019, I spontaneously started breathing the heart spiral into and through me, and found it entering my consciousness in various different color realms—buttery yellow, sky blue, chocolate brown, cinnamon red, vanilla white—and then it morphed into a giant pure energy multi-dimensional archetypal form—macro-sized, going out into space forever, and micro-sized, drilling into my system to an atomic level. This wonderful, nourishing, mind-blowing experience prompted me to start working with the heart spiral form in a much more expanded way—it was a whole new relationship with this archetypal form.

i began visualizing myself standing in the center of the form: it was a cosmic presence--a vast universal archetype in manifest form. I then made a dark blue heart spiral as a meditation mat, 5’ across so I could work with it somatically, and meditate sitting next to or in it. a group of dear friends and I began meditating with it, and using it as a healing doorway for ourselves and others. My years of painting and meditation with other ancient geometric forms has taught me that such images, maps really, carry specific vibrational fields of energy and knowledge, that we can bring into our bodies with breath and intention. This was no different. many other versions of the heart spiral have followed, in all the colors of the rainbow, and I’ve been since leading meditations with the heart spiral on zoom, and in video form on Youtube.

Those of us who have been working with the heart spiral doorway so far have come to a number of understandings:

• It’s a light bridge: A luminous lattice of light, a 5th dimensional presence • It’s a generative, sustainable, resilient form of love (with wisdom) • It’s infinitely looping love-light—with no beginning, and no end.

to purchase prints of the heart spirals, please go to the sales page

Murals as change agents

I have always loved murals and wall graphics, which is not surprising, given my love of painting, I suppose. The idea of vast expanses of any building being transformed by paint and story simply delights me, whether it’s a New Deal mural on a San Francisco landmark, or section of wall in an alley, vestiges of storytelling on an ancient Roman wall, or wild critters created by kids on their school. A mural is by nature impermanent, because it is just a thin layer of fadable, chip-able paint on a wall, and it is loud and huge and out there for all to see. A mural is larger than life, larger than humans, and often collaborative. They are often playful even when they are serious, and transforms human dwellings or rock walls into canvases. I love them.

The murals that I have collaborated on or directed have almost always come about because a change was needed, or healing needed to happen, or ugliness needed to be transformed, in one way or another. I’ve never actually been looking to make a mural. They just seem to happen. And paint is actually a very economical method for achieving change.

Sometimes it was because a friend needing cheering up—we created full-wall murals on three stucco walls surrounding her patio—all in service to creating joy and an on-going project during a time of deep depressions caused by an on-going physical crisis.

Sometimes it was because a friend had a space outdoors that was calling to me—a super-graphic would beckon my potter-friend’s buyers into his pottery gallery, wooing them down the small-town alley to see what was behind the painting on the door.

In my years working with teenagers, 4 different projects enlivened immense yardage of depressing surfaces in institutional buildings: dark corridors in basements, giant ugly fences, inexplicably bleak light-blocking walls—all were transformed into dynamic and beautiful spaces that became destinations, instead of forgotten corners.