Nancy Wait

Talks about her book, and about being an artist and a writer

RSS

Cosmic Portraits  

The idea for this kind of portrait came to me early last spring right after my Spirit Fire Ceremony on the Gold Ring, which was a journey, a process, and an opportunity to be in deeper contact with my higher self and my creativity.  I was calling them Galactic Portraits then.  I hadn’t actually done any yet, but when I thought of doing them, I pictured a physical likeness, and maybe two different shots of the same person on the canvas, one in the present, and one in the past.  I was looking for something that would represent the whole person rather than a snapshot in time.  The higher self along with the physical self.  That part of us that is connected in Oneness with the Universe and with universal energies.

My first subject was to be my dear friend Mariette Bermowitz, a woman I have known for many years and share a birthday with.  I took photographs of her with the portrait in mind. Then other projects came up, and I never seemed to get around to the Galactic Portrait I had planned of Mariette, even though I had bought a canvas specifically for it.

I wasn’t ready.

Yet these things have a strange way of working themselves out.  It seems that my first Galactic Portrait wasn’t to be of Mariette but of MissMagikal, a singer-songwriter and musician I know on the Gold Ring and have never met in person.  For some reason, I can’t remember why, I suddenly told her I wanted to paint her portrait and asked her to send me a picture to work from.  This she did.  And still nothing happened.

I know myself well enough by now to know that I have to be ready to work on something. It’s one thing to have the idea, another thing to actually be ready to carry it out on the physical plane.  I know the value of waiting.  But not waiting too long.  Just being ready.  It’s like being a hunter who waits and waits in the bushes.  He waits in readiness.  He never loses his focus.  And when his prey appears, he is ready to strike.

That’s what I’m like.  One day a few weeks ago I was suddenly ready to paint MissMagikal.  The painting went very quickly.  It almost shocked me how easy it was to paint her.  I worked with watercolor and colored pencils.  The only problem was that the photo she sent me was cropped, showing only part of her hair and nothing of her shoulders.  She was with another woman in the photo, and by the time I cut the other woman out, there was very little left of MissMagikal except for her face and neck and one side of her hair.

I decided not to let this stand in my way.  I thought I’d play with her hair, her little yellow cap, and make something of it.  What evolved and developed was an elaborate kind of head-dress that resembled a crown or a halo, which led me to further explore in color the empty side of the paper where there was no hair or anything else of her to go on.  Why not just go with color, I thought?  So I did.  And what emerged was a picture of energy streams moving out from her head, suggesting the aura.
Do I see auras?  Yes, from time to time.  Did I see MissMagikal’s aura?  No, not consciously.  But I’m sure I felt it.  I know that I picked it up subconsciously.  Because there was a singular lack of doubt while I was painting, as if the colors just painted themselves.  I know enough to let my hand go, letting the brush do what it wants.  I trust the brush.  The brush has a mind of its own.  It tends to move very quickly.  It knows what it wants, knows what it’s going for.  I remain the bystander, the observer, watching what it does.

The portrait went so well that I was now prepared to tackle Mariette’s.  By now I was calling them Cosmic Portraits, after hearing Magenta Pixie use that term on Face Book where the portrait was now posted.  Cosmic.  I liked that much better than Galactic somehow.  It suggested something smaller, less grandiose than Galactic.  It was a concept, a term that made painting these portraits easier and simpler.

When I paint a portrait, whether it is from life or from a photograph (and they have all been from photographs in recent years – all except for when I first started painting really),  I pick up the person’s energy.  I feel them.  Sensing them in ways I’m usually not aware of in ordinary life, though I certainly am feeling people all the time.  Painting a portrait is an intimate act.  It’s a step into a person’s psyche, into their emotional body, along with studying the planes of their face, the hairline and length of nose, etc.

I loved this photograph of Mariette.  She looks into the future calmly, bravely.  She looks like a survivor, above all else, and this she is.  Mariette lived through the Holocaust.  She was one of the Hidden Children, as they are known to be called.  She was in Belgium, taken in first by the nuns, and then by the sisters of one of the nuns when the convent proved too dangerous.  Mariette spent the war in the countryside, and was witness to the Battle of the Bulge towards the end of the war.  Her mother and four siblings were sent to the camps where they perished, but she survived, along with her father.  She has written a beautiful memoir about her life called “Looking For La Vie En Rose,” which I hope will be published next year.

Mariette has often spoken to me about her Guardian Angels and the Beings who have looked after her, not only on the physical plane but on the inner planes.

It felt right to give her these bursts of color around her head, these circles of protection.  As you see, she wears a leopard print scarf around her neck, which was perfect I think, as she is very connected to the physical world and her instinctual self, as well as to her higher self.

I am currently working on a portrait of her companion these past ten years, Wolfgang, who recently suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and remains hospitalized.  I want it to be a healing portrait.  That is my intention.

0 Responses

Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.