Join us this Tuesday, May 26, 2020 at The Kultivate Loft Gallery for the grand opening event of Kultivate presents The Art of Shakti Adored Exhibition!
The grand opening of this exhibition will take place from 1pm to 3pm slt and feature live performers Mavenn and Lark Bowen with a casual dress code.
Slurl: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Water%20Haven/28/114/32
You can learn more about Shakti Adored below:
This is my story. Art is the healing for a life gone wrong.
*CURRENT RL ARTWORK-
https://www.facebook.com/shakti.art
https://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/1485765
*SL ART
http://fergusonhillgallery.mystrikingly.com/
*PREVIOUS-
Curator of The Rose Art Gallery, Creation’s Fine Art Gallery
and Roxeter Place for the Visual Arts
Previously Owner/Curator of Angelwood Bay Arts Center as angel Kingmaker
and The Pearl Gallery of Modern Art
*CURRENT SL PROJECTS-
A development of an installation about global issues and sky gallery working on the theory of
Maslow’s Hierarchy, which is the concept that a person and a society reflect their advancement
by their creativity.
I love to paint nature in the abstract form as I feel it. I try to capture that energy,
the movement, of the natural world. My innate and incessant feeling and filtering energy is what drives me to paint the crazy way I do.
I have dealt with chronic pain from degenerative joint disease and fibromyalgia for 18 years.So I have a difficult time sitting or standing for long periods of time. Not having the circumstances to have a proper studio combined with my physical challenges,one day I was inspired to paint in the place I go to relieve my joint pain, my big garden tub. I can sit in my tub and paint for hours on end with very little pain. I can sit in positions I can’t sit outside the tub..and I have water and a drain right there.
I had a very artistic mother and a father with good taste and culture. When I was very young he took me to galleries and museums. I knew as a child that art was the pinnacle of society. Not “high” society but the evidence of a society at all. To me art was also the collecting of things and I began collecting a lot of little things like postcards and books.
As a survivor of domestic abuse, art has saved me. During those dark years I created art and curated galleries virtually, in secret. And now I am free and have only just begun. I have a deep vision for the future of my work. Not just pretty paintings but messages about our global environmental crisis.
I still remember my first drawing and paintings from elementary school. My parents didn’t seem to think much of it but I did and still miss my paintings of swan, deer and mice. In middle school years, everything I wrote was about art and culture. My 5th and 6th grade teachers used copying encyclopedia pages as a punishment for not doing homework, which I never did. Didn’t make me do the actual homework,
just copy those pages. This did not make sense. But I didn’t care, I was learning about Monet and DaVinci.
In northern Wisconsin though a girl’s art dreams were pretty irrelevant in the late 1980’s.So I spent 25 years as “chief cook and bottle” washer for my family. I made a few paintings over those years,but my life was completely devoted to raising kids and husbands. I did go to one show for the Tolkien Society at Oxford. I only had two paintings; The Two Trees of Valinor, Rivendell Overlook and some fun cast interview portrait sketches. I had to get a separation from my husband to be able to do that. But like most mentally abused women, I went back, a few times. 15 yrs. later I did a few other paintings, some are lost and some my grandchildren have.
Over the years I was in an abusive marriage I finally found refuge in virtual reality in 2009, while my ex husband was in Iraq. Low and behold,there is an art world there and I discovered virtual photography and painting. I opened and directed several galleries over 10 years. Working with artists all over the world I curated hundreds of shows and held charity auctions raising money for organizations like The Micheal J. Fox Foundation, Relay for Life, Feed A Smile and other humanitarian efforts. It was my secret world that no one could keep me from when I was alone. That experience is what gave me the courage to leave that marriage. I took some art management courses at university while in a women’s shelter. I loved what I learned and won a award for best virtual gallery that year but the most important thing I learned is that I wanted to put my own art first now.
In 2019, after I was free from my previous controlling relationships I began to paint again. At the same time I was doing a lot of research on figuring myself out as a painter. I love my virtual paintings but I knew it was time for the real paint. It started out hap-hazard. I had painted landscapes in the past but now, I just couldn’t be confined anymore. The first artist to sway me towards abstract art was Viggo Mortenson, the actor, whose work is so wild that my first thought was actually, “what the hell is he thinking”, but Monet will always have my heart. I would not say that there is anyone who really influences my style choice, only those who have inspired my freedom, like Jessica Zoob, Fiona Rea, Elizabeth Menin.
From 2005-2010 I was a massage and essential oil therapist and Reiki Master Teacher. This is a Japanese energy work. I was very good at it and had a successful business. But the return of my ex husband from his 2nd tour in Iraq destroyed our family that was already fragile. Our family was a casualty of war. I still haven’t completely recovered and art is my therapy for a life gone wrong. My husband now of the past 4 years, fully supports me and wants me to paint because he says I am happier when I do. When I’m not happy, I don’t want to paint. Some people like putting their anger on a canvas. I really don’t but someday I might have to. That’s how art is when you give yourself to it. You have to do what your soul wants you to do or it won’t work well in one aspect or another.
As I continued to urge myself to get into a deeper space and find a flow, what I perceive as my “style” began to emerge. When it comes through, those paintings, I fall deeply in love with. It is illusive though and flow only comes with trust in yourself. Sometimes I feel I loose it and some part of the painting that I thought was going well seems to get messed up,but if I take time to get back in the flow or, as is often the case, I have worn myself down by not eating or taking a break, I can get back to the place and to my amazement that “messed up” part will become the best. My paintings can take me months to finish in some cases. If I don’t feel it’s right, I won’t sign it and I will hang it and look at it everyday until the muse returns to finish it.
My process starts in a couple ways. Often with a song I am hooked on. I have an affinity with things moved by air; clouds, water,leaves and my favorite, feathers. No doubt my longing for freedom. I also attribute this to being a fire element type and my true nature as an energy worker. So I get comfy in my tub, I search through music as the tub fills with hot water for something that speaks to me that day and will stay with that song or album/genre for that whole painting. I make my own gesso that is really more like a plaster. Basic gesso seems to interfere with my painting because of how much blending I usually do. Somehow, from inspiration, I made plaster and began to use that like paint for the first stage, guided by the music. When I finish that, the canvas could sit for weeks or maybe over a month before I am called back to it. When I am, sometimes I just start rubbing water color on the plaster with my fingers.Then I might feel like washing over the entire canvas with some concoction of acrylic paints and mediums, using different tones of the same colors and different brushes as I feel guided. I start to see subtle shapes emerge from the plaster. Subconscious images of memories or snapshots of favorite subjects in motion. It is so deeply satisfying and fun. But every painting is still a test in trust.
To quote Steve Martin in his novel, An Object of Beauty, on the process of painting,”A layer of underpaint, usually pastel color, then, the miracle, where the secrets are: the paint itself, swishing around, roughly, gently, layer on layer, thick or thin, not more than a quarter of an inch ever- God can happen in that quarter of an inch,…”. To me,that’s what happens when I trust myself,
God happens. Even if it affects no one else, it teaches me, it delights me and heals me; that’s God. But I think it will affect someone else.
– Shakti
Kultivate Magazine 