Claudia Olivos’s Wall at Artomatic.

Claudia Olivos’s work on 6 NE in Artomatic stopped me dead in my tracks.  As you can see from this picture she works large as well as small and her colors and subject matter appealed to me right away.  So I took lots of pictures and emailed Claudia hoping to hear back from her about her work.

Her words took my breath away because many of them could be my own (see my own Goddesses and gods and their stories here on my website)!  I guess when you pull from the same energy stream you recognize your traveling companions. 

I am pleased to present Claudia Olivos in her own words:

"My work at ArtOMatic is primarily based on the idea of the Divine Feminine.  The smaller pieces (many of which have moons in them) were prepared for a nude exhibit in Paris last Fall.  when I started them, I knew they had to include nudes, but did not know anything about the content.  However, I soon found it infused with allusions to the Goddess…indeed, I was doing a lot of reading about archetypes at the time.  The titles came afterwards, and so did the idea to do for each one a "noche/night" pairing (see right: Juniper and IO (top right and left) and Boa’s Beso).

" Namaste (below here on the left) and the other more abstract pieces were done this winter, and they also speak to me about myth, spirituality and the universe/goddess.  I have found it interesting to learn about the ancient worship practices that we see all around within ancient cultures throughout the world where the Goddesses were worshiped and honored giving us a sense of commonality and shared belief and symbols.

"I think it is vitally important that we understand we are all of one origin, one family, sharing from the depths of one earth which can serve to provide us all with sustenance and beauty, as much as pain and suffering.  This is the content that underlies my current work in various ways (sometimes implied, sometimes more obvious).

"As a painter, it is wonderful to play for hours with colors and textures of oil paint, and to find that somewhere along the line, something tangible is created, and my ‘inner’ thoughts and feelings. surface.  Generally, I tend to work in a ‘Surrealist’ manner – that is, I don’t work from sketches. (The Wise and the Foolish, here left) I work very intuitively…I often don’t know what my pieces will be about or where they may be going…they take me ‘there’ – it is often an arduous process..with many twists and turns (what was once a male figure, may end up being a flower; a figurative piece can become abstract, and vice versa).  I often don’t know the meaning, much less the titles until well after I am finished.

"ArtOMatic is a wonderful place to exhibit my work as I find that many people who otherwise do not attend gallery events attend this even, and have access to work of artists of all genres and talents."

You can see Claudia’s website here and her Artomatic catalog page here.

Don’t forget to check in at Body Politics regularly.  Heather is posting the notes people are leaving at our installation at ArtOMatic.  We are both pleased with the response – every time I go by there are people engaged with the work.  This is great to see!  Today I will be taking in my own pair of "skinny" jeans except they are really "tweens" since I long ago gave the skinnies to the thrift store.

thought for the day:  When a woman makes the choice to embody spiritual experience in her everyday life, idealizations go out the window.  She has to bring in everything – frailties and strengths, doubts and optimism, whatever she longs to conceal and whatever she’d be delighted to flaunt – and live it out.

This takes the utmost humility, because the ego ‘I’ doesn’t feel ready to able to live the deepest experience.

…’Spiritual life is like a moving sidewalk,’ the Christian contemplative Bernadette Roberts told us one afternoon…’Whether you go with it or spend your whole life running against it, you’re still going to be taken along.   Whether you commit yourself utterly or throw in the towel, eventually you’ll be swept away…You know those Zen pictures where the man is searching for his ox, his true nature?  Well, in those pictures, I’m the ox and the divine’s coming in search of me.  No way to get away.  You just cannot escape this."    Sherry Ruth Anderson and Patricia Hopkins, The Feminine Face of God:  The Unfolding of the Sacred in Women