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VISIONARY REVUE
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ENLIGHTENMENT OF THE DOMINATORS
Maura Holden
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DARK MOTHER
Maura Holden
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FALL 2007
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I
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In the winter of 1999 I hallucinated a world of divine beauty. Heaven lived in every atom; each leaf, face, and architectural form shone with mystical light… From the moment I saw that realm it has haunted me. On five occasions I tried to sketch it, but with no success. Each time my hand was beguiled into rendering completely different worlds - completely - this is no exaggeration. The places I drew were dark, disastrous, and nearly antithetical to my vision.
I found this interesting. The archetype of the vision was paradise, a sensuous earthly heaven…. As I say, when I sat down to draw it, however, what came out of my pencil were fearsome underworlds, decaying carnivorous cities, kingdoms destroyed by seismic wave and nuclear explosion…
I had seen these visions during the previous year, and they had haunted me also. Certainly I still found them compelling, but now that I had visualized paradise I no longer relished the thought of painting apocalypses. I preferred rather to put them on hold while I captured the delicate harmonies fresh in my mind. I was even worried that if I delayed painting the paradise, its strange substance and fugitive light would fade from memory.
Considering this, it fascinates me to wonder why I could not begin. For mysterious reasons, I was bound to render the older visions first. So, for seven years now I have steadily painted apocalypses - with glimpses of the unattained paradise burning behind their tattered veils…. |
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VISIONARY REVUE
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II
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1998 fell with a crash. It was a strange autumn. There are times in life when the house collapses, so to speak, and one is left standing in a pile of wreckage. Within a matter of months, the structures of my life - family, job, home - crumbled. Even the rubble seemed unsalvageable: a puzzle of ill-fitting beams and worm-eaten balustrades…
I took refuge in my art. My apartment, as the days darkened, became an enchanted hermitage. Winter came. The bells of 1999 tolled ominously. Philadelphia wrapped itself in a dirty fog.
By day, chemical smells and the sounds of demolition work permeated my studio. Hovering between ruin and the unknown, I worked in an inspired trance: the building next door was being gutted, and soon I had to leave…
Recently a change in fortune had come to the neighborhood. Broad Street had been re-named 'Avenue of the Arts'. Fancy new lampposts had been imported, and the hookers had been deported. The shabby row of buildings on Lombard Street, between Broad and Juniper, sagged expectantly.
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DETAIL: TRAVELLER'S MOON
Maura Holden
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FALL 2007
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For many years, in their low rent status, they had fallen to rot, but now they began to look to their owner like future luxury apartments. While recognizing this as inevitable, we who ate, slept, and made art within their ruinous walls sneered and worried.
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III
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At the end of the world, there is nothing better to do than to create a new one.
One evening, leaning on the rotted windowsill, I watched a winter sunset bloom out of the refineries. Contemplating a packet of purple gelatin triangles, I felt myself running headlong into the fresh air of another life…
These curious triangles contained some of the best acid I had come by in years. They were a gift from a botanist friend whose usual gifts were organic and also of excellent quality. I reverently swept the floor in preparation. I beautified the apartment and set up drawing materials. In the customary way, I spent the evening downstairs with LMV, and by the time I climbed the stairs it was almost midnight.
As the bells tolled and clouds rolled over the city, I placed a triangle under my tongue and put the kettle on. A nice pot of tea: Assam Golden Broken Leaf, with milk…
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HYPNOHERM
Maura Holden
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Somewhere into the second cup, the cracks in the ceiling began to shiver and ripple. In the art-ghetto tradition, I had customized the heavily scarred plaster with a baroque paint job. Layers of midnight blue and purple, imbedded with nebulae of mica flakes and glitter, caused the ceiling to appear open to the twinkling depths of space. Extending partway down the walls, this illusion feathered off into a misty atmosphere, rubbed with transparent zinc veils. The room, at this moment, looked like a moonlit landscape wrapped in fog.
Out of the fog, the solid walls reappeared with acute physicality. In their blooms and fissures, stylized reptilian forms crystallized into shimmering mosaics. The crazed plaster was alive with lizard totems. I have often wondered whether flat, hieroglyphic pictures, by their visual nature, unlock that layer of the mind that houses our oldest gods. At this moment it seemed so: all around me danced the minions of a great lizard spirit, in patterns somewhat Byzantine, and at the same time as clever and mathematical as the interlocking geometries of Escher.
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VISIONARY REVUE
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Setting aside the tea - it was still hot, after an eternity - I moved myself to the table, where I gazed at my latest gray work: a large drawing, almost finished, called My Birth in a City of Strange Monuments. Now, this drawing was inspired by an impression I had been having for over a year. I felt I was awakening to a new awareness in which all my history and past accomplishments appeared as a mad city. The place haunted my reveries and dreams. In nightmares I quested and fled through mazes of nonsensical monuments, carnivorous citadels and broken bridges. No more able than a newborn to negotiate or repair the metropolis I dreamed, I was bent on recording it in artwork, then abandoning it…
Gazing at the gray drawing, I was transfixed. Flat, colorful patterns swam on its surface, ironing away all subtleties and illusions of depth. The bright patterns conformed linearly to the penciled forms, but the towers no longer leaned into the sky with a dizzying effect; the figures no longer loomed. Instead they appeared distorted and flat. Even the meaning of the picture was lost to bold abstractions. For a little while I watched the patterns swim and change, but they remained too garish to enjoy. It was unpleasant to watch such subtle rendering turn to bright mosaics. It was too early to expect otherwise, though. I was still in the waiting room of the trip, where walls of pattern and color barred the entrances to spacious worlds. |
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IV
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With a whistle of banishment, I turned away. I felt restless. Without flipping on the light, I entered the kitchen.
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FALL 2007
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MY BIRTH IN A CITY OF STRANGE MONUMENTS
Maura Holden
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VISIONARY REVUE
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BIRD GODDESS
Maura Holden
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FALL 2007
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Suddenly I found myself in a dark electric jungle. A faint glow came through the window from the street lamp on Juniper, but it only picked out the edges of things. Fronds of enormous plants arched overhead. Stylized African masks materialized, their fantastically geometric features softened by repose. Omniscient, they communed with an undivided universe.
I gazed at them. My restlessness condensed into a fascinated concentration. Time disappeared. After an unknown interval, noises broke through: turmoil somewhere in the blue depths of the jungle. Beasts scuffling, tearing at one another… faint and echoing… By degrees the sound drew closer; my imagination receded: beasts outside in the street…human animals… people…
As they drew nearer, I began to recognize something familiar. Though garbled - burbling up from under water - I knew I had heard them before… I pondered their cadences, but became distracted: myriad jungle fronds whisking the air… Suddenly the voices came directly below my windows; recognition dawned: it’s that fighting couple. |
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V
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Frequently, late at night, the couple would walk from South Philly to Center City and back, harassing each other all the way. I knew some of their route because I worked nights in South Philly, and rode my bicycle home.
Under the street lamp they circled each other. The woman, clutching a bottle in a brown paper bag, threatened to break it over the man’s head; the man bellowed a string of insults. In the gold light, the gutters glittered with broken glass. Hissing inaudible incantations, the couple enacted an ancient scene that had toured every country and every age: the war dance of hate that was love…
When I turned away and flipped on the kitchen light, I perceived that I had walked into an Ivan Albright painting. The scarred and peeling floorboards buckled up into the cracked and leaning walls in a most decrepit way. The sagging ceiling seemed ready to curl into a precipitous but peaceful collapse.
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VISIONARY REVUE
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DETAIL: THANATOS WAVE
Maura Holden
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FALL 2007
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DETAIL: THANATOS WAVE
Maura Holden
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Concentrating on the arthritic puzzle of the floorboards, I watched intricate many-layered laces flow over them…dowager antimacassars dragging the sea… Suddenly the lace parted, revealing a brief glimpse of a world beneath the floor…a door into Atlantis...
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VI
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At last I had pierced the veil. Sitting with my eyes closed, I entered a land of accelerated time. Centuries elapsed in moments. I watched fantastic temples of sandstone accumulate and erode. Countless sunsets merged into a flickering twilight.
Behind my eyelids, pink and gold-veined carvings swirled over the pillars, cornices, stairways and domes of ancient, but alien castles or mosques. The buildings were difficult to classify. They were of huge, possibly of endless size. Their purpose seemed at once defensive and sacred. Behind their ornamental ramparts, imprisoned sunlight shuddered, its glow flickering faintly, even through stone.
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VISIONARY REVUE
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Moth wings and flowering patterns wheeled across the faces of epic carvings. Suddenly - in a brilliant flash - all was obliterated.
Opening my eyes, I returned to physical reality. I was in the front room. On every wall, paintings hung or leaned at crazy angles, presenting themselves like flowers… I went to the one on the easel. It was a large round painting, newly begun, later called Thanatos Wave. At this early stage it was monochrome: a faint bluish violet veil of images. Figures in the foreground bulged toward the viewer as if through a fisheye lens. Behind them a seismic wave crashed into a city of screaming carnivorous buildings.
I gazed at the buildings. Their architecture, which I have called carnivorous and strange, was also grotesquely beautiful. As I stared at the wide mouths of balconies, various perceptions
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THANATOS WAVE
Maura Holden
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FALL 2007
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DETAIL: THANATOS WAVE
Maura Holden
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passed: initially every grain of pigment stood out, and the coarseness of the paint grated on me. Soon, though, a softening haze descended, followed by an electric fairy light, which settled in the shadows of the masonry.
Phosphorescent colors sparkled in the forms. The lines of the rooftops and windows wobbled. All lines waved and swayed. Following the composition’s largest movement, a spiral, smaller elements of the picture curled up at their edges. The curls repeated down to the minutest ornament.
Fascinated, I gazed at the tiny gargoyles. Charming new elements attached themselves to these: extra eyes, beautifully patterned scales, finely wrought exoskeletons… The temptation to take up a brush and begin recording these details was strong, but I had already judged the forms as intricate as they ought to be. Generally, I found painting while tripping too difficult. (Drawing was often an interesting success, though…)
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VISIONARY REVUE
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I shut my eyes again. Cliffs appeared, with temples carved into their crowns. A cool green fire burned within the living rock, seeping through cracks. The light was a liquid substance: though the color of emeralds, it was perhaps a kind of magma. Over this place a heavy atmosphere of magic hung.
Storms rolled across the dim landscape; clouds released lightning into the temples’ pinnacles; shafts conducted the electricity deep into the earth’s caverns, where it condensed into pools. Night fell. Out of the electric pools arose a mist of phosphorescent forms: coiling dragons and all manner of mysterious tableaux…
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VII
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I knelt at the front windows, watching the sky roil with electric mist and fantastic clouds…
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A WORK IN PROGRESS (UNDERPAINTING)
Maura Holden
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FALL 2007
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A WORK IN PROGRESS (UNDERPAINTING)
Maura Holden
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Electric sky… Into the drains of my eyes, the vastness of time and space poured. Shut: through the filters of my eyelids it was no different. Matter merged with energy; barriers and membranes dissolved. Body and mind melted into distant stars.
Cocooned in inner space, thousands of eyes opened and fluttered their lids. Wink: their gazes synchronized and traced geometric figures. They sent cryptic signals through an archly humorous dance of expressions. I had communed with them before: ancestral tricksters, librarians of the Akashic records... They appeared as the composite eyes of every known species of animal. They had witnessed every event, from the dawn of creation. Nevertheless, they often affected dramatic surprise, and all sorts of amusing theatrics.
Astral light and insect music poured from drains in the night sky. Buzzing and oscillating, growing ever louder and brighter, light and sound waves became the warp and weft of a single fabric. Peaks and troughs, and their interference patterns… Many layers of audio-luminous fabric rippled together. They created new colors, novel musical chords, and interference patterns that were hybrids of light and sound. As the waves tightened to an inaudibly high note and a blinding light, the nighttime world shattered apart.
Nothingness…
Phosphorescent darkness dissolved into the twilight of an uncertain dimension. This soon became the diffused light of a misty morning. Out of the luminous air, a shining world began to materialize…
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VISIONARY REVUE
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Shot with rays of sunlight, a wreath of rose-pink haze crowned the summit of a high world: a floating paradise, both heaven and earth.
As a child, I dreamt of other worlds, hanging above and below this world. All had skies overhead and earth underfoot, but there were different purposes to each. They contained different places, qualities and things. They were connected by secret passages and stairways, but these were difficult to discover…
Now I had stumbled upon such a world. But its wonders, compared with those of childhood dreams, were thousand-fold...
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A WORK IN PROGRESS (UNDERPAINTING)
Maura Holden
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FALL 2007
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I saw the bioluminescent faces of beautiful women gazing from a mountain of cosmic temples. Jeweled filigrees framed their faces, and fountains of violet light poured from their eyes.
Their hands unfolded in mudras of benevolence and offering, fingertips trailing violet vapors through the electrified air. Miniature suns sparkled in the beads of dew on their ornament-coiled limbs, and their skins glimmered like veils over magma.
Flower forms and jeweled traceries mingled with trees in the spires of the mountain. In the softly glowing haze, golden bells and chimes tinkled; water flowed. Harmonies of clear sound and divine proportion organized the universe...
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A WORK IN PROGRESS (UNDERPAINTING)
Maura Holden
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VISIONARY REVUE
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DETAIL: MY BIRTH IN A CITY OF STRANGE MONUMENTS
Maura Holden
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FALL 2007
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VIII
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At some point in the early morning I sat at the table and began to embellish the drawing, My Birth in a City of Strange Monuments. The largest figure, an incandescent face and a hand holding a shell, slightly resembled the women of the cosmic mountain. I penciled the delicate ornaments of her headdress, and gave her strange light to some of the cyclopean towers.
Throughout the dawn and into late morning I drew. The vision had strewn such beauty over every sight and thought that I felt my ruined life infused with its enchantment. On this magical morning I was not aware that I would try and fail so many times to recapture that vision in art. I set my sights on it as though it would soon, and ever afterwards, be familiar.
Even today, I feel the gravity of the cosmic mountain before me. Everything I do is some part of an attempt to rebuild it. Every painting contains some element of it. The resonance of its forms, though dimly remembered, commands me to atone with the mechanics of harmony… Perhaps foolishly, but in a spirit of gratitude, I still hope to paint it.
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- Maura Holden
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VISIONARY REVUE
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I was born in 1967 in Philadelphia Pennsylvania. I am self-taught. My knowledge of painting craft comes mostly from the books of Cennini and Ralph Mayer. The visionary side of my work comes from the strange lands and mind-bending dimensions I have experienced, to a large extent through entheogens. Part of my goal in painting is to synthesize some of my longest standing interests – geometry, mythology, architecture and various optical obsessions – into unique visual matrixes, or “keys”. Just what they will unlock is in the eye of the beholder.
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FALL 2007
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GODDESS OF THE ROCKS
Maura Holden
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In a dense phosphorescent fog I have been searching for things which can never be found: the journals of Adam and Eve; a photographic record of the cities of the interior; a map charting the soul's disasters and renewals; the keys to locked dimensions; the point at the center of everything....
My paintings are the residue of this effort. But they are only shells, fossil imprints around the things I truly meant to give existence to -- those lost moments when my identity fell to the ground like a torn dress, and I moved through non-human spheres with x-ray vision and a compound mind, seeing and being all of those impossible things.
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- Maura Holden
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