Ascent Through Descent Artists
Brent Aaron
Image making is the birthing of interiority. The exteriorization of dream. Fragments of experience are cast into the mental Alembic to undergo processing. Examined on all sides by the boil of the subconscious, and reduced to their core elements. The resulting distillate then undergoes reconstitution upon the void-like surface of the artists matrix. Image emerges from the womb of print and page almost as if a living creature, reproducing itself after its own kind. In so doing, the capacity of the image to retain a spark of that Promethean neural firing is certain. The bold fantasy of alchemical dreaming.
Michelle Anderst
This image depicts a peacock with a venomous snake and poisonous plants. The peacock is said to devour these deadly creatures and transmute the venom into it’s brilliant iridescent colors; a metaphor for descent into matter before rebirth.
Richard 'Bokar' Capuro
In addition to being a fixture in New York City's downtown art scene, since the 1980's, Richard has also studied and practiced the occult for even longer. Richard has received mention in books by Peter Levenda and James Wasserman, and is currently writing a soon-to-be published book about his occult and metaphysical experiences over the last four-plus decades. His artwork has been described as Giger like (H.R. Giger), with an occult edge.
Brian Cotnoir
My work explores both physical and inner alchemical practice, and I express my findings through book-art and prints. These range from high-end limited editions such as the Emerald Tablet and my latest book, Alchemy: The Poetry of Matter, to lino-block “books,” alchemy ‘zines and Risograph prints. The print and book work, and my artwork in general, isn’t about alchemy. Rather, it is an aspect of my alchemical research and practice.
One aspect that my print, book and film work have in common is that they are all concerned with image, word/text, and a somewhat narrative/process structure. I use the process of bookmaking, printmaking, etc., as an actual research tool into a particular aspect of alchemy, be it alchemical process or substance. The works are not ends in themselves, as an art piece to be viewed or otherwise engaged. They are better understood as traces, suggesting ways for the greater work to move forward, aspiring to an intended greater change.
Brian Cotnoir is an alchemist, artist, and filmmaker. A contributor to Frater Albertus’ Parachemy, he is also the author of a series of Alchemy Zines. His books include the recently published Alchemy: The Poetry of Matter, The Weiser Concise Guide to Alchemy, Alchemical Meditations, On the Quintessence of Wine, and the Emerald Tablet. His Emerald Tablet was part of the Language of the Birds: Occult and Art show in 2016 in New York City. Egonomen Nekros, an alchemical composition drawn from early alchemy, was included in Morbid Anatomy Library/Green-Wood Cemetery’s exhibition Power of Images: Life, Death and Rebirth. His books are in special library collections worldwide such as the National Institute of Medicine Library, Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica in Amsterdam, Vanderbilt University Library Special Collection, the zines are in the collections of the Glasgow School of Art Library and the New York Public Library to name a few He occasionally gives talks and has presented workshops and seminars around the world on various aspects of alchemical theory and practice based on his research. His film work has been screened at Museum of Modern Art, Sundance Film Festival, HBO, PBS and other international venues.
David D'Andrea
David V. D’Andrea is an freelance illustrator and printmaker. He currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon where, since 2012, he has worked under the by name of Samaritan Press. David received a degree in Illustration from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 2006. Notable clients include Om, Sleep, & Godspeed You! Black Emperor. “ D’Andrea’s illustrations seethe with sinuous, accomplished line work and intentional rough edges. He combines the draftsmanship of the 1960ʹs poster artists with a raw detailed grittiness to create an organic pen and ink style that is unmistakably his own.Through esoteric signs and symbols such as aviform in flight, sigillary calligraphy, disembodied wings, and skeletal forms, he seeks to perpetuate the avowal that is death, and in turn catharsis; to create archaic crests for modern battles.” - “D'Andrea's work is his spiritual path.” - Al Cisneros / Om
Rik Garrett
Rik Garrett was born and raised in Washington State. Against the grey skies and green foliage of the Pacific Northwest he spent his formative years combating the boredom of mundane daily life by creating artwork, writing stories and reading books about the fantastic and mysterious. Garrett was given his first camera at the age of six. He watched his mother study photography and eventually open her own portrait studio.
At the age of 14 he followed her lead and picked up his first real camera – a Nikon that his grandmother had given his father. Lacking any overt religious or cultural traditions, he latched onto photography as a family heritage. This obsession led him to concentrate not just on film and the darkroom, but historic procedures such as the wet plate collodion process.
Over the years Garrett found historical connections between his seemingly divergent interests: the medium of photography being married to esoteric studies throughout history via spirit photography, Thoughtography, Radionics and Parapsychology. Drawing on the historical precedent of the apparently static realm of analog photography having been used to document the invisible, he has adopted, revived and expanded upon esoteric photographic practices in order to explore personal subject matter.
Travis Lawrence
Influenced by Jungian psychology and mythology, Travis uses the art of printmaking to create illustrious allegorical imagery. Reinterpreting medieval alchemical illustrations and illuminations, each symbolic print appears to be an excerpt of narration filled with mystery and metaphor. The viewer is invited to explore the content of these Works through a contemplative interaction with the archetypes.
Travis resides in the Midwest where he was born and raised. Having a religious upbringing opened his perspective to the interaction with ideas greater than and/or within oneself. The creative process is an act of opening doorways and manifesting these ideas through symbol and metaphor. Similar to alchemy, Travis uses printmaking as a meditative procedure of transforming the mundane into a higher state.
John Leary
John Leary is an artist and researcher who helped found the magical order C .: I .: U .: in 1975 and worked at the Esoteric Book Conference before becoming a part of Mortlake & Company. He published the Magical Timeline through his press Stellar Lamp.
Drew Meger | Corey Press
I named my shop The Corey Press because I carve and print my work around the corner from where Giles Corey met his end during the Salem Witchcraft Hysteria. I am a bit of a magpie when it comes to inspiration, taking from occult symbology, Lovecraftian nightmares, and UFO strangeness to form the cornerstone of my medieval woodcut style carving. All my work is hand carved and pressed to wood - I find the way the woodgrain fights the ink gives each printed piece its own unique feel.
Carlos Melgoza
Anima Nocturna is the creative vehicle for photographer and multi-media artist Carlos Melgoza.
The current ongoing body of work is entitled Ecstatic Ordeal. The intent of this body of work is to bypass symbolic illustration and to bring the viewer right into the center of the Circle of Arte, that is, to evoke in the viewer the sensations of the rites themselves and to catch a glimpse of the entities that populate them, (each capture session is done within an open circle rite.)
In terms of photography this poses an interesting problem to me considering the formalist intent in dictating photography is for "facts" whilst traditionally painting and drawing are more suitable for fantastic endeavors. My Path in photography has lead me to use a custom technical approach to catch a glimpse of the mysteries. There, as in ritual, the right combination of elements will let the "Subconscious energy which incarnates the dream to be released."--Kenneth Grant
"The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery."--Francis Bacon
Nina Pluska
Nina Pluska is a self taught multi medium artist based outside of Chicago, IL. Her work is a reflection of time spent as an avid reader of weird fiction, classic horror, folk tales, and esoteric texts. The combination results in a distinctly delicate style of dark art.
Max Razdow
Max Razdow's "Mage Card" drawings develop pantheons of characters and creatures alluding to a holistic space of sorcery, where archetypal "Mages" summon less specific deities, artifacts and spells. The drawings depict a transference of energy reminiscent of game-play as they build lexical structures. Colors are re-seated as mysterious philosophical endpoints in a spell-casting technique that may or may not work. Gnosis, Chaos, Nature and Order intermingle between hierarchies of diviners, witches, wizards and alchemists in complex taxonomy drawings, each represented by tarot-like scenes. In the Mage Cards, formal geometric lexicons are implicated to abbreviate categories of beings and architectures that seem ordered, but are in fact unfixed.
Unlike traditional tarot, with a clarity of illustration that tends to accompany it, Razdow's cards are hesitant to presuppose meaning, maneuvering instead toward happenstance resolution through labyrinths of pen-work and spilled ink. By involving chance to spin meaning, the Mage Cards may navigate monadistic structures without bearing witness to them. They trust, instead, our interest in manipulating symbol, as viewers, to cast a net of fortune upon ourselves.
Max Razdow was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1978 and lives and works in Boston and New York City.
Tom Schurr
The (Blue) Work Angels - The origin of this image came from a series of collaborative drawings that a friend Mike Clopton and myself had worked on together in the spring of 1986. The angels came to him in a dream about a dead aunt who had called him on the telephone. He believed these angels were messengers of bad news from the other side. As a result he avoided answering the phone dreading who or what might be on the other end of the line. The angel drawings were for him a way of channeling this energy even though it probably didn’t help his phobia much. Maybe the image making process served as a kind of protection against them; a kind of amulet against the dark side. In any case soon after he arrived in New York we began to work on the angel drawing project. At the time my studio wall was filled with several hundred Polaroids taken off of television. I had written a text while at work called Work is Work which was a commentary about drudgery of working day in and day out. We made copies photo of this text which we then drew the angels on top of.
The working process was rapid, gestural and deliberate. It was intended to be ritualistic; we were trying to evoke something and make magic. It was also perhaps a kind of visual version of call and response found in music. After completing about two dozen drawings they were then mounted and spread out at random on top of my wall of TV Polaroids.
Later in the fall I began to rephotograph and videotape one of the angel drawings that now rested on top of my Polaroids. I made seven photo/video generations from the original image which transformed the spiral face that Mike had drawn into something entirely different. When I saw the result of the last generation of rephotographing the image on the TV monitor it quite literally nearly knocked me off my stool. The abstract spiral face had morphed into a skull like form with its tongue sticking out at me. I was shocked at what had been produced realizing that what was now staring back at me was an angel of death. Almost trembling with excitement and stupefaction I called to my girlfriend to come in and have a look. Disturbed by what she saw, seeming not entirely to share my fascination as to what had just transpired. She exited the studio quickly leaving me alone to be transfixed by this portrait of death.
I was never sure how exactly this transformation had taken place; the process I used was clear enough but at what point the image morphed into something else was hard to say. It had quickly flipped between the sixth and seventh stage of the degeneration process reducing the original image to some kind an elemental core. It was a related but very different version of the original being, perhaps a kind of cousin but more monstrous. The spiral mask had fallen off and Mike’s angel and had turned into my own, born again naked and blue.
Liv Rainey-Smith
Liv Rainey-Smith is an artist specializing in hand-pulled xylographic prints. Her imagery draws primarily upon historic styles, folklore, dreams, and esoteric traditions. Rainey-Smith’s woodcut process incorporates a mixture of traditional and modern tools as well as a blend of European and Japanese printmaking technique. She pulls her own fine art prints in small editions on both paper and animal parchment.
Brandi Strand
With years of developing attraction to the enigma of Symbology and Hermeticism, Brandi Strand, as a mixed media collage artist, creates her works through personal photography, digital images, acrylics and a collection of analog pieces over the decades. All digital art is solely made on iPhone. Typically most pieces are intricate and consist of up to dozen of images blended together, while others can be quite more simple. The process consists of experimental manipulation using various applications. The artist submerges herself into the current of inspiration until the process of transmuting the already existing images becomes automatic. Thus the end result is what she refers to as “Spiritual Pop”.
One such example is "Pool Of Flesh", the work presented in the current exhibition. A digital collage which depicts Dali's St. John of the Cross as Jesus Christ upon a platform. The platform is constructed of a personal photo of the Temple of Solomon, taken by the artist from the pages of Newton's first edition, "The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms". Below waves of carcasses form a fateful mass of flesh. Perhaps the perspective of the Sun as Christ, the Logos made Flesh, upon his descent in matter.
Faith Sponsler
Faith Sponsler is an interdisciplinary artist originally from the small, northern California town of Mount Shasta. She explores esoteric concepts such as alchemy, materially and graphically through sculpture, painting, and printmaking. She currently lives and works in central California and received an MFA in Art Studio from UC Davis in 2017.
Tim Svenonius
Tim Svenonius is a San Francisco based artist whose work explores the intersections of history, memory and myth. A voracious reader and an avid researcher, his subjects are often informed by deep forays into arcane areas of study. A keen interest in symbolism, a passion for mythology, and enthusiasm for enlightenment-age science are all evident in his imagery. In 2015 he self-published his monograph A Book of Lost Latitudes, which through evocative drawings considers the meaning of the whale in art, lore and literature from antiquity to the industrial age.
J. Swofford
J Swofford is an artist living and working in Portland, Oregon. The son of art-loving parents who compromised about his name at his birth and gave him the letter J as his full name. J spent his formative years in the rural mountains of Virginia, a place steeped in a wilderness spirituality, and took to creativity and art from an early age. J picked up his first camera in earnest in the summer of 1994 and taught himself black and white, darkroom photography with borrowed equipment in a blocked hallway. In 1999 J moved to Portland, Oregon. He finally went to school for photography at the Oregon College of Art & Craft, graduating in 2005 with a BFA.
Consistantly working with themes of mythology, magic, and dreams J has exhibited his art work across the united States as well as Rome and Tel Aviv internationally. He and his work have appeared in various web based and print publucations, both as a subject and as a contributor.
Joseph Uccello
Joseph Uccello is a wayfarer in the Codex Naturae. While living in China he discovered and embraced the traditional brush and ink stick. He practices the almost-forgotten art of typography, has developed special techniques in letterpress printing, and is an award winning book designer. He currently runs the Viatorium Press.
Benjamin A. Vierling
Benjamin A. Vierling is a painter & illustrator working in traditional media, with an emphasis on mythically inspired portraiture, Vanitas still-lifes, and botanical renderings. His illustrations appear in publications by Three Hands Press, Ouroboros Press, and Red Wheel Weiser Books. Album Cover artworks include Joanna Newsom's influential record, Ys. Past exhibitions of his paintings were shown at the The Esoteric Book Conference, the Roq La Rue Gallery in Seattle, Art Fair 21 Cologne, and the Strychnin Gallery in Berlin, Germany. A Decennary Retrospective of Vierling's work was exhibited in 2014 at the Gage Academy of Art in Seattle.
Parker Wrenn
Parker Wrenn is a visual artist and ritual mage exploring the intertwining applications of art and magick. Continuing in the tradition of shamans and magicians since the dawn of time, his work endeavors to bring forth something resembling wisdom from the depths of the imagination. Leveraging an ever-evolving understanding of the Western esoteric corpus and its Eastern counterparts, he hopes his experiments in creative synthesis with these ancient ideas will serve to further the Great Work.
Image making is the birthing of interiority. The exteriorization of dream. Fragments of experience are cast into the mental Alembic to undergo processing. Examined on all sides by the boil of the subconscious, and reduced to their core elements. The resulting distillate then undergoes reconstitution upon the void-like surface of the artists matrix. Image emerges from the womb of print and page almost as if a living creature, reproducing itself after its own kind. In so doing, the capacity of the image to retain a spark of that Promethean neural firing is certain. The bold fantasy of alchemical dreaming.
Michelle Anderst
This image depicts a peacock with a venomous snake and poisonous plants. The peacock is said to devour these deadly creatures and transmute the venom into it’s brilliant iridescent colors; a metaphor for descent into matter before rebirth.
Richard 'Bokar' Capuro
In addition to being a fixture in New York City's downtown art scene, since the 1980's, Richard has also studied and practiced the occult for even longer. Richard has received mention in books by Peter Levenda and James Wasserman, and is currently writing a soon-to-be published book about his occult and metaphysical experiences over the last four-plus decades. His artwork has been described as Giger like (H.R. Giger), with an occult edge.
Brian Cotnoir
My work explores both physical and inner alchemical practice, and I express my findings through book-art and prints. These range from high-end limited editions such as the Emerald Tablet and my latest book, Alchemy: The Poetry of Matter, to lino-block “books,” alchemy ‘zines and Risograph prints. The print and book work, and my artwork in general, isn’t about alchemy. Rather, it is an aspect of my alchemical research and practice.
One aspect that my print, book and film work have in common is that they are all concerned with image, word/text, and a somewhat narrative/process structure. I use the process of bookmaking, printmaking, etc., as an actual research tool into a particular aspect of alchemy, be it alchemical process or substance. The works are not ends in themselves, as an art piece to be viewed or otherwise engaged. They are better understood as traces, suggesting ways for the greater work to move forward, aspiring to an intended greater change.
Brian Cotnoir is an alchemist, artist, and filmmaker. A contributor to Frater Albertus’ Parachemy, he is also the author of a series of Alchemy Zines. His books include the recently published Alchemy: The Poetry of Matter, The Weiser Concise Guide to Alchemy, Alchemical Meditations, On the Quintessence of Wine, and the Emerald Tablet. His Emerald Tablet was part of the Language of the Birds: Occult and Art show in 2016 in New York City. Egonomen Nekros, an alchemical composition drawn from early alchemy, was included in Morbid Anatomy Library/Green-Wood Cemetery’s exhibition Power of Images: Life, Death and Rebirth. His books are in special library collections worldwide such as the National Institute of Medicine Library, Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica in Amsterdam, Vanderbilt University Library Special Collection, the zines are in the collections of the Glasgow School of Art Library and the New York Public Library to name a few He occasionally gives talks and has presented workshops and seminars around the world on various aspects of alchemical theory and practice based on his research. His film work has been screened at Museum of Modern Art, Sundance Film Festival, HBO, PBS and other international venues.
David D'Andrea
David V. D’Andrea is an freelance illustrator and printmaker. He currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon where, since 2012, he has worked under the by name of Samaritan Press. David received a degree in Illustration from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 2006. Notable clients include Om, Sleep, & Godspeed You! Black Emperor. “ D’Andrea’s illustrations seethe with sinuous, accomplished line work and intentional rough edges. He combines the draftsmanship of the 1960ʹs poster artists with a raw detailed grittiness to create an organic pen and ink style that is unmistakably his own.Through esoteric signs and symbols such as aviform in flight, sigillary calligraphy, disembodied wings, and skeletal forms, he seeks to perpetuate the avowal that is death, and in turn catharsis; to create archaic crests for modern battles.” - “D'Andrea's work is his spiritual path.” - Al Cisneros / Om
Rik Garrett
Rik Garrett was born and raised in Washington State. Against the grey skies and green foliage of the Pacific Northwest he spent his formative years combating the boredom of mundane daily life by creating artwork, writing stories and reading books about the fantastic and mysterious. Garrett was given his first camera at the age of six. He watched his mother study photography and eventually open her own portrait studio.
At the age of 14 he followed her lead and picked up his first real camera – a Nikon that his grandmother had given his father. Lacking any overt religious or cultural traditions, he latched onto photography as a family heritage. This obsession led him to concentrate not just on film and the darkroom, but historic procedures such as the wet plate collodion process.
Over the years Garrett found historical connections between his seemingly divergent interests: the medium of photography being married to esoteric studies throughout history via spirit photography, Thoughtography, Radionics and Parapsychology. Drawing on the historical precedent of the apparently static realm of analog photography having been used to document the invisible, he has adopted, revived and expanded upon esoteric photographic practices in order to explore personal subject matter.
Travis Lawrence
Influenced by Jungian psychology and mythology, Travis uses the art of printmaking to create illustrious allegorical imagery. Reinterpreting medieval alchemical illustrations and illuminations, each symbolic print appears to be an excerpt of narration filled with mystery and metaphor. The viewer is invited to explore the content of these Works through a contemplative interaction with the archetypes.
Travis resides in the Midwest where he was born and raised. Having a religious upbringing opened his perspective to the interaction with ideas greater than and/or within oneself. The creative process is an act of opening doorways and manifesting these ideas through symbol and metaphor. Similar to alchemy, Travis uses printmaking as a meditative procedure of transforming the mundane into a higher state.
John Leary
John Leary is an artist and researcher who helped found the magical order C .: I .: U .: in 1975 and worked at the Esoteric Book Conference before becoming a part of Mortlake & Company. He published the Magical Timeline through his press Stellar Lamp.
Drew Meger | Corey Press
I named my shop The Corey Press because I carve and print my work around the corner from where Giles Corey met his end during the Salem Witchcraft Hysteria. I am a bit of a magpie when it comes to inspiration, taking from occult symbology, Lovecraftian nightmares, and UFO strangeness to form the cornerstone of my medieval woodcut style carving. All my work is hand carved and pressed to wood - I find the way the woodgrain fights the ink gives each printed piece its own unique feel.
Carlos Melgoza
Anima Nocturna is the creative vehicle for photographer and multi-media artist Carlos Melgoza.
The current ongoing body of work is entitled Ecstatic Ordeal. The intent of this body of work is to bypass symbolic illustration and to bring the viewer right into the center of the Circle of Arte, that is, to evoke in the viewer the sensations of the rites themselves and to catch a glimpse of the entities that populate them, (each capture session is done within an open circle rite.)
In terms of photography this poses an interesting problem to me considering the formalist intent in dictating photography is for "facts" whilst traditionally painting and drawing are more suitable for fantastic endeavors. My Path in photography has lead me to use a custom technical approach to catch a glimpse of the mysteries. There, as in ritual, the right combination of elements will let the "Subconscious energy which incarnates the dream to be released."--Kenneth Grant
"The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery."--Francis Bacon
Nina Pluska
Nina Pluska is a self taught multi medium artist based outside of Chicago, IL. Her work is a reflection of time spent as an avid reader of weird fiction, classic horror, folk tales, and esoteric texts. The combination results in a distinctly delicate style of dark art.
Max Razdow
Max Razdow's "Mage Card" drawings develop pantheons of characters and creatures alluding to a holistic space of sorcery, where archetypal "Mages" summon less specific deities, artifacts and spells. The drawings depict a transference of energy reminiscent of game-play as they build lexical structures. Colors are re-seated as mysterious philosophical endpoints in a spell-casting technique that may or may not work. Gnosis, Chaos, Nature and Order intermingle between hierarchies of diviners, witches, wizards and alchemists in complex taxonomy drawings, each represented by tarot-like scenes. In the Mage Cards, formal geometric lexicons are implicated to abbreviate categories of beings and architectures that seem ordered, but are in fact unfixed.
Unlike traditional tarot, with a clarity of illustration that tends to accompany it, Razdow's cards are hesitant to presuppose meaning, maneuvering instead toward happenstance resolution through labyrinths of pen-work and spilled ink. By involving chance to spin meaning, the Mage Cards may navigate monadistic structures without bearing witness to them. They trust, instead, our interest in manipulating symbol, as viewers, to cast a net of fortune upon ourselves.
Max Razdow was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1978 and lives and works in Boston and New York City.
Tom Schurr
The (Blue) Work Angels - The origin of this image came from a series of collaborative drawings that a friend Mike Clopton and myself had worked on together in the spring of 1986. The angels came to him in a dream about a dead aunt who had called him on the telephone. He believed these angels were messengers of bad news from the other side. As a result he avoided answering the phone dreading who or what might be on the other end of the line. The angel drawings were for him a way of channeling this energy even though it probably didn’t help his phobia much. Maybe the image making process served as a kind of protection against them; a kind of amulet against the dark side. In any case soon after he arrived in New York we began to work on the angel drawing project. At the time my studio wall was filled with several hundred Polaroids taken off of television. I had written a text while at work called Work is Work which was a commentary about drudgery of working day in and day out. We made copies photo of this text which we then drew the angels on top of.
The working process was rapid, gestural and deliberate. It was intended to be ritualistic; we were trying to evoke something and make magic. It was also perhaps a kind of visual version of call and response found in music. After completing about two dozen drawings they were then mounted and spread out at random on top of my wall of TV Polaroids.
Later in the fall I began to rephotograph and videotape one of the angel drawings that now rested on top of my Polaroids. I made seven photo/video generations from the original image which transformed the spiral face that Mike had drawn into something entirely different. When I saw the result of the last generation of rephotographing the image on the TV monitor it quite literally nearly knocked me off my stool. The abstract spiral face had morphed into a skull like form with its tongue sticking out at me. I was shocked at what had been produced realizing that what was now staring back at me was an angel of death. Almost trembling with excitement and stupefaction I called to my girlfriend to come in and have a look. Disturbed by what she saw, seeming not entirely to share my fascination as to what had just transpired. She exited the studio quickly leaving me alone to be transfixed by this portrait of death.
I was never sure how exactly this transformation had taken place; the process I used was clear enough but at what point the image morphed into something else was hard to say. It had quickly flipped between the sixth and seventh stage of the degeneration process reducing the original image to some kind an elemental core. It was a related but very different version of the original being, perhaps a kind of cousin but more monstrous. The spiral mask had fallen off and Mike’s angel and had turned into my own, born again naked and blue.
Liv Rainey-Smith
Liv Rainey-Smith is an artist specializing in hand-pulled xylographic prints. Her imagery draws primarily upon historic styles, folklore, dreams, and esoteric traditions. Rainey-Smith’s woodcut process incorporates a mixture of traditional and modern tools as well as a blend of European and Japanese printmaking technique. She pulls her own fine art prints in small editions on both paper and animal parchment.
Brandi Strand
With years of developing attraction to the enigma of Symbology and Hermeticism, Brandi Strand, as a mixed media collage artist, creates her works through personal photography, digital images, acrylics and a collection of analog pieces over the decades. All digital art is solely made on iPhone. Typically most pieces are intricate and consist of up to dozen of images blended together, while others can be quite more simple. The process consists of experimental manipulation using various applications. The artist submerges herself into the current of inspiration until the process of transmuting the already existing images becomes automatic. Thus the end result is what she refers to as “Spiritual Pop”.
One such example is "Pool Of Flesh", the work presented in the current exhibition. A digital collage which depicts Dali's St. John of the Cross as Jesus Christ upon a platform. The platform is constructed of a personal photo of the Temple of Solomon, taken by the artist from the pages of Newton's first edition, "The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms". Below waves of carcasses form a fateful mass of flesh. Perhaps the perspective of the Sun as Christ, the Logos made Flesh, upon his descent in matter.
Faith Sponsler
Faith Sponsler is an interdisciplinary artist originally from the small, northern California town of Mount Shasta. She explores esoteric concepts such as alchemy, materially and graphically through sculpture, painting, and printmaking. She currently lives and works in central California and received an MFA in Art Studio from UC Davis in 2017.
Tim Svenonius
Tim Svenonius is a San Francisco based artist whose work explores the intersections of history, memory and myth. A voracious reader and an avid researcher, his subjects are often informed by deep forays into arcane areas of study. A keen interest in symbolism, a passion for mythology, and enthusiasm for enlightenment-age science are all evident in his imagery. In 2015 he self-published his monograph A Book of Lost Latitudes, which through evocative drawings considers the meaning of the whale in art, lore and literature from antiquity to the industrial age.
J. Swofford
J Swofford is an artist living and working in Portland, Oregon. The son of art-loving parents who compromised about his name at his birth and gave him the letter J as his full name. J spent his formative years in the rural mountains of Virginia, a place steeped in a wilderness spirituality, and took to creativity and art from an early age. J picked up his first camera in earnest in the summer of 1994 and taught himself black and white, darkroom photography with borrowed equipment in a blocked hallway. In 1999 J moved to Portland, Oregon. He finally went to school for photography at the Oregon College of Art & Craft, graduating in 2005 with a BFA.
Consistantly working with themes of mythology, magic, and dreams J has exhibited his art work across the united States as well as Rome and Tel Aviv internationally. He and his work have appeared in various web based and print publucations, both as a subject and as a contributor.
Joseph Uccello
Joseph Uccello is a wayfarer in the Codex Naturae. While living in China he discovered and embraced the traditional brush and ink stick. He practices the almost-forgotten art of typography, has developed special techniques in letterpress printing, and is an award winning book designer. He currently runs the Viatorium Press.
Benjamin A. Vierling
Benjamin A. Vierling is a painter & illustrator working in traditional media, with an emphasis on mythically inspired portraiture, Vanitas still-lifes, and botanical renderings. His illustrations appear in publications by Three Hands Press, Ouroboros Press, and Red Wheel Weiser Books. Album Cover artworks include Joanna Newsom's influential record, Ys. Past exhibitions of his paintings were shown at the The Esoteric Book Conference, the Roq La Rue Gallery in Seattle, Art Fair 21 Cologne, and the Strychnin Gallery in Berlin, Germany. A Decennary Retrospective of Vierling's work was exhibited in 2014 at the Gage Academy of Art in Seattle.
Parker Wrenn
Parker Wrenn is a visual artist and ritual mage exploring the intertwining applications of art and magick. Continuing in the tradition of shamans and magicians since the dawn of time, his work endeavors to bring forth something resembling wisdom from the depths of the imagination. Leveraging an ever-evolving understanding of the Western esoteric corpus and its Eastern counterparts, he hopes his experiments in creative synthesis with these ancient ideas will serve to further the Great Work.