THE HEROINE'S JOURNEY
Artist's Statement

The Heroine's Journey is something we all make as human beings, the descent into the underworld where we face death and transformation with the possibility of rebirth into new life. It is not one journey we take, but different ones at different times. One does not usually choose to go, but like the Greek goddess Persephone, one is more likely dragged there, or catapulted, unwillingly. The ground opens up, and then the road stretches out before you, dark and unfamiliar, rife with perils that can lead to a finality of destruction or a return if one meets the challenges with courage and persistence.

As in the shamanic journey, you do not return to your village unchanged. You are not the same, and there is no path back to where you were before. The road leads only forward. Even the people around you may look different. Your feet step out onto new earth. You hold your power in your hands. This is a human journey, but as I speak through the feminine vernacular, I reflect the human experience first through the feminine, which too often has been ignored and devalued.

I have always been fascinated by the concept of liminality. Liminality is the magic that happens at the edge of borders, at the nexus of dream and reality, consciousness and unconsciousness, for in fact that line is very thin. Having returned from the underworld, that door is ever open and beckons a return. There are some tellings of the Persephone myth where she chose to eat those six pomegranate seeds, so that she could return.

In her book 'Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement', the author Whitney Chadwick writes, "Internalizing the muse, women artists rejected the search for an idealized Other and interrogated the image in the mirror..." Art is a means to communicate in the language of the unconscious, through color, symbol, and archetype. Color is emotion. Texture is emotion; whether whispering pianissimo with a sheer glaze, or striking fortissimo with bold strokes and impasto laid down fast and furious with a knife. A picture says a thousand words and becomes a mirror; first relative to the artist and then for the ones who encounter it.

I define my paintings as visionary art. My paintings are spiritual, mystical, often alchemical; speaking in the languageof archetypes and the mytho-poetic,of the mysteries of life, death, renewal and transformation.

My work could be seen to have elements of fauvism and expressionism, but flows most naturally in the currents of women surrealist painters such as Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, and Remedios Varo who also explored the landscape of the unconscious, the sacred feminine, female power, and alchemical transformation through mytho-poetic allegories; and Frida Kahlo, because she also used her painting to transcend physical and emotional pain, and in the unflinching rawness with which she sought to express her truth.

This statement was included in the show at the James Gray Gallery in Santa Monica, CA.

November - December 2007.

Copyright 2007.  Ashtoreth Valecourt. All rights reserved.

ASHTORETH'S BIO

Ashtoreth's interest and studies of art began at an early age.  She studied in classes and privately. From there she was self-taught, inspired by an ongoing interest in art and art history. From childhood, Ashtoreth has been drawn to the study of world myth, especially goddess cultures, mysticism, and the language of symbols.

These and her personal studies of psychology and archetypes feed into her life's artistic expressions as a writer, and painter. They are wells she draws from, a vocabulary she wields that are an inversion of her work as a writer; to capture vivid images and ideas in words.  In her paintings, her goal is to communicate the ideas of many words in a single image and to explore her own experiences and thoughts via the language of the right brain, in the poetry of images.

THE THINKING WOMAN

The Thinking Woman represents the dreaming creative woman. Shakti personified, her mind is in dynamic activity; synthesizing, dreaming, and preparing what she will manifest next. The golden snake bracelet is a talisman, identifying her with the sacred feminine.

THE POETICS OF SOUND

This expressionist work is a meditation on the gift of being able to hear.  It expresses awareness and gratitude for the gifts of connection to the world of sound, and indeed to life itself.  As a survivor of an acoustic neuroma I gave up the hearing nerve on the left side.  What remains is strictly ornamental, like that of the lavender fairy who is at the center of the painting.  So many people take their hearing for granted.  I never did, but I am especially aware now.  I began with a poetic fragment that came to my mind,

'The sound of the wind, the sound of the water, the sound of your voice.... music to my ears.'

It is my hope to raise awareness and funds for hearing research with this image.  All proceeds from the sale of this original painting will go to the William Slattery Science Foundation of the House Ear Clinic in Los Angeles.  Dr. Slattery gave me my life back.  It is my hope to be able to give back; to inspire, and to put art in the service of science.

ERESHKiGAL

As autumn deepens and we enter into the sign of Scorpio, whose archetypes deal with the underworld; eros, life and death, it was fitting to let Erishkegal have her moment.  Erishkegal is a character from ancient Sumerian myth, the sister/shadow of the goddess Inanna, and the Queen of the underworld.  This is her realm, and she is at ease here, the fluent embodiment of its mysteries, the ultimate femme fatale.  This painting was inspired by this myth and its archetypes, but also another underworld myth, the Greek myth of Persephone, her journey into the underworld and subsequent transformation into its queen, often referred to then, as Queen Proserpine.  At that point, she is no longer what she was.

In the myth, she was dragged from a field above, from the side of her mother Demeter, goddess of the fruitful earth, as Kore; which translates to ‘young girl,’ into the underworld.  There, in the realm of Pluto or Hades, she marries the god and becomes his queen.  Having eaten of the red foods of the dead, six seeds of a pomegranate fruit - she can never return to the world above completely; but must spend six months of the year there, ruling as its queen; in essence, as the queen of death, the dead, and all plutonian matters, where one is often dragged there and pulverized so that one may have knowledge of life and death and be transformed.  This need not be physical, but can be metaphorical.  Needless to say, experience of the underworld means you are no longer an innocent, and that innocence will never totally be reclaimed.  You become something else.  During Persephone’s time in the underworld, Demeter mourns and the earth sleeps until she returns in the spring again and the earth is renewed, or so the myth goes.  It is one of the myths of the seasons.

Image:  A goddess perches brooding on the ledge of a cave, deep in the underworld, warmed by the light of hot coals in a copper bowl.  She smokes a cigarette and regards us with knowing contemplation.  She tantalizes and barricades, mesmerizes and enslaves.  To approach her is to invite the sting of death.  She has knowledge of life and death, sex, power and their mysteries, and how they are all combined and reflect one another.  She not only knows; she embodies this.  At one point, she knew nothing.  She was an innocent, and naïve.  That has been pulverized.  It is dead.  It no longer exists.  In its place sits something else.  Knowledge of life and death, sex and power, demand the loss of innocence as their price.  Though one may dance in the sun again sometimes, the caves of the underworld will always call; always feel like home, for no one but those who have gone there and eaten its fruits can call it home.