The Mystical Painting of Gaia

Gaia, the Goddess Mother Earth, is a beautiful flowing spirit that encompasses all of life on the planet.  I was given the task of capturing Gaia in a painting, but I had no idea how to do that.  Gaia isn’t just an image of a pregnant woman with leaves in her hair, she is Mother Earth.  She is everything! She is the ocean, the wind, the sky filled with birds.  She is the charging herd of wild buffalo, the leaves on the trees, the lady bugs on the petals, the air, and the rain.  She is the spirit of home that nurtures all of the creatures and all of the peoples, breathes life energy into them and cradles them at night.  I thought, “How in the heck am I supposed to capture THAT on a painting?” But I’m a figure painter, and it would make sense for me to paint a female figure to represent her, but then what race would I make her?  How could I make her unique, and not trite?  I was so stumped.  Honestly I would have never have painted what I painted if things were left only up to me.  This bright beautiful painting of Gaia,  painted in a whimsical cartoony style, is not exactly what I usually do.  In fact, this whole painting was quite out of the ordinary for me in more ways than one.  The truth is, I’m not the one who painted it…
Years prior to this, unintentionally I started channeling.  I thought I was possessed actually.  Some force or spirit inside of me was moving my body around if I let it.  It would move my head around, it would draw on my sketch pad, and I started automatic writing.  Things got scarry real quick, and it was telling me horrible things that made me make rash decisions.  After having a near breakdown about it, seeing shamans for clearings and New Age therapists, getting Mormon blessings, and then just finally ignoring it for two years, I could feel sort of normal again.  Doing all of that spiritual work for two years, I became sort of a raw foods New Age guru.  Then at a spiritual healing workshop as we were opening ourselves up to the universe in healing modalities, I let it move me again, but this time it was different.  All of that time spent raising my mental/emotional vibration had brought me up to a higher state of resonance.  Now I wasn’t dealing with low crawling mischievous spirits anymore, now I was dealing with something higher, something more special.  I was surprised at the way I could channel healing qi through the movements of my “ghostie friend.”  Not only that but it could also dance and rollerblade really really well.  I was starting to have fun with my ghostie friend again but was still leery while playing with it.
I stretched an prepped the canvases, giving them some random splatters of paint, like I usually do. I hung them on the wall.   I was still stumped on how to paint Gaia.  I said, “Ghostie freind, you do it.”  I relaxed my body in the certain way where I allow it to move me.  It would move my hand holding the brush to the pallet to choose a color and then back to the canvas to paint.  What started happening was amazing.  Imagine all of this in the same cartoony style as the finished piece.  The first things that started to appear on the canvas was the big bang, a bright star that exploded out into many stars.  We painted spirals for galaxies.  My ghostie friend is obsessed with spirals.  It was quite time consuming because I couldn’t just paint on the canvas, my ghostie friend would make me dance around and paint the air in front of the canvas too, as if I was making an energetical three dimensional painting of the stars and the galaxies.

Then the next thing that was painted were some outlines of single cell bacteria all around, but very primitive looking.  Then ancient crustaceans appeared here and there, a purple dinosaur to the left, and then one big giant crocodile appeared across the whole top of the canvas.  I was like, “Oh no.  I can’t present the filmmakers with a cartoon crocodile and pass it off as Gaia.”  But then as things kept progressing, more and more animals appeared and the ones below them were getting covered up.  Mammals appeared. This painting was evolving like Mother Earth.   A big yellow snake halfway coiled in the top right corner had eaten a monkey and you could see it through the snake.  That got covered up by the giant purple rhinoceros.  So many animals came alive over the whole canvas, that you could barely see that giant crocodile anymore.  There ended up being two ghosts in the painting too.  A crazy-eyed, grandma type of ghost to the right, and the ghost of a monkey to the left.

To remind you, I didn’t draw any of this.  I just let my ghostie friend move my brush on the canvas.  Then finally some small images of humans appeared on the bottom.  A man riding a horse, and some humans being carried in carriages on top of elephants.  Then the wind blew through them and the humans appear slightly to be losing control of the situation, which I thought was funny.
I was blown away watching this giant painting come together piece by piece before my eyes.  If someone else was watching me paint this, they would have thought it was all my doings, all my drawings, design and color choices.  But I knew that the real artist behind this piece was my ghostie friend.  Of course my own natural skills and talents helped a lot, and I certainly did a lot of my own volition, but mostly filling in colors and gaps etc.
Then I said, “Well this is quite the collection of animals, but where’s Gaia?  Other than everywhere?”  Then we painted the blue outline of her spirit that spanned over the three canvases.  Her head is in the top right corner with spirals for eyes and a warm smile.  She’s just floating there, hanging out with all of her creations and pretty happy about it.  Then I said, Ok it’s my time to take over, and I did all of the finish painting, tightening, tinting, shading and made it look like an actual professional painting.

After all was said and done, I couldn’t believe my eyes.  I couldn’t have come up with a better Gaia myself if I tried.  I was thrilled and mystified and shocked about what exactly had happened over the course of the past three months.  I was pretty sheepish about telling other people how I painted this for a long time, but now I don’t care.  World, Meet my Ghostie Friend!
Gaia has been around to a few art shows and her presence fills the room with energy.  You stand in front of the painting and feel energy radiating out from it, even across the room.  She filled my studio with life and energy for a long time.  Sometimes I would hang her in my bedroom to be showered by her love.
The original is available for sale for $333,000.  There are no prints available