Could This Be A Picture From Beyond Death?
This accomplished painter, sculptor, composer and actor has seen many things in his fifty odd years of life. It is however not his life experiences, but his death experiences that he says are at the root of the images in much of his work these days.
Camp Verde, AZ (PRWEB) October 12, 2004 --- For more than thirty years I have been on my own journey to find an absolute, non-relative truth", says Devi DeLavie (the artist also known as Dan Miner). He continues, I have been blessed with many teachers, some just folks Ive met along the way and others, recognized spiritual Masters. Thirty years of studying ancient teachings and meditating in the ways in which I was taught took me to a certain level of experience and understanding, but it was never enough."
Devis artwork during those thirty years embodied a vast array of images, most executed as bronze sculptures. His subjects ranged from classical nudes, to religious figures to figures straight out of mythology (both eastern and western) and even the inhabitants of Dantes classic novel The Inferno".
At one point," Devi continues, explaining the abrupt change in subject matter, Everything I was doing was public. I was Teaching at Tulsa University, teaching privately, writing for, and performing in a Community Theatre and occasionally singing in Night Clubs... all this as a way of paying the rent. I was burnt out spiritually and needed a time of deep retreat to sort things out within myself. The family of one of my students owned 56 undeveloped acres in Northern Minnesota and I was told I could stay there if I wanted to. So I built a little shack on top of an 8x12 trailer and hauled it up there."
It was the most profound period of my life. Even in the bitter cold that reached 60 below and more, I was drawn to deep meditation. I would be 'gone for hours, even days at a time. When I came back to body awareness on a few occasions, my body would not respond and it smelled of decomposition; I had to willfully cram my awareness back into it. It was during this period that I experienced the multitude of realms and states of being that most people would call death. I perceived an 'afterlife that was full of not only my Christian expectations, but my Buddhist and Hindu belief structures as well."
Now that he is painting and sculpting again, Devis images are of a phantasmagoria of landscapes and entities, some oddly familiar to the average viewer and some decidedly unbelievable.
Whatever your judgment of his work might be, you cannot help but be moved, either with a smile, a chuckle, or something deeply stirred, like a memory long buried but not gone.
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