Our multi-talented friend, Marie-Laure Valandro, is an author, artist, art therapist, and avid biodynamic gardener, as well as a persistent world traveler. Her books,
Camino Walk: Where Inner & Outer Paths Meet and the upcoming
Letters from Florence: Observations on the Inner Art of Travel, chronicle two of her journeys in recent years. These are travelogues in spirit of Goethe's
Italian Journey. Here, we are happy to present to our readers photos of some of Marie-Laure's works of art, mainly veil paintings (what she calls "modern icons") intended to heal people and spaces. Her primary inspiration in this field has been
Liane Collot d’Herbois, a well-known anthroposophic art therapist and teacher.
Marie-Laure's newest book will come out in June, and she has finished two more manuscripts for Lindisfarne Books, one on meditation and one tentatively called
A Troubadour of Nature: On the Via Podiensis—The Path of Power.
Marie-Laure is a keep observer of life, people, the arts, and her own inner self, all of which she shares in her books. Naturally, as a passionate artist, paintings and architecture are never far from the forefront of her writing. But it is never
just about the work or the products of art, but the deeper meaning of art and images for human life, inner and outer. The following is a comment on the author's artistic views that appears near the end of
Letters from Florence:
My flight to Frankfurt would have been uneventful, except for a black fighter jet that got in the way, forcing the pilot to put on the breaks or step on the gas—I don’t know which—to avoid it. I saw the odd aircraft from the window of our plane making one of those sideways maneuvers to avoid us. Who made a mistake? Who knows? It delayed our arrival because we had to land at an airport far from Frankfurt. I finally got to my hostel after leaving all my heavy books in a locker. I discovered I would be staying smack in the middle of a brothel district that included at least twenty-five such hotels nearby. That meant no walking around at night. I stayed with the usual travelers/backpackers—one from Ireland, one from new Zealand, and some young men from Japan. The common room was full of dubious-looking men from Bulgaria or Romania who were doing funny businesses, and we were joined at breakfast by some women looking over-used and drawing my sympathy. Frankfurt, the city of banks, has many skyscrapers, reminding me of San Gemignano, the city of towers in Siena, and of how the wealthiest families had to have the biggest towers, not only for protection, but also for the sake of competition. Now we have the huge bank towers representing some of the huge companies that control the world. Meanwhile, as I walk around in one of the wealthiest city in the world, I see old men and women drunks sleeping in the streets, drug addicts in corners, and women forced to make a living selling their bodies—many of whom appear rather sick. And the bankers with their slick black suits and laptop computers out to make more money. In the old days, the towers communicate from one to the other as the poor on the ground scrounge a living. Here in Frankfurt, the tall towers lend one to the next, buy each other out, and still the ordinary people on the ground scrape out a meager living. They go to sleep with alcohol, TV, football, cinemas, shopping, and a new kind of slavery. And the towers grow larger.
I visit once again a museum of beautiful icons in the Russian tradition and take many pictures in addition to buying yet another book. The book has a section on icons and medicine, a topic of great interest to me. I have been seeing thousands of painted images, which it is my work back home as a painting therapist and a painter of healing paintings, or modern icons. We are all attracted to images, but most of us do not discriminate about which images we take in. Rudolf Steiner wrote about images; he said that it is immensely damaging to take in images without being aware of them.
Dennis Klocek, the author of The Seer’s Handbook, heads programs at Rudolf Steiner College near Sacramento. He sometimes gives his students an exercise: when you are at a supermarket, notice all the magazines that are there and sense how hungry you are for pictures. Indeed, we look at them unconsciously, especially the bad ones; we are drawn to them. And we can see their power. By becoming conscious of our wondering attention in such exercises, we can learn to control it. Another exercise is to driving around and become aware of what we look at without any real thought of what we are taking in. Pictures, Steiner says, live on in us and have a disturbing effect on our psyche, especially when they are taken in unconsciously. This is especially damaging to one’s soul life.
Steiner developed many exercises to train our minds not to wander and absorb destructive images. Now imagine young people sitting in front of a television, unconsciously absorbing countless images that do damage to them as their conscious attention is diverted by tactics to sell products. They are no longer in charge of their own psyche.
Now one observes beautiful icon paintings that used to surround people during the Middle Ages, whether at home or in a local church or cathedral. They lived with these healing images of saints, scenes from the New Testament, and various depictions of the Madonna and Child; they filled people with a healthy element. Of course this is true not only of the Christian world, but also in many other cultures.
After spending so much time looking at sacred works of art, I decide to visit a museum of modern art just for a shock. I step into a cavernous, white hospital-like room that contains enormous paintings, the subject of which is nothing. They are a pell-mell mixture of images, painted poorly in painful, screaming colors. They reveal the state of the human psyche today.
The indifference, as well as coldness, that exists toward art today arose gradually. Think of people in a modern city walking through a picture gallery or a painting exhibition. Their souls are not moved by what they see because it is unfamiliar to them. In a sense, they are faced by a multitude of riddles that they cannot solve unless they understand how the artist relates to the subject. The souls of onlookers are faced with purely individual puzzles, and the important matter is that people imagine they are solving problems related to art, but in most cases they not grappling with riddles of art at all, but merely with psychological problems related to the way a certain artist sees nature or views the world. Such questions, however, are not important when we examine the ages of great art, when both artist and viewer faced genuine tasks of aesthetics. The way the painting is accomplished is the real concern of the painter, whereas the substance of the painting is merely something that always flows around and thoroughly imbues the artist. You could say that today’s painters are observers rather than artists; they observe the world from their particular point of view, and, owing to their particular temperament, what they happen to notice they paint. They tackle psychological themes, problems of philosophy, or history, while the essential artistic questions of how the painting is to be approached has become almost entirely irrelevant today. People no longer have the capacity, or indeed the heart, to perceive art in its essence, which is to perceive the means and not just the content.... It is...no wonder that our age has lost the living element of soul that can sense what is really at work in the cosmos as a whole and what must flow to us from the cosmos and all its working before art can come into being. Art will never emerge from scientific concepts, let alone from abstract anthroposophic concepts. At best, these will generate insipid allegories or rigid symbols, but certainly nothing artistic. Today, thought and imagination about the world are inherently inartistic and even seek to be so. (Architecture as a Synthesis of the Arts, pp, 135-137; translation revised)
There is complete chaos in the museum. When will the phoenix be reborn amid this chaos? Of course the answer is not simply to copy the past, but to develop new icons that suit us today. For the past six or seven weeks, I have observed and meditated on treasures of the past, and I see that we need a greater understanding about what heals, and then we need to bring it into public awareness before mass hysteria arises from mass inattention and the absorption of meaningless images viewed unconsciously. Such images are thrown at the public to take advantage of the unconsciousness.
Click on this
link, which will direct you to Marie-Laure Valandro's paintings. Enjoy!
