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Aliyah Marr
The Tao of Creating Art
In the last 15 years I have identified two major voices or moods in my work. The moods correspond to the two basic sides of my personality: one is very aggressive, expressive and masculine; the other is contemplative, surreal, feminine and cool. These two distinctive moods correspond to the eastern concept of the Yang and the Yin: the Yang style can be seen in the vibrant colors, expressionistic style, and large canvases of the Body & Soul series. The yin mood translates to the cool colors, smooth technique, and small dimensions of the Mirage series. These two voices exist side by side: I work on a minimum of 4 canvases at once and find there is usually a mix of work in each style.
Even the videos that I have produced are evenly divided between the two voices. Beauty Tip #1: Exfoliate belongs to the Yang voice: the film records the destruction of a woman’s magazine and a young woman’s search for identity. The Subtitulo films — Subtitlo: Bergman and Subtitlo: Kurosawa — by contrast have a passive or contemplative mood.
It is in the paintings where this dualistic nature is most evident. Each style or mood can be seen to have its own evolution. The paintings do seem to influence each other and lend themselves to my personal development. I like to say that painting is how I think at a very deep, non-verbal level. After years of trying to consolidate the two styles into one, I am finally content to see how they fare if left alone.
I never start out with the idea that I am going to produce a piece in one voice or another; I have only been able to see these two parallel tracks when I look at the work in retrospect.
It is only recently, in my Tarot deck that I can see how the two styles can work together. The Transformational Tarot is, like the Osho Zen Tarot, only loosely based upon the traditional Tarot: it is meant to be an aide in the development of awareness. I made the Arcana cards from the paintings of the last 15 years. In choosing the images to go in each suite and to go with each word, I could see how the Body & Soul style fit with the Minor Arcana; and how the Mirage voice fit the Major Arcana. The Minor Arcana concepts are all about the trials and obstacles of life, the lesser gods and demons at the gates of enlightenment. The Major Arcana concepts are about levels of awareness.
Both styles or voices deal with the same ideas or themes. In the last year of art school at the L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts, I produced a series of paintings called The Object, which had as theme, the idea of how something can go from an object of veneration or worship, to something that is taken for granted, like a tool or decoration. I was highly influenced by an exhibition of Buddhist paintings that I had seen that year in Paris, and by my personal study of European culture, mythology, and Jungian psychology. The Object series was the culmination of a year of study and contemplation on the nature of religion, mysticism, language and the evolution of awareness. This theme is a common thread in all my work.
For years, I have been working with the same awe for life, the enigma of reality, the development of awareness, the dual forces of yin and yang, and the yearning for what we cannot see, touch, or feel. Somehow we know it is there, it is there in the violence as well as in the calm. It is beyond the duality and the suffering we experience, and it is also in that as well. I can identify with both Rene Magritte and Francis Bacon because they embody something in me, in all of us: our schizophrenic society: our need to understand and perhaps evolve beyond our essentially conflicted and dual nature.
— Aliyah Marr
Represented by
MIWAA MIdtown West Artists Alliance