Landscapes of the Goddess Within: Recent Paintings by Becky Soria

Archway Gallery presents Landscapes of the Goddess Within: Recent Paintings by Becky Soria. On view November 4 – November 30, 2017. The artist will be available to visit with guests during the opening reception on Saturday, November 4, 2017, from 5 – 8 p.m. with an Artist Talk at 6:30 p.m.

Life Interruptus…  The constant ding of the cell phone, whether by text or call or email or Facebook or….  To counteract the stress and anxiety provoked by the constant interruptions, the practice of mindfulness has been gaining currency in the West. Mindfulness, a form of meditation, is the practice of maintaining a moment-to-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, as well as of the surrounding environment.

Becky Soria has spent many years being mindful of her thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations, as well as the world she dwells within. In part, she was forced to attend to her interior landscape due to chronic pain caused by scoliosis.

Fortunately, she has been able to turn adversity into opportunity, as her awareness drew itself inward to find an inner landscape of complex structures interrelating thought with sensation, sensation with feeling, feeling engaging idea.

But these are relatively abstract conceptualizations of an inner landscape actually characterized by density, texture, color, movement, subtle energies, blockages, releases, compassion bodies, pain bodies, sacred bodies, lumina naturale… The list of the interior landscape of a mindful mind goes on and on.

In this current show, Landscapes of the Goddess Within, Becky Soria paints the woman as goddess, but not in any archaic way. She paints the inner landscapes of the totemic goddess female. Mindfulness practitioners are probably aware of chakra images, and these do represent an inner landscape. But this is the inner landscape of a quite perfected individual. It is a landscape for the advanced practitioner to use as a map.

For the rest of us, Soria shows us our inner landscapes; and it is amazing.

Pictured: “The Body Electric” (detail).