By Carol Tombers
Shamanic Series 1, Egg tempera with earth pigments on Arches Rag 400 lb. paper, 23″x30″, painting © 2008 by Carol Tombers. All rights reserved.
It is my desire for color that calls me to the studio. Essentially, color is a vibration and its energy is stored in the mineral pigment. I am drawn to put those different vibrations next to each other and listen to how they speak to one another. And I am curious to bring together colors that are rich beyond daily visual experience.
Painting is like a meditation for me. It almost always produces a calm and alert state of mind, and puts me in touch with a universal sense of well being. It hasn’t always been like this. For many years the primary test was a struggle with what subject matter to depict.
Now I try to include all of the subject matter that interests me at once, and the challenge becomes how to represent it in a way that might be meaningful to the viewer. The image, then, is closer to how I experience the world and this gives me a sense of satisfaction.
Shamanic Series 4, Egg tempera with earth pigments on Arches Rag 400 lb. paper, 23″x30″, painting © 2008 by Carol Tombers. All rights reserved.
Five years ago I began to take classes in Medieval egg tempera painting from a master icon painter in the Russian Orthodox tradition. The theology underlying the images engages me in a mythological way rather than a spiritual way. My own studio painting changed as I began to understand that every aspect of the painted icon is reflective of a particular concept of the theological tradition. No brush stroke is made, nor color mixed, that it not significant to the theology.
For example, when an icon is gilded, the artist first applies bole, a mixture of red clay and glue, to the prepared surface. The bole (essentially dirt) symbolizes the most base aspects of human nature. The bole is polished to a mirror-like smoothness, a symbol of the spiritual work of the human. Next, the icon maker breathes a deep breath onto the bole to make it tacky before laying on the 24K gold leaf, a symbol of divine perfection. The idea of these materials symbolizing a spiritual process inspired me to put my personal mythology into my work.
About this same time I began to study shamanism, first in the tradition of the Mapuche people of Chile, and later in a more general way. It is through shamanic “journeys” and other meditation practices that I come to the imagery of my paintings.
Shamanic Series 3, Egg tempera with earth pigments on Arches Rag 400 lb. paper, 23″x30″, painting © 2008 by Carol Tombers. All rights reserved.
The paint I use is made from “earth pigments.” These minerals and plants are ground and mixed with egg yolk, water, and a drop of vinegar to preserve it. The beauty of egg tempera is that it is translucent and that light passes through the paint and bounces off of the white ground, giving an effect of a painting that is illuminated from within.
The pigment can be laid down on the painting in a pool of water so that the different mineral colors fall to the surface of the painting in patterns similar to the bottom of a dry riverbed. Up close a tension can be seen between the various pigments; but stepping back your eye blends the color together to see it unified. So there is an exciting variation in the appearance of the materials, depending on proximity.
Shamanic Series 5, Egg tempera with earth pigments on Arches Rag 400 lb. paper, 23″x30″, painting © 2008 by Carol Tombers. All rights reserved.
To support my studio work, I make color studies, practice brush strokes, and collect color combinations. I paint about six hours at a time, two or three times a week. I look at other paintings. I keep painting. I learn about what other creative people think about. I keep a journal of color combinations and their recipes, lists of books to read, and images to track down on the web. I don’t often listen to music while I paint because I want the right hemisphere of my brain available for painting. But I do listen to audio books and pod casts while I work.
I was listening to a dialogue between Leonard Cohen and Philip Glass from the Aurora Forum at Stanford University. Leonard Cohen said you (artists) have to keep going because it isn’t until near the end of the work that the brilliance of it comes out. So I urge my strategic mind to fixate on color combinations and other art elements and principles, rather than the evaluation of my work in a realm beyond my control. This allows me to keep going.
Shamanic Series 2, Egg tempera with earth pigments on Arches Rag 400 lb. paper, 23″x30″, painting © 2008 by Carol Tombers. All rights reserved.
About Carol: Carol Tombers was born and raised in Minnesota. She began her artistic career at the age of eight by painting a picture of the garage on plywood with house paint. Later she earned a BFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design and an MA from the University of St. Thomas. She is especially delighted by travel, and has done visual research most recently in Barcelona and Bogotá.
Carol has taught visual art for ten years at The Blake School and will begin a seven-month sabbatical in January 2009. During that time she will be studying historical color systems and painting in Mexico and Colombia. Her work has been shown in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taipei, Seoul, and Ohio.
To learn more about the Russian-Byzantine Tradition of Icon Painting visit The Prosopon School of Iconology. To learn more about shamanic healing in the Mapuche tradition visit Luzclara — Chilean Medicine Woman.
redravine.wordpress.com 
These are all absolutely beautiful and the fourth one, wow; it really made its way in……..I liked these lines: Painting is like a meditation for me. It almost always produces a calm and alert state of mind, and puts me in touch with a universal sense of well being.
That’s what writing poetry does for me….thanks for sharing these.
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Very impressive! I love your use of color and lines and hidden imagery. Too often we don’t see what our teacher artists are actually capable of – just what their students can do. Thank you for sharing and best wishes for a terrific sabbatical.
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The last piece is by far my favorite as it strongly resonates with me. When I look at that painting, the word “transition” comes to mind as in the meaning and season of autumn.
I feel that way when it comes to writing poetry. Every poem I write is a creation, a transition into being, something mythical, spiritual, cultural, and religious.
Carol, these paintings are beyond gorgeous and inspirational; you hit into the deep hearts of humanity and meditation that is necessary for healing and living life to the fullest. Thank you for sharing these paintings with us!! I always have an eye for art, and I think yours deserve to be in a museum or even a meditation garden! 🙂
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Your work vibrates with energy. It’s amazing how the natural pigments reflect the light and make the color even more brilliant than something more dense.
I think it’s wonderful that you are working to keep these Old World methods alive. Do you teach them to your students, as well?
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Fabulous — its quiltingly patchwork in paint and
hauntingly beautiful — seems to draw you into the
scene and make you want to reach in for more.
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Carol,
Your work is at once, full of energy and yet calming and soothing at the same time. It is breath-taking in its beauty, mysticism and imagery! I appreciate your explanations, as well. Thank you for a most inspiring post…it’s a “keeper!”
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Thanks all for your kind and encouraging comments.
Ybonsey asked about teaching this process. In fact, I teach it to my second grade students. We begin by looking at portraits from Fayoum-these are Roman/Egyptian funerary portraits. They are exceedingly beautiful, and some of them depict young people. We conjecture about what paint is made out of, (milk, dirt, rain are popular guesses) and we learn about pigments. The students love to crack a shivering egg into their hand, separate it, and mix it into a painting brew. We then make a portrait following the methods of the Russian-Byzantine icon painters, though we use imagery from the Fayoum portraits. The loose quality of the student’s painting makes for some stunning results.
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Carol, it’s such a pleasure to have you on red Ravine. Wonderful work. And I like the essay you wrote about your process. Especially the part about starting with the rough bole and shining it to perfection as it relates to a spiritual process. I also liked how you talked about the translucent qualities of the egg tempera and how you make a little pool and let the sediment settle into the color.
Your work is so detailed, I’m wondering — how many hours goes into one of these paintings?
I also have a couple of technical questions. Does the egg tempera paint spoil at all — how long does it keep? And when you draw out these designs, do you make a grid first? I noticed that someone mentioned your work is like a patchwork quilt. And it does remind me of fabric art translated to painting. I’m just blown away by the detail of it.
It’s so wonderful that you teach this process to your students. I bet they love you as a teacher. I think if I would have learned things like that as a kid, like how paint is made, or how to make egg tempera, I would have gotten involved in the Arts at a much earlier age!
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Wow, Carol, second grade? I had been picturing you working with students older, like middle or high school. That’s really cool that you’re exposing them to these techniques at such a young age. I bet the results are stunning.
Also, I was curious about the sabbatical. Is it something your school offers to all teachers? Em’s guitar instructor happens to teach at a private Montessori here, and he also got a sabbatical. I thought that was a fabulous idea for teachers.
BTW, my work also offers the sabbatical, (although it’s two months off, not a year, but if you combine with the other month of paid vacation, you can take an entire summer off, for example). I think it’s the best benefit an employer can offer to an employee. It’s a chance to refresh, rest, pursue passions, be with loved ones, be alone…whatever you want. I’m due for my next one in just a couple of years, in fact.
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I cannot come near to picking a favorite, They are all amazing. Each time I go back to look at the individual works I see something new. They would make wonderful meditative pieces, I can imagine them gentling the mind and calling forth thoughts, a wandering, a discovery tool. Very organic.
I am very interested in making ink from natural pigments – have actually made ink with the lavender flower, though not for the pigment but for the fragrance – but I have researched making writing inks from different types of earth, so your pigment painting is fascinating to me.
What a wonderful experience you provide to the young artists in your classes. I ‘m thinking their works would be very unusual.
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Dear A lotus,
Thank you for your comments. I also view the work as a depiction of a transition, or all the many transitions that we are experiencing at any given moment. Of course our minds like to think of us as stable, fixed, settled, but my genuine experience is that all of my thoughts, sensations, memories, chaos, and sense of well being-it’s all happening at once and any categories that I divide my life into may be useful in a practical way, but they are essentially constructions of mind. We are, after all, just whirling around a star.
The horses also refer to a specific transition. I was thinking about how people used to travel only on foot and the profound change it must have been to begin to travel on horseback. One would see the landscape from a elevated perspective, and would be able to go much farther afield before needing to return home for dinner. I am most interested in the psychological change this precipitated in the world view of humans. It seems to me that this transition offered not only an expanded world, but also a very intimate experience with an animal, and I wonder about this evolutionary event from the point of view of the Horse People.
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Dear marj kammuelller,
Thank you for your comments, I spent many years working in textiles, making elaborate appliqued people, animals, and designs. I love to do it but would spend 1-3 years on each piece. I am glad to think that the paintings are seen as quilt-like.
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Carol,
That’s wonderful! Great minds think alike! 🙂 And yes, I can see that transition image playing around with the horse depicted in the painting. It sums me (and humanity in general) pretty well!
That’s fascinating what you said about the horse image. I think we each have our own animals, so to speak. Mine is similar to that of a phoenix on a spiritual level. I wrote a few poems incorporating that animal.
And Horse people? Do you mean the Horse people of the Chinese Zodiac?
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Hi QuoinMonkey,
You asked, “How many hours goes into one of these paintings?”
Truthfully, I try not to count. I’m not very good at counting and
counting starts my mind to thinking anti-artistic thoughts. Inevitably these thoughts turn to the monetary value of my work in a culture that undervalues art, overvalues science and… well, you see it goes on from there. Over time I’ve decided it’s not a very useful conversation with myself and can stop me from working. I can tell you I make about 4 or 5 paintings per year.
“Does the egg tempera paint spoil at all — how long does it keep?” It doesn’t spoil on the painting because there is only a tiny amount of egg yolk mixed with the pigment. But if I leave egg/water solution sit around for a few days it gets stinky. A farmer recently told me that a egg that has never been refrigerated will stay fresh a week or two! But once you put it in the refrigerator and take it out you have to use it pronto. So I try to use unrefrigerated, organic eggs- the quality is so much better than the supermarket ones.
“When you draw out these designs, do you make a grid first?”
Yes, I do. For me it represents a number of things. The vertical lines represent the connection between the upperworld and the underworld. There are many ways for me to say this; higher consciousness/unconsciousness, would be another way. The horizontal lines represent the plane of the material world. The places where those lines intersect become symbols of infinite possibility, and the places of our birth in this world. It’s a way for me to depict many moments of time simultaneously.
QM, thanks for all of your comments, but especially those about my students. I adore my students. Perhaps none of them will grow up to be artists, but that is irrelevant. With continued exposure to art education they will grow up to be creative, critical, and strategic thinkers in a world that will have challenges we cannot yet imagine.
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Bo, I was just reading back through the comments and I think it’s fascinating that you are making your own inks (#10). I’d love to know more about that. I’ve got an ink pen and a lot of nibs I just ran across in a box in the studio. If you stop back this way, I’m curious about the lavender ink. How was it to write with? And was it dark enough on the page?
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Carol, thanks for the depth of your responses. I’m amazed about the farmer and the eggs, how they keep longer if you don’t refrigerate them. I read somewhere, too, that a little bit of vinegar helps preserve homemade paints. And also it’s great to learn about your process around the horses.
I’ve been thinking more about your imagery and how you said how some of it comes from your shamanic journeys. (The longer I look at your paintings, the more I see in them.) The animals that you incorporate into your work, do you consider them Totem animals? Do they consistently show up in your journeys? I wondered if you could talk a little about the shamanic part of the process as it relates to your art.
You know what else stuck out for me — the way you decided to put all your favorite imagery into one painting, rather than trying to agonize about what to put in, what to leave out. It’s a good way to look at that part of the process when we are faced with a blank canvas, a blank piece of drawing paper.
That concept kind of reminds me of Writing Practice – in that you simply write everything in these structured practices as a way to get your creative words down on the page, to get to the heart of the matter without agonizing over what to write. You can sort through it all later. And it even has a similar conclusion in writing — the trick is to figure out how to integrate the raw word imagery on the page into a structure that appeals to a reader.
I am grateful that art teachers like you are out there in the world teaching the next generations. As you mentioned, art teaches people of all ages how to be creative, critical, and strategic thinkers. And when funding for the Arts gets cut (and it’s often the first to go), it makes me cringe.
I’m just curious – when you teach art to your students, what do you teach them as a definition of art? Or how do you explain the importance of the Arts? Or do you simply let the hands-on aspect of doing their own art teach them those things.
I’m also curious about ybonesy’s question about your sabbatical (#9). I do know one other public school teacher in MN who took one a few years ago.
Thanks for being our guest, Carol. It’s been a pleasure.
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QM – Here’s a link from my blog with the recipe. You use a black ink base and actually scent the ink with the died flowers, so it’s not really making pigment inks.
http://gardengrow.wordpress.com/2008/07/31/a-old-recipe-for-scented-lavender-ink/
But I have a book with lots of information on using different types of earth to make writing ink. I’ll send you that if I can find it. (Way too many books in this house…) 🙂
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Bo, I just checked out your link — what a wonderful post about the lavender ink recipe. And that your great grandmother made scented inks every summer. I love that.
And, yes, I’m very interested in making inks from different types of earth. If you find the book, let me know and we can email off-line. I’d love to make ink pigments to use in letter writing. I also like adding the scent.
I’ve done a lot of road trips. And when I traveled, I would pick up a little dirt from the different places I traveled. Old Mother Earth. I labeled them and collected them in spice jars. I have used different blends of this earth in my artwork over the years. It only added to my interest in Carol’s work with the egg tempera.
I’m excited to begin using those pockets of Earth again. And as a writer, the ink really appeals to me. Thanks for adding this little spark to the conversation. 8)
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Carol,
While looking at your work, I’m reminded of a feeling that came over me when I saw the play “The Lion King”.
I had this overwhelming feeling of pride, knowing that there were people scattered all over the world…so very talented…and realized how lucky the rest of us were to share the planet with them.
Yep, that’s how I feel seeing these and I’m very blessed to be daily surrounded by others who share their gift as well…
😉 H
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These are wonderful.
I immediately thought “quilt”, and the overall warmth of wrapping myself in such comforting images.
These are powerful.
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These paintings are so beautiful, so rich, like a tapestry of images with soft, deep colors. Thanks so much for posting them for our enjoyment. My favorite is #3 but I love them all and am grateful you told us how you paint them, it must be such a wonderful way to spend time.
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I’d like to respond to ybonsey’s question about sabbaticals. My school awards one, semester-long, sabbatical each year to a member of the faculty. They also offer a handful of shorter sabbaticals to be taken during the summer when school is not in session. It is a juried process; applicants submit a proposal that is reviewed by committee and awarded by the head of the school.
I began my sabbatical proposal by doing some internal and external research. “What would I do if I could do anything?” Anything, anything, really anything. I kept lists of my answers over six months or so. I read the proposals that had been approved previously and kept asking myself the question. Eventually it became evident that I wanted to live and paint in Colombia, visit a couple other countries, study about the way cultures make associations to color, interview artists, and do some web chats between artists in the northern and southern hemispheres, and continue to develop a service project I have going in Colombia. As I revised the proposal I did my best to aligned my goals to the mission of the school. And I sought advice from a friend who is a grant writer. (a million more thanks CM) The process as described here seems so straight forward, but it wasn’t, it was messy and there were u-turns. When I was lost I would go back to my original question. I was meditating and painting a lot at the time and that helped with the fear that came up when I began to see that I wanted to use a sabbatical experience to try to expand the perimeter of my life. I leave in four months…yikes!
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Hi QM,
You wrote; “I’m just curious – when you teach art to your students, what do you teach them as a definition of art? Or how do you explain the importance of the Arts? Or do you simply let the hands-on aspect of doing their own art teach them those things.”
I love talking about teaching art. I’ll try not to write a tome here…
“How do you explain the importance of the Arts? “(to the children)
This is such a great question because it points to some of the changes in education in the last generation. My students are 5-10 years old-they know, with their whole body, the value of visual arts, theater arts, and music. It would be more accurate to say that they have not been educated out of their intrinsic knowledge of the value of art. My job is in offering them tools to help them strengthen their relationship to this creative part of themselves.
The goal is for them to develop artistic habits of mind that lead to insights about themselves as learners and community members. To do this we study aesthetics, (“Are trees beautiful to everyone?”) art history, (comparison of tree paintings) technique, (paint a tree with a stick and with a paint brush) and art criticism. (“What are the qualities of the object that I have made?”) The elements of line, shape, color, and form guide our work.
It used to be that teachers saw themselves as great store houses of knowledge and that students were empty vessels, ready (or not) for that information to be poured into. I am generalizing here a great deal, but the point is that nowadays we know that new learning needs to be linked to previous learning, and that knowledge is co-constructed between teacher-student and peer to peer. It is from this point of view that I say there are no definitions of art. Definitions are definitive thoughts that are practical for some things. But, I think, every person, whether they are 5 or 85 makes meaning in their own way, according to the experiences of their life. And, it seems to me art is all about making meaning.
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Carol,
Wow,
I’ve just spent a short time reading through the comments. You are so very amazing!
I have not had a chance to see all these painting before. I love each one. I found myself breathless. There is so much detail.
Thank you for sharing the link with me.
Much love,
Kath
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Carol, I love your answer to the question about art (#23). It has so much depth. I want to think about it more. There is a lot to think about there.
I also just remembered that I wanted to come back to your piece and put a link to your show this week. I made a comment in Gail’s red Ravine piece that the two of you had gotten paintings into an MIA show this week – Art Perchance, a juried fundraising event hosted by Friends of the Institute. .
[For Gail’s work see Inner Rhythms – paintings by Gail Wallinga (LINK)]
I’m adding the Minneapolis Institute of Arts show information here, too. Congrats to both you and Gail! You’ll have to come back and let us know how the show goes.
_______________
See the work of Carol and Gail along with other selected pieces in the 3rd Floor Reception Hall in the Target wing. If you live in the area, please stop by if you have the opportunity; details are below.
Minneapolis Institute of Arts (LINK)
2400 Third Avenue South
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55404
888.642.2787 (Toll Free)
Monday: Closed
Tuesday: 10-5
Wednesday: 10-5
Thursday: 10-9
Friday: 10-5
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[…] The Shamanic Series by Carol Tombers […]
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What a wonderful collection of work! I was introduced to your work through a friend of yours, Barb Kobe. I love your use of natural pigments – something a friend of mine has been exploring as well. I love the quilt/mosaic-like technique. Wish I could witness your process personally.
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