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I have painted all my life. Its the way I best express my feelings for the numinous. Over the past 30 years I have been living a very simple life in the West Indies and have produced a large body of work, influenced by many cultures,mythologies, philosophies and metaphysical ideas which become woven as a continuum in my work. But most important are the direct experiences and insights which arise from living primitively and alone in wild and completely natural surroundings, spending many hours in meditation and spiritual practice—I have been a vajrayana buddhist practitioner since the early seventies, and although that is still my main spiritual practice—I'm aligned one pointedly with the world movement into a higher stage of evolution. One of the most important accomplishments from my years of living as a recluse in the rain forest has been the inner union of the Masculine and Feminine. A theme which is often expressed in my art. My paintings have a natural alchemy that conjures strong atmosphere. They contain a power, an energy within themselves which flows into the viewer. They are unimpeded expressions; free-flowing manifestations of Wonder and Wakefulness. A pictorial language which alchemizes strands of deep meaning, mystical symbols, and nuanced feeling.
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Jennifer Baird | Secret Domain of the Forest Yogini
Jennifer Baird’s art has reminded many of the visual aesthetic of Avatar. She has, of course, lived in a solitary and meditative manner in a tropical rainforest for thirty years! And yet, the comparison with Avatar falls short – that movie, as Ken Wilber has shown, finding its center of gravity at a green value wave that romanticizes the spirituality of the indigenous people. Baird’s art in contrast goes far past such romanticizing into something still too rare in the world – a vision and enactment of agapic descent as fully creative and generative. In integral theory there are four fundamental drives of the Kosmos: the horizontal drives of agency and communion; and the vertical drives of eros and agape. Eros is the drive of self-transcendence and ascending development and growth; agape is the drive of self-embrace and descending integration and health. Novel capacities are proper to the transformations of eros. What we can add is that through certain kinds of agapic descent, higher waves of development come not only to embrace and integrate but more profoundly to marry those lower and prior, this union giving birth to novel capacities in their own right, a process that we can call transfiguration. But why might this matter? Spiritual teachers like Saniel Bonder (“ healing the spirit/matter split”) and Michael Washburn (“regression in the service of transcendence”) direct us in their own ways to heal the epochal dissociation, that occurred early in human history, between the noosphere and the biosphere, the former as dominator of the latter. This dissociation entered our individual psyches long ago, splitting us off as adults from the deepest vital energies of Earth. Baird’s art is thus especially outstanding in that it expresses and enacts a movement of 2nd and 3rd tier stage structures descending to marry the spiritual energies of nature proper to the early waves of human culture. This specific mode of descending union and creative agape is grounded in her deep Vajrayana and Dzogechen Buddhist practice coupled with immersion in a natural environment woven with indigenous ways of life (cf. Forest Yogini). Subtle archetypes (Moonrise) and non-dual evocations (Riding the Wave) are married to the naked feel and raw energies of nature. In some works this transfiguring process works upon the very forms of art that emerged during the Neolithic moment of culture (Oh What Joy) that preceded the epochal and radical dissociation of the biosphere and noosphere. Baird’s is an exemplary art that enacts from an address of high developmental altitude the fully creative and generative dimensions of the Deep Feminine in Her agapic descent. Michael Schwartz |
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