Thirteen Year Collection
September – January 2018
Art Show: Unity Spiritual Center
2690 Ocean Ave, San Francisco, CA 94132
Closing talk, poetry reading and reception in January 2019
“May Love Be At The Center of All Choices”
The Sacred Invitation
About the show: This collection spans 13 years featuring art created in many different locations. Port Townsend, San Francisco, Sausalito, Sonoma, Mendocino and Healdsburg at my art studios and galleries. Each painting holds a story and the energy of a time and place within my career.
If these paintings could talk…or dance…the stories they would tell! Many early mornings with the muse and a cup of tea. Or by candlelight with a glass of vino with tears and drumming. With circles of women and with my lover. Alone and in the company of angels. Prayers and lamentations. Grief, recovery and bliss. Layers of healing and ultimately redemption.
These are paintings that were part of other full collections or were part of my personal collection. This is the first time for this particular grouping to come together with Unity Spiritual Center in mind. I wanted to create a show calling upon the essence of the feminine in images of the Blessed Mother, while remaining diverse in showing women of faith on the path of chosen transformation. Some were painted in classes, and still others were under the tutelage of my teachers, Caron McCloud and Sue Hoya Sellars.
When I look at them,I see my life unfolding. I am grateful to my friend and Pastor Maggie Oman Shannon for the invitation to share my work in the sanctuary where worship, prayer, meditation, self expression education and the blessings of the divine are experienced. I hope you see something that stirs you in your own experience of the sacred.
The paintings are from so many personal and collective teachings. The Creation Song was created with support from my teacher, Sue Hoya Sellars at Terra Sophia. We painted plein air for days on a custom panel. Her strokes are in the painting. This piece was purchased long ago by a woman who passed on and the painting returned to me. The one of Yeshua, He wanted to come too – was painted during a long journey of my Grandmother Eden passing. The painting shows points of exit and praying for her safe and peaceful passage. Her needle, thread and pattern were used in it. This is very rooted in how I approach painting, quite mystical and very literal at the same time.
Other paintings are teaching paintings where I guided other women to access the sacred invitation through Intentional Creativity. I Have Always Been Here, Cathedral of the Heart and the Weavers of the Great Mystery were each painted over 3 Thirteen moon cycles with a group of over 100 women in my ministry circle called Red Madonna. Another painting, Mama of Mamas was from my early thirties and was one of the first classes I taught on the Black Madonna. There is one inspired by Hildegard Von Bingen and Joan of Arc and Our Lady of Czestowchowa and the ancient Orthodox Icon called Theotokos of Vladimir.
I wish I could tell you about each one of them. Perhaps you can look at them and just ask for insight and see what arises? Many of the paintings hold the blessings of answered prayer but also the tragedies of the world – dots often represent deaths but also meditations and prayers. Everything gets included and therefore alchemized. When painting is a spiritual practice the act of Intentional Creativity is a vehicle for transformation.
For me creating art has always been a dialogue with the divine – even approaching worship. When a brush is in my hands and my heart is fixed on prayer and devotion I experience oneness with the Divine. I bring my praises, my complaints, my inquiries and my hopes. I just AM with the flow of creation. My work is an experience of reciprocity with the universe. I often think of it as antidote to the violence in the world. Painting as personal and collective medicine. This is my offering to the world, and my joy is to share the gift of self expression with others that they too might experience this.
From an early age I have walked with Christ and since my twenties with Mama Mary. Those two wild hearted ones have guided every step of my path and I am most grateful for the experience of embodied faith that being an artist brings. The sacred invitation is saying yes to the divine – whatever that means for each of us. The invitation is there if we are supple to it, opening our hearts and minds to what is possible in relationship to beauty.
Signed in a splash of glitter and woven with red thread,
SHARE the show with friends on FaceBook
Learn More: www.shilohsophia.com
www.intentionalcreativityfoundation.org
https://unitysf.org/
Painting Collection Mediums
Banner of Faith
Bella Madre
Cathedral of the Heart
Divine Wisdom
I Have Always Been With You
Journey Towards Destiny
Lady Moon
Love of the Divine
Path of Grace
Magistra Veriditas
Mama of Mamas
Mer-Madonna
Our Lady of the Flowering Earth
Our Lady of the Red Thread
One Who Shows the Way
She Holds Love In Her Arms
She Carries Me
The Creation Song
The Journey
The Transformation
We Are Her Constellation
Weavers Within the Great Mystery
BIO SHILOH SOPHIA
Shiloh Sophia lives life as a great adventure! A renaissance woman who communicates her philosophy through paintings, poetry, teachings and entrepreneurship. For 25 years she has dedicated her soul work to the study and practice of creativity as a path of healing which provides access to consciousness. As a curator and gallery owner, she has represented her own work, as well as hundreds of women artists. By the age of 40 she achieved incredible success through being in the top ten percent of sales for contemporary artists in the U.S. Her prolific intuitive painting process led to a desire to teach and provided the foundation for the groundbreaking work on how Intentional Creativity® can give voice to the soul.
Her work is taught widely, at the University in MA and Phd programs, the United Nations CSW, and by hundreds of Intentional Creativity Certified Teachers. At the core of her work is a belief that the right to self express is one of the most basic human rights – “We have a right to know how to access what we think, feel, believe and to express it in our lives”. Her life path is a spiritual practice, and an offering that was awakened with the feminine Divine. Her research dives into the exploration of the right/left brain connection with the heart and re-inventing personal archetypes as gateways to liberation. ”When we find freedom from the trauma of our stories, we can invent our own legends, and do the sacred work of organizing our consciousness.”
She is the creator of seven books, as well as a community leader. Having been trained by her mother Caron McCloud the poet, and Sue Hoya Sellars the artist, she brought her gifts of language and image into form through founding the Intentional Creativity® Foundation, Cosmic Cowgirls®, and Color of Woman®. She lives and works in Carmel, California with her husband the poet and chef, Jonathan McCloud. The two provide education both in-house and online, reaching over 25k subscribers a month. She can be found most days having tea with her muses discussing quantum physics and celebrating revelations of the heart.
