The Illumination series explores the traditional topic of light but from a purely spiritual perspective. These paintings are the spiritual made material. They reference the horizon as the point of departure for the enlightened mind as the sun breaks through the darkness between earth and the sky.

This work expresses the dawning of a light filled state of awareness or consciousness within the mind. They track the progress of the light that pushes out conditioning, ego attachments, thoughts and the sense of the self as mortal and finite. In all of my work, I am tracking the movement from unconscious to conscious awareness toward enlightenment

Enlightenment is, at its essence, the presence of light. It is a state of mind. Once the light enters the mind and imagination, it enters and consumes the body.

The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural...The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white.

-- Wassily Kandinsky

The Void

I am being filled

from the inside out

by a great void.

A vast emptiness

covered by the thin skin

of identity.

© Jill Joy

Executed in a kind of meditative semi-trance, Jill Joy’s paintings are like artifacts, residues of the energy that produced them, both art historically/materially and spiritually galvanized process paintings of the highest order; and further, physical conduits of that same luminous energy, radiating into the world. ~ The Huffington Post

Solace

quiet moment

silent mind

light cracks through

the dark drawn blind

crowded moments

have now flown

time stretches out

lithe and long

the next moment

cannot conceive

this long moment

a breath of reprieve

© Jill Joy

Limitless Borders

limitless borders

disappearing mind

dissolving ground

i am nowhere to be found

© Jill Joy

ART EVOLVES CONSCIOUSNESS®

The Consciousness Series is an expression of the unseen worlds of spiritual and emotional energy and their interplay as the individual soul evolves towards a higher state of consciousness.

The paintings sometimes move from dark to light representing the movement from unconscious to conscious awareness. They are a snapshot of mental and emotional experience time and space, the mind aware of itself in a field of universal love. The paintings are executed in a meditative trance and thus become meditative objects, contemporary mandalas.

This work references the sky and sea as metaphors for universal consciousness within which the individual soul experiences and evolves.

Special techniques I developed with oil paint and mediums create luminous surfaces that change with the light as the sky changes with the trajectory of the sun and as the mind changes with the nature of thought.

Grey Skies addresses continued aspiration in the face of loss and struggle. It is an acknowledgment of the difficulty and beauty one encounters when making difficult changes that bring greater authenticity and meaning to ones life. It's a painting about the process of personal evolution. Stark. Dramatic. Beautiful. Subtle.

The tower motif in my work represents the aspiration of the soul towards unity with universal consciousness.

Painted in oil on primed canvas over 2.5" deep hand built stretchers, signed lower right side.

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Rain addresses the purification of the mind and soul of old ideas and insecurities and the birth of new beginnings. Rainwater clears the atmosphere of the sky of debris as tears clear the soul of illusion. We are greater beings than we think

The rising sun icon in my work represents the emergence of the spirit or soul from the sea of ego based desires and attachments toward an illuminated state of unconditional love and forgiveness. Specifically "Rain" addresses the purifying nature of rainfall as the acceptance of change which allows us to clear our personal "atmosphere" and start fresh after experience has burnished us.

Painted in oil on primed canvas over 2.5" deep hand built stretchers, signed lower right side. Original oil painting as well as limited edition prints available.

According to yogic philosophy, we're born with a karmic inheritance of mental and emotional patterns—known as samskaras—through which we cycle over and over again during our lives. lt also represents a purification ceremony or rite marking a major event in one's life.

The transformation of anger to compassion. The awareness that we each have our own point of view and even a limited one deserves a compassionate response. Compassion is a more powerful response than anger and all beings deserve it.

Painted in oil on primed canvas over 2.5" deep hand built stretchers, signed lower right side.

You know when there's a storm coming, you can feel it. The pressure builds, the winds rise. It may be calm outside but you can feel a storm brewing in your life and it's not remotely clear who you will be or what you will be after it passes. It is the very beginning of something new and the end of what currently is.

Many of us would prefer to ignore the storm until it passes. But some of us want to stand on a cliff, overlooking the ocean with the wind blowing in our faces and the rain beating down on our skin.

Painted in oil on primed canvas over 1.5" deep hand built stretchers, signed lower right.

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Compassion
In my moment of pain,
deep-seated and unavoidable,
I wrap myself in the canvas of compassion.
Purple-blue vibrational waves soothe my mind.
Draped in damp, pliable, paint-stained fabric
the self-judgment lurking in my shoulders
like a sheepish enemy eases.
A white glow of intentional light encompasses my body,
freeing me to love.
(c) Jill Joy 2023

Compassion is a transcendent quality that goes beyond the limitations of our individual egos and connects us with the wider world. It involves feeling empathy for the suffering of others and a desire to alleviate that suffering. It's a quality that inspires us to act selflessly, to put the needs of others before our own, and to reach out to those who are struggling, even if they are strangers.

Compassion has the power to heal the divisions and conflicts that so often tear us apart. When we are compassionate, we see the humanity in others, regardless of their race, religion, or culture. We recognize that we are all part of the same human family, and we are all in this together. It creates a mystical connection - which is what this painting seeks and strives to communicate. They mystical connection between ourselves, nature, each other and the divine.

Compassion has the ability to break down the barriers of fear and mistrust that keep us apart and create a sense of connection and belonging that is essential to our well-being.

Moreover, compassion is important because it helps us to cultivate positive qualities like patience, kindness, and forgiveness. It can inspire us to be more mindful and present in our interactions with others, which in turn can deepen our relationships and make us more resilient in the face of adversity.

In a world that can often feel disconnected and divided, compassion is more important than ever.

(c) Jill Joy 2023

I look up and I see the sky.
It becomes part of me.
My feelings like clouds
against the clear blue vastness,
scudding across the backdrop of
infinite consciousness.
I look out and I see the ocean.
It becomes part of me.
My memories like islands
in a sea of universal mind.
-Jill Joy

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Growth is an expression of personal evolution, this painting reflects a period in my life when an old, self-negating paradigm burst into a new more loving and affirming one. In this instance it marks a moment in time when I sacrificed a neurotic need for perfection (to prove that yes, indeed, I am love-able) for an acceptance of loving despite imperfection, both myself and someone in my life.

Early on, I developed a strong need to be perfect as a way of compensating for a difficult childhood — as a means of proving that yes, despite the evidence around me, I was indeed worthy of love. It was effective in someways but ultimately spiritually and creatively debilitating. It was a means of existence based in a lie. During this period in my life I made a major leap forward into a healthier more accepting way of being.

This painting is part of the Consciousness Series but also part of a sub-set of this series I call Evolution.

In my experience, when we grow as people (often by recognizing a truth we have up to that point avoided or been unaware of) there is a burst of energy that occurs inside of us like the creation of a new universe and a new self. We explode outward and inward at the same time and we are no longer the same person. Our consciousness evolves. It’s a subtle process but very real.

Painted in oil on primed canvas over 2.5" deep, hand-built stretchers, signed lower right side.

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When we grow as people, often by recognizing a truth we have up to that point avoided or been unaware of, there is a burst of energy that occurs inside of us like the creation of a new universe. We explode outward and inward at the same time and we are no longer the same person. Our consciousness evolves. It’s a subtle process but very real.

Painted in oil on primed canvas over 2.5" hand built stretchers, this painting comes alive with the light and one senses the presence of movement and expansion. Signed lower right side.

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I sometimes paint to calm myself. It is an act, like meditation, that slows the thinking mind and connects me to something beyond myself. This painting itself was an act of Solace, a moment in time when I took refuge in color, rhythm, movement and beauty from a turbulent world.

Painted in oil on primed canvas over 2.5" deep hand built stretchers, signed lower right side.

In the Distance is inspired by a sense of impending fulfillment out into the future; It’s a painting about faith, premonition and growth.

Painted in oil on primed canvas over 2.5" deep hand built stretchers, signed lower right side.

Prints are available. Click above for purchase info.

Physical and psychic energy is the major currency inJill Joy’s artistry. She generates a sense of momentum, motion, and vastness evenon a small scale. Her vistas keep the eye and body moving across light-filled,expansive picture planes. Violet, ultraviolet, indigo, and blues from dawn to dusk, choppy water and glacial ices, prayerflags to sapphire. - Huffington Post

Alaska is painted in vibrant blue and violet and brings a sense of calm and peace, as if gazing on an infinite horizon. Evocative drips and blank spaces create atmospheric associations with lightning, rain, clouds and vast, empty sky.

This painting speaks to the evolution of two souls together on a shared horizon evolving in relationship. Alaska is from my Consciousness Series which explores the evolution of the soul in a field of universal love using nature as a metaphor for this invisible, energetic development.

Painted in oil on primed canvas over 2.5" deep hand built stretchers, signed lower right.

Prints are available. Click purchase info above for details.

Life is not simple and things are not black and white. There is the potential for insight and elevation when we are in the depths of confusion or despair.

Emotion addresses the temporal, personal, human struggle that includes loss, pain, joy, change, frustration, grief and aspiration. The paintings are intense, active and filled with a sense of energy in motion. For me as the artist, they the most self conscious and self absorbed of my recent work. They represent energy that is unrealized in the sense of divine realization; raw and nascent. They represent the processing of unconscious emotional reaction and converting it to consciousness, using the emotional energy to transform unrealized to realized, disturbance to peace. These paintings are powerful expressions of the unharnessed creative force that initiates change and growth, as are emotions when felt and constructively expressed.

My technique in this work is heavy, dense and multi-layered. Oil paint thickly applied, often with a knife or trowel that sometimes takes years to dry, similar to old wounds and deep feelings.

Surrender to love and fully throwing ourselves into the battle and the drama of life - having the courage to die and be reborn.

To have one's heart's desire just out of reach - lurking under the surface of despair is a sense of luminescent hope.

Divertere means to divert in Latin. It's also the root of the word divorce. To part, to go separate ways. Like water parting. White space underneath represents new beginning. Often we must part with what no longer suits us to make way for the new.

This painting has a sense of fluidity like water. And it's tough to say, are the waves parting or merging?

There is sometimes power in walking away especially from a situation that is destructive or limits us. The experience of loving ourselves enough to say no gives us spiritual wings. Though it can be intensely painful and sometimes scary. To know that we can take care of and love ourselves under any circumstances is truly empowering.

During a near-death trauma or accident death feels close at hand but it’s beaten back by fate perhaps. You can sense the forces of the universe battling overhead as you fight back to life. Even though you survived physically it is a kind of death and rebirth. The thing that nearly killed us can awaken us.

Every beginning requires the destruction of what went before. The Hindus goddess, Kali rules the mutual acts of creation and destruction.

This painting emerged as I dismantled my own life as a corporate marketer to create the one I had dreamed of for 20 years - being a full time artist. A lot had to go. Possessions, relationships, prestige, a hefty paycheck. The space had to be cleared for a new life and more authentic life to emerge.

This painting is an expression of frustration and intensity and great emotional and physical passion. There's a poem written in the work with oil pen and layered over and under with oil paint.

Emotions have messages for us. As uncomfortable as they are I have found it's important to feel them and to allow them to move through the physical body. The intense pressure of an emotion can often lead us to constructive action if we allow it.

I believe that intense, fated love is experienced as a collision of sorts. Like the birth of a new universe in which you are no longer a planet unto yourself. It's my theory that when genuine love is present one is not that much in control of ones destiny.

This is a painting about love. About two people who come together from two very different world views and how that collision creates an explosion of energy and change. Like the explosion that would create the birth of the new universe.

Blame…it’s the response of an addict. And on some level, to some degree, most of us are addicts. Very few of us feel up to accepting responsibility for everything that happens in our lives…the good, the bad and the ugly, especially when it comes to broken hearts and childhood trauma. Relationships gone sour, divorce, breakups—who among us hasn’t placed blame at the feet of our former lover or partner at some point?

I believe, on some level, all relationships are a projection of sorts. Especially those that we engage as adults. We often project our shadow selves on another person. Perhaps when we accept and express our own shadow, we are able to project more light.

Being a spiritual being in the midst of a temporal and sometimes painful reality. It incorporates a modified Sanskrit mantra, the original is "I Am That I Am". I changed it to "I Am Love". This chant is written in gold oil pen across blank primed canvas, overlaid with an intense experience of emotional disappointment and a recognition of the limitations we face as human beings. We are in the world, but not of the world.

Inspired by a deep and rich internal landscape along with a fascination for the Aurora Borealis and all things magical in Alaska. Dripping and overlapping blues, greens and purple create a mysterious world where it's not clear where the sky, earth and sea begin and end. This is a recurring theme in my work and becomes more pronounced in my Consciousness Series.

This painting is part of a series I completed as a meditation on the nature of reality and its malleable and fluid quality. Thoughts shape reality. When we change, or we change our thoughts, our reality changes. Sometimes our perception of reality and past events will even change over time. The fluid, dripping paint and layering of color speak to the liquid nature of reality.

Self Love, can we actually ever get enough of it? The ironic thing about self love is that one feels rigorously driven to develop it when the conditions of one's childhood were not loving. Either that or you turn to addiction. I decided to cultivate the former.

Created with impasto techniques and acrylic paint as well as crystal granules and graphite powder in acrylic medium and graphite pencil. There are words written in the painting. There is a lot of texture in this painting as well as dripping paint.

The Mystery of Betrayal explores the idea that sometimes when we feel betrayed by a person or circumstances we are able to come to a higher clearer understanding of ourselves, what our path is, our true value. In some sense "what doesn't kill us makes us stronger" that overcoming criticism or abuse and persevering can enlighten our senses.

If we can look through this visible, transient world, what we see beyond is something more real, though invisible, and unchanging, a spiritual reality that exists always beneath the surface or just beyond this one.

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Love (human love as opposed to Divine Love) is a crazy, messy thing. I began this painting in New York around 2002 and finished it a couple of years later in 2005 shortly after re-locating to San Diego after my husband and I separated.

My experience of Love, true and lasting Love, is that it's a journey. This was true of my relationship with my former husband (now friend) and was also true of the second great love of my life which was a twisting, turning journey of 12 years.

I believe to truly love there has to be a purification of the ego (at least in my case there was). First I needed to really learn to love myself and meet most of my own needs and then I needed to learn that I have to let people be who they are - it's the greatest gift of love - acceptance. I’m still learning that.

This painting is from a series entitled Love and Other Words, a small group of large paintings I completed in 2005 and 2006 that explore the idea of love and incorporate words or poetry. It is thickly painted in oil and highly textured. The word “Love” is built up in relief on the canvas. Painted on primed canvas and stretched on hand built 2” stretchers, signed lower right.

This work is an exploration of the nature of Divine Love. It's a multi-layered mixed media painting. The first layer is comprised of mystical symbols from various cultures that communicate some aspect of divinity or infinity, sculpted in relief using plaster and paper fiber.

I incorporated a Sanskrit chant I learned in my early 20's living in a yoga ashram, "So Hum Shiva Hum", which translates loosely to “I am that”. You can see this written in the upper right around an infinity symbol in both English and Sanskrit in gold oil pen. This chant is used in contemplation meditation is an opportunity to focus "thinking mind" on the mystery of being.

On left the, I've included one of my own poems about the nature of divinity:

I am all there is
I am all that is
I am the breath in your body
I am the light and the dark
I am the night and the day
I am the sun and the moon
I am your pain and your joy
And the space in between
I am everything right and everything wrong

Inspired by a trip to Alaska where I had the good fortune to take a helicopter ride over a glacier. It's not actually a statement about global warming, although that is a problem. The glacier here is metaphorical, those ice formations that exist in the soul, things like guilt and self doubt. It's a painting about positive, spiritual evolution. The poem below goes with it.

the glaciers are melting in my soul
plates of ice a million years old
mountains of guilt buried so deep
i heard whispers of their movement
in deepest darkest sleep

there’s no stopping them now they are on the move
the ice floes are running change is coming

self loathing and doubt are melting away
ceaseless dripping holds me sway
the ice is melting inches everyday
my personal planet is turning into a bay

there’s no stopping them now they are on the move
the ice floes are running change is coming

when these guilt glaciers are gone
i’ll no longer have an ego saying i’m wrong
my body may then cease to exist
my mind will merge with pure divine bliss

there’s no stopping them now they are on the move
the ice floes are running change is coming

so please don’t feel sorry for me
that my personal planet will no longer be
aside from a thought form it doesn’t exist
its disappearance i shall not resist

Dark mountain
in the canyon of your heart
Solid and hard
it breaks you apart

Dark mountain
rising up craggy and moist
from the valley of your soul
solid rock that steals choice

Dark mountain
wall of pain
keeping you broken
as you remember again and again

Dark mountain
shadows the landscape of your mind
release resistance
allow mutable time

© Jill Joy 2010

Widows into the soul, into the mind, into something beyond the visible world.

Geometric interplay of surreal forms expressing a changing consciousness grappling with new awareness and letting go of old ideas.

Black Ice

Beneath my calms skies there’s black ice in my soul

A slick dark patch that feels life times old

A shallow ice layer deadly in its way

Tread carefully across, it’s where the ego slays

Slick and dark, it’s pain that runs deep

When I’m with you sometimes, up it creeps

It’s the pain of losing what was dearest to me

Of wanting a love so badly I could not see

It’s cold and it’s dark, it’s there all the time

It’s deep and it’s narrow, beyond reason or rhyme

These patches of black ice frozen deep in my heart

Don’t even know they’re there ‘til love has a chance to start

But once they surface, they make themselves known

They come up fast ‘cuz I love you harder, but they are all my own

So as you walk with me if the path begins to feel slick

That’s my black ice. the chill comes on quick

I know you’re here now to help melt it down

As it turns into tears, the pain begins to drown

It’s cold and it’s dark, it’s there all the time

It’s deep and it’s narrow, beyond reason or rhyme

So don’t be surprised if we hit a slick or two

The ice we are on is glacial, it’s ancient electric blue

I think you’ll be around though for as long as it takes

To melt those hidden patches into clear glacial lakes

Once this ice is gone will you be gone too?

Or will you float in the sun with me, skin chilled by liquid blue?

You’ll do what you do, you’ll go or you’ll stay

Maybe when I’m liquid, I’ll send you away

But while you are here I like you just fine

If you can manage a slick patch from time to time

That ice is in me whether I’m with you or another

Running from you won’t melt it, so I won’t even bother

It’s cold and it’s dark, it’s there all the time

It’s deep and it’s narrow, beyond reason or rhyme

The only thing I can fathom that will make it go

Is standing in the light, knowing what is truly so

So let’s forget about the black ice forget about it for a while

Let me stand in the heat of you and your love without guile.

© Jill Joy August 2010

There is a harmonious body of light available to us when we are on our true path and being honest with ourselves about what we need, despite the risks that may require we take.

At one point in my life I experienced chronic back pain. I had an injury that never seemed to heal. It began to dawn on me through dreams that perhaps the dis-ease my body was experiencing was not entirely physical. I began to work with an alternative healer and during the visualization process I saw the honeycomb shapes that permeate this work.The honeycomb represented cells of the body. Some were dark and some were filled with golden light. It seemed that the dark ones were filled with painful memories and unresolved emotions.

The pattern also came to represent the sometimes ineffable order of the universe.In effect the pain set me on a path of understanding the relationship between the spiritual realm and my physical body and how the soul speaks through symptoms when we fail to listen to its other voices—feelings, dreams and intuition. When we align our minds with the highest truths about ourselves and our destiny, we are sometimes able to heal our physical bodies.

AUM is layered acrylic paint, iridescent dry pigment and powdered graphite with acrylic medium. The light play on this painting is tremendous. The title AUM refers the chant used in meditation which represents the sound the universe makes.

AUM also refers to the three states of consciousness: Sleeping, Waking and Transcendent. In aligning the three states, we achieve enlightenment.

The honeycomb grid represents a seemingly random but essentially ordered universe and events. Triptych structure references the concurrent existence of the three states of consciousness.

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