In the 20th century we have witnessed a fundamental change from an art of representation to an art of expression, from descriptions of the world of material and visual fact to manifestations of the inner world of spiritual/psychical experience. This is the personal world disclosed by meditation and contemplation, by vision and dream, in short, by philosophy and practice of mysticism.

The mystical view and method, as distinct from the scientific and pragmatic (though they sometimes interface) direct that most enduring of modern and “post-modern” styles we call expressionism. Like the mystic, the expressionist artist attempts to penetrate to a deeper reality that that given in commonplace experience, and to express in art his or her unique engagement with it.

To that end expressionist artists typically use highly personal forms and techniques, signs, symbols, shapes, colors and materials in compositions which may or may not be accompanied by allusive captions. The artist invites the viewer to share in the experience of the inspiration, creation and completion of the work without anxiety about its literal explanation. Thus, despite its apparent mystery, the work can effect a mutuality of artist and viewer in the continuing exploration and enjoyment of it. What is communicated escapes any final literal definition because there are layers of content with differing relationships and meanings for each viewer.

A whole world of thought and art is at the expressionist’s disposal. Powers has been influenced by Buddhist cosmology, the practice of Yoga, and the nature of mysticism of Lao Tzu. From the west she has learned from alchemical lore, from the 17th c. mystic Jacob Boehme, and from Carl Jung’s doctrine of the universal unconscious. For Powers the cosmos is a living unity, its essence the world soul, which is not transcendent but immersed in all phenomena, animate or inanimate. Everything is interrelated in unending patterns of affinities, resemblances, similitudes and metaphors. These reveal themselves in meditation, in dreams, and in the twilight zone between sleeping and waking. The images they evoked are timeless and universal, and shine forth from the humblest objects; Boehme, for example, beheld the mystery of the Trinity and of Being in the glow of the sun on the rim of a pewter plate; for Wordsworth “the meanest flower that blows can give/thoughts that do often lies too deep for tears.”

Content with the world soul (anima mundi) is a dialogue with the receptive soul of the artist. The images that record that contact speak to the viewer of the artist’s vision ~ in effect an icon, a vehicle of mystery. (Says Powers: “I sense my works are like altarpieces because they are an invitation to the viewer to contemplate more than the physical world.”)

Not only the images, but the materials out of which they are fashioned have a resonant eloquence in conveying the significance of the icon to the viewer. Powers is fascinated by the old alchemists’ symbolism of metals, and their transmutations. A favorite motif is the funnel, a symbol of distillation, a step in the process of transmutations. Applied gold and silver leaf have their own symbolism and reinforcement of the icons’ message. This symbolism guides the viewer as she or he encounters such compositions as Existence Opens, or Incubating.., or is introduced into the Heart of the Matter, the creative crucible of the alchemist. Read another way, it is the world matrix, or still another, the great stupa at Sanchi in India, memorial to the Buddha and diagram of the cosmos, in which all things coexist in perpetual harmony. The concord of universal Being, no matter how we experience it in our personal conscious or unconscious awareness, is the subject of Lynn Powers art, and the indispensable guide to our discernment of it in a meeting of insights.