Nora Maccoby
“Working with a visual language, using color and the Fibonacci series to compose images, she directs the power of breath to the psychic core where there is no separation, just a breathing center of humanity.”
— Sandra Botnen, curator
“Power the center and dance with your friends”
The artist for Day 27 is Nora Maccoby. The work of Nora Maccoby ambitiously sets out to uncover a language of the unseen world. Daughter of a renowned psychoanalyst, investigating the subconscious is something she has been surrounded by her whole life – along with artists too. Going back generations, she cites all the women in her family that were skilled in painting. She talks about the great abstract expressionist, Mark Rothko, as her grandfather's best friend and his legacy - that the practice of art is a spiritual meditation and life long study of what is God.
Maccoby approached painting as an intensley personal internal dialogue of the psyche. Dissuaded by the arbitrary nature of the New York art world, she studied film, working as a screenwriter in Hollywood and London, but found the world of illusions leading her to want to influence reality. A near death experience turned her toward Washington, DC and environmental activism. She looked at the challenge of making positive change against a death cult as performance art. Her interests remained akin to an anthropologist, gathering information by engaging with indigenous people. She learned from plant medicine, quantum physics, and ancient philosophies while continuing to paint her dialogue with the invisible world.
Ultimately she found many of the images sourced from her own subconscious were in fact messengers from indigenous people. “It’s like the gods were all fighting to be heard inside me,” she says. "My mother was dying for 3 years. During that time I wanted to paint for her, maps to travel through death and rebirth so she wouldn't be afraid." Committing solely to the canvas, she immersed herself in painting, discovering a spirituality within that sought its own healing and transformation. “As within, so without,” she says, “there is no separation.” Her art became an effort to mediate, and center herself while coming to understand how spiritually, in all forms, can peacefully intersect on earth and in her own being.
“Power the center and dance with your friends,” she says. These are the words that came to her through one of her paintings. In a time of extremism around the world, she has found a grand sense of purpose. Working with a visual language, using color and the Fibonacci series to compose images, she directs the power of breath to the psychic core where there is no separation, just a breathing center of humanity.
Today, a collection of fifty of Maccoby’s images she describes as guardians, time travelers and portals are being published as an oracle deck of cards. Writings on each image and a forward by Deepak Choprah help interpret the images such that they become prompts for spiritual openings, breath and healing.
Other works by Maccoby include a collection of portraits and written works including, Identity Cartography: Maps and Symbols for the Heterarachy, and The Intelligence. Books are available on Amazon. More information at www.noramaccoby.com
Avaliable Works
More information at www.noramaccoby.com