An Epiphany of Spheres: The Paintings of Jane Hudson

Editor’s Note: Click on any image below to view it in full-screen mode.

I want to acquire genuine knowledge of our Earth’s existence in relation to the elements found in the center of the universe.

—Hilma af Klint

Since I was a child, I have been transported into imaginative realms through music, theater, poetry, technology, and painting. My parents were artists, and older family members flirted with self-expression as best they could, given cultural and economic limits. So the example was always there. At the same time, I didn’t have a focus or a preferred medium until much later. In all my forays into art making there was a spiritual or magical element, something lurking at the edges of my “vision” that first emerged as abstract metaphysical speculation. However, I did spend the better part of my adult life teaching other artists how to find that vein of passion and vision in their own process (School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts). After many distractions, I am now fully engaged with painting.

I have had what you might call an epiphany! Once separate spheres began to sing together. A little late in the game, you might think, to redefine the terms of my connection to the whole, when I had long since tested and rejected any formal religious language. Belief might be good enough for others. I was looking for something more direct. At the same time, I have recalled early mystical moments where a connection to the ineffable, the celestial ballet became very real to me. In my young adult years, I read Russian mystic Helena Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, a masterwork of visionary cosmology. I was moved by it then, and it lived, tucked away in deep consciousness, as I went to pursue the world. The experimental hippie path had been mine, and it has held sway to the present. I have also had a long-time relationship with the Tarot, with the mystery of the soul’s journey it invokes. These elements in tension—the speculative and the intuitive, the leap of vision and the act of making—came together, in concert with some physical challenges, to focus my painting as a spiritual practice as well as an aesthetic one.

My aesthetic forebears are the European Modernists of the turn of the 20th Century—Hilma af Klint, Vasily Kandinsky, the Delaunays, as well as the Minimalists of the American 70s, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Morris, Frank Stella, and Agnes Martin. So there’s a tension between the rigor of Minimalism and the expansive color and form of Constructivism. The early ones saw abstraction as a route to the ineffable, finding within the language of geometry access to the fundamentals of Cosmic energy.

When Covid hit, I retreated into a very private world of mystical considerations. My devotion to Tarot, already strong, deepened. During 2020 I created a body of paintings depicting the 22 characters of the Major Arcana. This work led me to join a local group focusing on the exploration of the Tarot. I worked with the visual ingredients of the system and explored my own psychological and emotional complexes in the archetypes, I found my voice and vision and started a meditation practice for/with others that has given me a fulfilling spiritual context. This practice always informs my painting, and the paintings bring me to richer and deeper understanding of my esoteric proclivities. 

In my meditations for the group(s), I take people on a journey to a safe and sacred place among the trees. There we experience a ritual of energy gathering, chakra cleansing and release of worldly stresses. It is my joy and terror as I perform these that I will encounter new insights and motives. Each leap of insight, in turn, demands that I acknowledge certain blind spots, that I practice new ways of letting go. As Hilma af Klint advises, 

Only for those prepared to leave their life as they have known it, will life emerge in a new gown of continually expanding beauty and perfection. But in order to attain such a state, it is necessary to achieve stillness in both thought and feeling.

The Vortex paintings arose as a consequence of reading A Vision by William Butler Yeats (my all-time favorite poet). I came upon this book by accident as a result of my forays into ‘channeling’ and other extrasensory experiences. It seems Yeats’ then new wife began to channel ‘instructors’, entities that communicated the design of personality/history as it plunges through our lives and the life of humanity at large. This is not a one-way, linear operation. It is helical and oppositional, wave after wave of expanding and receding energies. One can see in the paintings the complexity in the interaction! It seems I am always moving from complexity to reduction and back! This flux and flow comes from a deeply emotional, intuitive place. At the same time I am frequently prodded by things I read that lead me to consider new ways of envisioning an ethereal, invisible space/time. Everything from physics to Theosophy, the structure of a cell to the arrangements of Tarot cards, the inner life of plants to the flow of energies in a landscape.

The pieces that involve spherical figures that I call Orbs. (Much of my work for the last few years has depended on the Orb as a surrogate). This figure radiates internal energy, tumbling through a toroidal space that is shaped by the aura or etheric body of the individual as well as the Earth and all celestial bodies. For reasons I cannot unearth, since childhood I have been fascinated by the celestial sphere. That is to say my hold on Earthly belonging has been tenuous. I see myself as belonging more to a galactic swirl, a place of dynamic movement, energies, colors.

I have also found in recent years and in relation to my present location in the mountains and woodlands of the Berkshires a ground of being, a location of meditative commune with the elements of air (East), fire (South), water (West), earth (North), and center (Cosmos). These directions and their attributes anchor me now. Being in such direct contact with the denizens of the earth and its remarkable cycles, I find the connection of Earth and Cosmos as it rises in me. I suppose this revelation comes to me as I approach the end of my life (not going anywhere yet), and must consider how Death and Rebirth are active forces in our lives, as these manifest on Earth and elsewhere.

Art and spirituality: these two strains run very close to one another. There is an ongoing dialog between them as I look for a relationship between what I’ve learned and what I have yet to know.