Aloria Weaver & David Heskin
Mushroom Cafe mural by David Heskin & Aloria Weaver
Beginning their mural collaboration in 2014, David & Aloria took on a vision large enough to integrate with the many murals in the room. With Amanda Sage, they developed a layout of three wall segments that included a mycelial landscape into a mushroom-laden path toward an inner world. The mural is replete with a strangely familiar blue caterpillar and fungi-temple structures, encompassed by a spectral re-visioning of charismatic mushroom clouds, representing beings and benevolent spirits that support CoSM, including the founding visionaries, the staff, volunteers and art pilgrims. The path through the mushroom forest symbolizes the soul’s journey of awakening, through suffering to liberation and gnosis.
Aloria Weaver painting Mushroom Cafe mural
David Heskin painting Mushroom Cafe mural
Aloria Weaver
Aloria Weaver began oil painting in 1993 while apprenticing artists at the Buffalo Art Studios of Western New York. She later studied at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and SUNY, Buffalo, New York. Aloria holds three artistic lineages: classical realism learned at Loveland Atelier from an alumni of the Florence Academy of Art in Italy; traditional egg tempera and gilding through an unbroken transmission from master to student dating back to Fra Angelico in 1430; and the Mischtechnik (or mixed technique), a process of painting with egg tempera and oil glazes, the secret method of the Italian Renaissance masters, later revived by Viennese artist, Ernst Fuchs. Art has the capacity to illuminate the transcendent aspects of human existence through beauty and to expand the otherwise limited perceptions of the mundane world. In a ceaseless quest to reveal hidden truths, my art weaves a metaphorical tapestry of symbol, myth and archetype into a narrative of the primordial soul. Painting is a form of meditation, a contemplation of the harmony inherent in nature and an expression of my reverence for the Living Universe.
David Heskin
An emerging Visionary Art movement is building authentic bridges to a brilliant future with the determination to envision possibilities. A lifelong artist, David Heskin began oil painting in 1995, largely self-guided for 15 David the sought out art teachers of techniques on the brink of obscurity. After studying three master lineages, his original work became an integrated expression of this artistic trinity. Fusing the richness of traditional symbolic themes with the innovative spirit of a modern renaissance man, David lives in service to art and draws forth inviting visions for viewers to bask in the inspirational light of creativity. David teaches with his art & life partner, Aloria Weaver, at intensives on traditional and innovative painting techniques. David Heskin’s artwork is exhibited in museums, galleries, cultural centers, theaters and private collections throughout the world. For inspiration, I look to the beauty of the natural world in its infinitely subtle and intricate patterns. Forms in nature become syllables in a secret language of consciousness at every scale. Art emerges from this diversity of phenomenal life forms. The responsibility of the modern artist is to look inward, then forward, and then inward again. If one’s art is to fulfill an ongoing renaissance in this vast cosmology, its presence must deliver a vision that continues to inspire personal and cultural evolution.
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