3 Chance Encounter

Perhaps it’s a stretch to say I met Hilma Af Klint at a party. 

She was born in 1862, in Sweden.

I attended a meditation group on zoom, led by Mark Mezadourian, who often relays messages from Archangels, Ascended Masters, and sometimes, the spirits of poets, painters and musicians who come forward to offer their wisdom and guidance.

In mid October, last year, the spirit of Hilma af Klint came forward. Mark explained Hilma af Klint, was a visionary painter from Sweden.

How is it possible I had I never heard of her?

As soon as the meditation ended, googled her and the first thing that came up was an exhibition of her paintings at the Guggenheim in 2018. The exhibition broke records for attendance. It was the most popular and well attended exhibition in the history of the museum. 

You can read more about her and the exhibition here

The series exhibited in the Guggenheim was part of a larger body of  her work which she had channeled from “high beings.” Every week she and four other women would get together to pray, meditate, and communicate with these high beings and they would paint as well as write the messages they received.

Her paintings looked like they could have been painted yesterday, not in 1907.   She was doing abstract art twenty years before  Kandinsky and Mondrian -- the "founders" of  modern art, but there was no mention of her work anywhere in art history, until very recently. 

Hilma was convinced that no one in her time could understand  and appreciate what she was doing.  And she may have been right about that.

When she died she left h an enormous body of work to her nephew and instructions that the paintings could not be sold nor exhibited until twenty years after her death, in 1944. 

It took more than 40 years before her work to first be exhibited in 1987 in Los Angeles.

I feel in love with her paintings. 

The colors and the playfulness of the shapes reminded me a bit of Cezanne. But they were filled with symbols — some I recognized from astrology, a symbolic language woven into the colors and other images. Some of the shapes looked like wave forms. They were like nothing I had ever seen. They spoke to me.

Down the rabbit hole I went to discover everything I could about Hilma af Klint….