About the Founder & Associates

Marti White, Artist, Mystic
My life as an artist has taken various forms over more than half a century beginning with the creative play of a child, the usual art classes in school and college, and then a series of classes with various teachers in various media, pencil, ink, oil, watercolor, acrylic, mixed media and collage. Each medium has offered different challenges and joys. Watercolor brought me years of satisfying work in the middle years of my life. I painted mostly from the natural world around me – flowers, landscapes and small wonders of the forest and field.

When we made a move out West, I felt that it called for a new artistic path to go along with a new life in a new place. I began studying mixed media in earnest and embarked on a discovery of painting from the heart. Learning to just let my colors and media take me wherever they pulled me was an exciting new expression for me. My new work comes from the center of my being and is spiritual in nature. By painting “from my gut” instead of my head, with no concern for what the paintings mean or whether they resemble something, I am able to free up and discover an inner person that I never knew before.

This has finally pulled me into a much more abstract way of seeing the world around me and my work has become less and less representational. My joy is in seeing how others respond to my work. Color fills them with a sensuality and warmth as I use vibrant and varied colors in the abstracts. My challenge is to allow the inner person to express on the canvas or paper without thought for what is coming forth – to allow the brush to be an extension of my body and soul-- to become a part of what is happening there. This is an intensely spiritual and multi-dimensional experience and when it is going well, I get lost in it; time passes and I am unaware of it; life is happening and I’m truly caught up in the very being of my art. This is when I’m totally free and my expression becomes self-less.