About

A photographic portrait of the artist Ashtoreth Valecourt, standing amongst baroque candelabras with multiple beeswax candles, silvered mirrors, and dark burgundy velvet draperies, inside an authentic 15th-century Venetian palazzo. The atmosphere carries the cool, dense weight of ancient stone walls and dark Renaissance era carved wood, combining bas reliefs of fruits and flowers. The space smells faintly of the Amber perfume the artist is wearing, and damp canal air, from a window open nearby, all under a soft, filtering light. The artist is a slender woman with long auburn hair, refined classical lines, and an expressive artistic focus, who projects a grounded watchful elegance. Her hair frames a face holding a quiet, knowing smile—the face of a writer and a painter looking deeply past the surface of things. Her eyes are open and deeply attentive, radiating intellect, warmth, and unshakeable sovereign confidence. She stands in a posture of easy engagement, as if ready to begin the nimble dance of thought, trace a new line on a canvas, or greet a new member of her artistic salon.

A Liminal Woman

Ashtoreth Valecourt has always been drawn to aesthetics in many forms: the study of world myth, especially goddess culture, mysticism, the language of symbols, and alchemy. Art is a calling, but also a way of living and seeing the world, and beauty in all forms, whether natural or created, is her pagan religion. She was largely self-taught, inspired by a life-long interest in art and art history. Ongoing studies into subjects such as psychology, alchemy, and archetypes feed her creative expressions that lean toward symbolism and surrealism.

She is a liminal woman who walks between worlds, and having tasted the fruits of the underworld, feels at home there, walking in the fairy mounds, and can no longer feel wholly connected to the world of men, living betwixt and between them. Her gifts she brings to the world are as a medial woman.

She communicates her thoughts and experiences, here occulted through the poetry of images, making the personal transpersonal. It is her hope that in the encounter of her art people will find soul medicine brought back from the underworld that makes them think and feel deeply, and which quickens something in themselves that inspires their own journeys of renewal and empowerment. The encounter of art is an inward-facing ritual, whether experienced personally or collectively.

Ashtoreth’s work deals with themes of transformation through death and rebirth that are an ongoing part of conscious experience. The collection shown here was part of a 2007 exhibit she staged in Los Angeles, California, titled ‘The Heroine’s Journey’. One moved through the placement of the paintings as in The Stations of the Cross in the Roman Catholic Good Friday Liturgy, meditating and participating in a virtual journey into the underworld, from ritual confrontation with death, to resurrection, and new life after, though one is never the same as before one made one’s descent.

Having walked and mapped the paths herself, the artist hands the viewer a torch to illuminate their way through the darkness, and the paintings become an alchemical map and a mirror to gaze into; portals that lead into their own inner landscapes. The stories and times may change, but the path, the journey and the treasures to be won are universal.

Visual surrealist riddles are layered in the images: Egyptian hieroglyphics, snakes smiling knowingly, organic mirrors, mirrors that break into fire and deep space, soft form, strangely organic rock forms from which water flows; and specific tarot cards casually dropped, contain mystery codes that unlock deeper meanings, even unconsciously. The works express ideas that are ancient and modern, placed in the realm of dreams, the shadowland of the unconscious, or in some cases the literal underworld; speaking in the language of symbols and archetype that are beyond time.

[WELCOME TO THE LIMINAL SALON]