Annie Tull
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(415) 481-2046
So many of the issues we face as a global community stem from the systematized disconnection from the land over centuries of discovery and invention. We have stopped living as members of the Earth’s ecosystem and have instead decided that evolution means we are a species set apart, no longer subject to the laws that govern life on this planet. We take, we use, we ravage, and we don’t give back. We have abjectly refused our animal essence and have become lost. We no longer know the planet we occupy. How can you value something you don’t even know?
And so I paint to remind us, we are not separate. We are part of a much greater whole. A whole that is full of magic and beauty and harmony, but only if we participate as we are meant to. The fragility of nature is our fragility. We are not separate from nature, we are part of it. In protecting nature, we protect our own livelihood.
Rejecting the superiority complex of the human intellect, I paint soul portraits in which nature takes precedence, and the human physical body relinquishes its corporeal self to the spiritual attunement that comes from letting nature be the greater force.
My work expresses this connection to nature in varied ways. In Soular Power, the imagery of a young woman exalting the Sun, simultaneously absorbing and radiating the divine energy of the Source of all life, speaks to the unbreakable union between human and nature. Namasté, Love portrays a more intimate soul bond: the figure is bowing her forehead in a gesture of third-eye transmission, in much the same way a Tibetan monk might greet a fellow traveler on the mountain path. She addresses the flowers: “The divine light in me honors the divine light in you.” With Risen, I have taken a more reverent view of the raw power of nature’s Great Replenisher. Each year when the wildfires sweep through California, I am awed by Mother Nature’s transformative strength. It is a reminder of how small and helpless humans are in the grand scheme of the universe, and how important it is to acknowledge and respect that which is greater than us.
In honoring the ways nature works tirelessly to support us, I aim to stir the place in each of my viewers that intuitively understands the deep soul connection that is not only possible, but essential between humans and all other life. By introducing such imagery to our cultural dialogue, I hope to help others find the source of their own connection so that we may collectively return to an era of harmonious coexistence with the world we inhabit.
