Featured Artist, Georgia Lynn Dean

“I work in a variety of mediums, including digital and ink illustration, painting, and a variety of styles of printmaking. Across the span of my work, there are many common elements and themes. I focus on the female form, the human skeletal system, anatomical drawings, and botanical elements. I create in a formulaic fashion, working through difficult feelings and questions I have for myself through the intertwining of these symbols with each other. Like a math equation, each element has grown to represent a deep rooted philosophy for me on my perspective of the world.

“The act of creation is extremely therapeutic for me. It often calms a stormy mind and a troubled heart. I spend a rather short amount of time actually creating most pieces, in contrast with the more extensive amount of time spent reading about the physical human body, the symbols of nature, world religions, and yogic bio-psychology. The culmination of this research in combination with daily yoga practice and meditation is sketchbooks upon sketchbooks of ideas and drawings. Often times, images come to me after meditating on a particular phrase, poem, or mantra. I strive to create and communicate an honest and articulate representation of my self moving through this life.

SERIES 1 - HEAVENLY BODIES

“[These pieces] came out of a time of consistent yogic practice, and each represent a core value I wish to enact daily. The illustrations pair with mantras that came to me in a variety of formats in that time of my life, including a poem by rumi and an unkown proverb.”

SERIES 2 - INFECT THE WORLD WITH KINDNESS

“This series... blossomed from a reflection on birth. I had a friend who was discussing with me why she felt so called to have kids with her boyfriend some day. I had the argument of how little faith I had in humanity, and she responded with how much faith she had in herself. She told me that because the world could suck so much, that’s why she wanted to have kids. She knew they would be kind, sensitive, and loving, and so she might as well ‘infect the world with goodness.’

“That really stuck out to me as such a brave thing to be in this world—kindhearted, yet fearless. So often people can be looked down on for being sensitive and soft, but it doesn’t have to be that way. To choose to love as a response to everything, and change the ugly parts of our society, is a daunting task, but affect is wonderfully contagious. So I created these three pieces, intaglio prints, to show that process of saving the world through being kind, and gentle, and sincere.”

SERIES 3 - EVE / DIVINE SELF

“Both of these were interpretations of the same theme, building on the foundation of the philosophy I have been exploring the past couple of years. In these two pieces specifically, I suppose I was focusing on origin rather than transformation.”

"Eve is based off the figure of Venus from Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, a famous old painting that I found myself revisiting in a time of reflection on true self, the version of self that exists outside the physical realm and the concept of lifetimes. Eve and Venus both sort of represent [an] ultimate feminine, and I suppose I stripped that all down in an attempt at understanding what was really behind it all. I keep coming back to the theory that it has to really be love, somehow."

"Divine Self follows the same stream of consciousness -- who am I really and how do I tap into that all-knowing energy? I think when we truly know ourselves, the path becomes illuminated to true freedom and peace, and that’s what I wished to articulate with this piece. Both of these are digital versions of what would later become screen prints on paper."

More of Georgia Lynn's work is featured in the most recent issue of Cantilevers. She sells prints of her work at local markets, and her portfolio is available at https://georgialynndean.myportfolio.com/