dominique's book,
The heartist's Secret,
has just been published. It helps readers understand how to expand their sense of planet Earth, and how to function as a fully connected human being.
Welcome to incarnation 2021 of my website, created in 2009. Even though I did not entirely stop doing art for the Earth, life took me into writing and healing. Now is the time to reveal my new book, which is part catalogue raisonné, part memoir, with contemplations sprinkled in between. The heartist’s Secret: A Memoir did not come from “conscious conception,” rather it flowed like a spring that helped me clarify the work I had been called to do.
The book states that my performances and installations are prayers. My passion is the Earth, and my identity belongs to Spirit. The word heartist reflects the gift of listening to Nature. The term results from my quest for the spiritual in art, begun in 1979. Heartist is a word unifying life and art and suggests a way of being in these transformational times. This book is my answer to the question of the spiritual in art in a way that explores the deep connectivity for all things on Earth.
Here are quotes from The heartist’s Secret:
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heartist was shy at first. It had come into my consciousness, but that was all. It whispered in the ear of my heart that it did not want a capital letter and favored italics. If someone wanted to know more about why I had chosen it (or why it had chosen me), I told them that when I began introducing myself an artist I often felt people were putting me on a pedestal, so I listed heartist as my profession, a new word-being that opened up a tender dialogue with those who encountered it. It gave me a chance to speak of a world where everyone is an artist (a heartist) whether a baker, a doctor or a painter.
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The intention of benefiting may not prove incorrect, but the gist of it all is that you do what you do because of love, and no other reason. Was I confusing visionary and missionary! Over time, I found some clarity, and acknowledged the river as my teacher.
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Besides being a code understood by the weavers of life and art, the seeming language of synchronicity reminds us of the world of childhood. It’s all alive and vibrant, one mysterious, spontaneous web. One thing happening here… One thing happening there… And hop! The threads mysteriously cross over and lock into a perfect out-of-this-world combination. Uncanny coincidence is no description for the experience when it catches the magic of life in its folds.
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The pursuit of peace, like the pursuit of happiness, implies a journey, not a destination. As in any traveling, the road may be fraught with challenge and conflict. A peace traveler is given the opportunity to show, through caring engagement and creativity, that peace is a much more complex process than violence. In peacemaking there is the beauty to which all of humanity aspires. Peace travelers connect through their shared passion. Their bond will soon gain irresistible momentum, making the dark fortresses of hatred, greed, and violence impossible to hold.
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