Kel Rae's Artist Statement
The Spirit of the Great Mother, known by many names, metaphorically represents the mysterious and loving life-providing source from which we put forth from, which exists within all things. I herald the Spirit of this Great Mother as the bringer of peace by manifesting Her Love through us to create balance and I feel my paintings are a meta-language for being-ness. Some of my paintings have a black background – in early times black represented the color of fertility – the womb where life emerged from nourishing soils. Red ocher was the vibrant color of life indicating earthly inhabitance and white depicted the end of physical life and a new beginning.
At times I incorporate the lotus to represent the great mystery of Her being which lies behind existence. The roots of the lotus connect like umbilical cords to Her great womb where impulse births the bloom. One cannot point directly to the Great Mother, She is invisible, detected only in the delicate arc of a stem or within the fragrance of a bloom.
Almost all of my Goddesses do not have heads as the Great Mother is the feeler – the ‘knower’ – and not the thinker (represented by the head). She is the body’s innate intelligent system that takes over when the mind shuts down. She is the over-riding impulse that directs when the mind cannot comprehend its situation. She is the non-thinker, The Knower providing direction when all appears lost.
My paintings enable the observer to allow the soft and gentle truth of their own being to rise to the surface. Each painting is a reminder of the gentle mystery behind life, a mystery born through and nurtured by a grand and loving essence that moves through all life like the spirit of a Great Mother.
KEL RAE'S GODDESS GALLERY
Note *This website is a remake of a much older website which was lost on the web! These paintings will be updated with their sizes, names and significance along my journey.
About Artist Kel Rae is an artist and writer devoted to the Goddess and the sacred feminine. She was born in Vancouver and raised on Vancouver Island. Since childhood, Kel Rae sought to know more about the nature of existence and left home at seventeen to live in the NW Territories among the Inuits. This resulted in her becoming deeply interested in their spiritualism and animist principles. She spent the majority of her youth travelling, reading J.Campbell and Jung, and seeking to unravel the mythic imagination regardless of the clothes it wore.
In the nineties Kel settled in California and gave birth to a daughter. She then attended the International Design Institute of San Diego, moving into Asian Design later at the Wind and Water Academy in Encinitas, and then The Losina Fine Arts Centre, in San Diego and later became an art therapist. It was through the activity of painting that the Spirit of the Great Mother began to emerge through her during her pregnancy.
Kel Rae eventually left the west coast for the shores of Mallorca. After moving around Europe she felt the need to go deep into meditation in the Mexican desert to intimately know the way of the Divine Mother and had profound experiences in meditation. In 2010 Kel Rae returned to Canada to resume normal life. She has been painting the Spirit of the Great Mother for over twenty years. Her paintings and writings honor the Divine Feminine as a living presence — guiding, inspiring, and reconnecting people with this ancient wisdom. The Great Mother Lodge is her space for expressing these truths through color, form, and story — a bridge between art, writing, and the eternal feminine.