Sandra Bart Heimann  has life long dual interests - creativity and health. Over the years these have merged into painting, writing, and investigating creativity lost and found.  She has a BFA from the University of Houston where she majored in printmaking, especially stone lithography, under a European master printer. She started a fine art edition business that produced limited edition hand separated and pulled fine art prints for artists and publishers in California and Texas.  Heimann's professional exhibitions began in 1974 in Houston where she lived for 2 decades. 

         Heimann moved to mid-coast Maine in 1988, closed her fine art edition business, and returned to nursing.  She has been painting and writing since childhood; the detour back to heath care did not interfere with painting but meandered around another bend. She completed certification as a holistic nurse and found an obvious connection between creative expression and enhanced well-being. Creative expression is good for everyone! After a decade of nursing, she resigned to focus on her own art, writing, research, consultations, and workshops for jump-starting creativity.

 

        The research led to an interest in the importance of the Sacred Feminine as a metaphor for creative expression.  A trail of ancient artifacts both pre-historical and early historical along with the translations of early texts of myth and song from Sumer(ia) made a leap, an 'ah-ha': There once was a sacredness around women. That concept is intuitive, fertile, nurturing, and creative.  The arts over the millennia have been overseen by various goddesses and muses (female).  Do away with the sacred feminine and creativity is difficult to maintain --not a natural birthright.

 

        Heimann's canvases begin as organic lines that eventually reveal an image, a story. The paintings evolve from intuitive expression and are not preconceived illustrations.  The current show partners images with Sumerian songs in translation.  Many of the songs tell of  an amazing early goddess, Inanna, who could only have emerged from a time long before patriarchy took over.  She is the evening and morning star and the prototype for later Anat, Aphrodite, Venus and more.  She is love, fertility, queen of heaven and earth, storms, conflict,  and settlement of disputes.  Inanna is forever young, alluring, indomitable; she bosses the gods around, and decides kingship.  She is the variability of nature's ebb and flow, decrease and increase, love and death.  Inanna is the allure and exuberance of a sacred feminine life force, biophillic (love of life); the fertile creative process. 

 

         Heimann's own poetry also combines with her art. She believes that humans became human not when they started making tools but when they started telling stories.  We are story tellers, we are  creative creatures, we are clay that dreams. She advises clients to take time, drop out, make stuff, get into the "zone", i.e.: when absorption in something takes one out of time.  She advises workshop students to not worry about the eliteness of creativity with the hallowed capital "C", but rather do what feels expressive, playful, and juicy.  She has found her dedication to writing and researching in the very early morning and painting in the afternoon to be her dream of contentment and commitment to a creative life.   At some future date the artists' years of research on creativity will be available in book form.