Allyson Grey

Artist, Co-Founder Chapel of Sacred Mirrors

Born in 1952, I have been married to Alex Grey for 25 years. We met at the Boston Museum School where I received a Bachelors and a Masters Degree in Fine Arts. I've had one person shows at Stux Gallery and O.K. Harris Gallery in NYC, among others. Commissions of permanent public works include a 24 foot mural at the First Bank of Lowell, Massachusetts and my paintings have been collected by many corporations and individuals. I paint and collaborate with my very busy husband and adorable (and also very busy) actress daughter, Zena Lotus, in Brooklyn, New York. Intending to create spiritual art, I feel naturally attracted to abstraction and to a written sacred language. Every known religion reveres its holy writing.

Sacred writing of all faiths, however, come into conflict through human interpretation as the written word defines the differences of philosophy and traditions, when truely the basis of all religion is unity and infinite love. In 1975 I began writing automatically in an invented or transmitted language. I do not give meaning to the symbols in my art as it is meaning that separates experience from expression. The alphabet that I use points to the notion of a sacred language beyond meaning. Some of the works call to mind the experience of seeing an illuminated text in a foreign language and religion. In recent work, I combine the icons of perfection (the Jewel Net) with the secret language, and images of chaos. Chaos in my art is the entropy of the units of spectrally arranged squares using a system of "planned randomness", allowing every spectral unit to fall apart in a variety of ways -- squares falling off of a corner or the spectral unit exploding from the center, etc. The three elements used in my work, Chaos, Order and Secret Writing, are non-literal representations of the sacred.