Dawn Whitney-Hall: Immersed in the spirit

When the Spirit Calls

Visionary paintings by Dawn Whitney-Hall at Art Space in El Segundo

It’s a common enough saying that when one door closes another opens, and this seems especially true of Dawn Whitney-Hall, who is perhaps better known in some circles as Dawn Von Flue. The name change came about a couple of years ago. “It was a little bit of a Fleetwood Mac situation,” Dawn says, referring to the band whose members played together, yet no one stayed together, cohabitationally speaking. In short, Dawn was married to one of the musicians of Hangdog Expression and is now married to another, while being involved in a close music-artistic partnership with a third. Perhaps the band’s named proved prophetic.

This isn’t quite as irrelevant as it sounds. The break-up wasn’t a walk in the park, but it did lead Dawn towards a new direction with her painting, which we’ll be able to see firsthand on Saturday at Art Space in El Segundo.

Of her divorce, Dawn says, “It was one of the hardest things in my life. I was in a really bad place, just trying to get through the next day. Creatively, that was on such a backburner that I don’t think it was there.”

Clearing the mind, and listening

Dawn Whitney-Hall currently lives in El Segundo, but she’s lived in the South Bay most of her life, the early years in Manhattan Beach (she attended Mira Costa) and the latter years in Hermosa, with a brief foray to Newport Beach when she was the co-owner of a small ceramics business. Along the way she raised a family; her eldest child just moved up to Washington to attend school.

“I’ve always made paintings,” Dawn says, preferring the figurative over the abstract. Suddenly they made a large jump in size:

“The murals just happened. Somebody said, Will you paint my baby room? and it turned into a business and this is 21 years later.” There were many other commissions for children’s rooms, and then gradually Dawn’s clientele included more and more businesses, car washes, schools, and so on. It’s what pays the bills.

Now let’s go back to Dawn’s post-Fleetwood Mac days.

After her divorce, “I was looking for things to figure my life out,” she says, before adding that “I’ve always been secretly spiritual.” It was in this direction that she found herself pointed, and drawn.

“Sometimes I think tragedy makes you pursue things and find answers,” Dawn continues. “So, what I ended up doing was, I found a shaman. The way it happened, I don’t know how, I think there are things at work, the way we cross paths.” His name is Alfonso De Rose. “I’ve been practicing and learning from him for a couple of years, and my life has changed, just completely.”

The word “dieta” in Spanish means diet, but a shamanic dieta would be closer to a cleansing, one that modifies consciousness and purifies the body in order for a person to become more spiritually attuned, largely to the plant and animal spirits with whom we share the planet but most often ignore or dismiss. I may be off by a few centimeters or a few yards, but I believe that’s the gist of it.

As Dawn describes it, a person who chooses to undergo a dieta is given (assigned, Dawn says) one of the master plants from the Amazon, and as a tea one drinks it each evening for the duration of the dieta. There are certain other requirements that concern what is ingested and what is practiced (abstinence, for one, meditation for another), as well as the need for quiet and solitude. “If you open your mind and feel the presence,” Dawn says, “you get intuitions and you get insights. It might be all in my subconscious but it doesn’t matter, because the teaching was still there.”

At the retreat she attended for her first dieta, which spanned three days, Dawn was understandably skeptical. However, “It was during that weekend that I had a spirit animal come in and it was a powerful experience.” It was also when she “saw” her first painting (of those that she’s completed for Saturday’s show). “When you’re going through something of great resonance, or if you’re having a conversation with the Creator, if you don’t take it seriously then you’re not paying homage or respect to the Creator.” In other words, “these paintings came as a result of listening to God, I guess, or the Great Spirit.”

Self-reflection, self-love

“That may be placing a lot of responsibility on these paintings,” Dawn says with a laugh, yet she did paint them during what she calls a private ceremony, and it was during her second dieta that the deer appeared and she’s completed two paintings of it or inspired by it.

An artist of any kind may be thinking dollar signs when he or she is producing new work, but those principles don’t apply when the ideas or visions for it are being passed along from the spirit world. “I’ve had no thought of selling or not selling these paintings,” Dawn says. “As an artist that primarily works commercial, it’s always about, well, there’s a check at the end. There’s not a check at the end of this, you know?”

The tea grown by shamans in South America that’s shipped to the U.S. is not psychoactive, although it may give one dreams and insights throughout the day. There’s another tea, this one called ayahuasca, and it’s highly hallucinogenic, so the ceremonies that use it take place elsewhere, in Tijuana for example. It’s not a party drug, Dawn says, but it does yield visions, some of which you may like and some you may dislike. “They call it Mother Aya because she teaches you lessons and sometimes she’s kind about it and sometimes she’s not.

“But the biggest lesson I think that she eventually teaches is self-love,” Dawn continues. “I believe it’s not unlike a near-death experience where you’re shown all of the places that you’ve been a real jerk. And that’s painful, to see the places where I did not show compassion for people. The spirits talk back to you if you talk to them, and I would say, But I didn’t know any better. Or I would have an excuse. And they basically said, Well, we’re not about excuses here; we’re about you finding compassion in your heart and forgiveness for yourself for the way you acted..

“That’s a tough one, forgiving yourself for being (uncaring). It’s a powerful healing, though. Some people aren’t ready for that, to confront their own demons and the way they’ve been. I think that when I came to it the pump was pretty primed. I was at a place of suffering from depression, and my esteem was at an all-time low. I was ready to have that ‘death of the ego’ thing happen.”

This is, perhaps, a re-evaluation, or re-booting if you wish, of one’s self and identity, which of course then bears upon the creative expressions that emerge from it. As Dawn notes, “This art is more of having had those experiences and allowing my ears to open to what to do next.” The visions didn’t make her an artist; the talent and skill was already there. But it did help to push open a new door which, as I mentioned in my opening sentence, often appears when an older door is closing.

The event on Saturday is just that, an event rather than simply an art show. Nich Von, whose involvement in the shamanic way of life seems largely to parallel Dawn’s, will perform “medicine music” along with Dawn’s husband, Brett Hall. In addition to Dawn’s ten paintings, Jodee Hulsebus will be displaying her leather jewelry. Furthermore, Alfonso De Rose, the shaman behind Dawn’s inner journeys, is scheduled to give a brief talk about plant medicines, and that may take place around 6:30 p.m. It’s a one-night-only event, so let’s not dally, okay?

Nocha De Medicina, featuring the visionary art of Dawn Whitney-Hall, is happening Saturday from 6 to 10 p.m. at Art Space, 419 Main St., El Segundo. More at artspacela.com, or contact the artist at (310) 955-0408 or by going to Whitney-HallStudio.com. ER

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