In 2011, Adrianne Tamar Arachne sat down for an interview at the LucasArts office. It was a big day for her; the culmination of a ten year journey during which she had made sacrifices and overcome opposition and chased her dreams and gone to art school. It was right before her – the chance to become a concept artist and help create worlds of amazement and wonder. The interview was going well; her portfolio was strong, her skills solid, and she had always been a good communicator.
And then the interviewer asked: “So, what do you want to do here?”, and Adrianne froze. She had a visceral realization, a moment where her whole body knew that she didn’t want to be a concept artist and draw other people’s visions and characters and creatures and robots all day. And so she chose not to pursue that career; a pivotal decision that has helped shape the artist she is today.
Today, in August 2024, Adrianne is a visionary fantasy artist who creates magical bioluminescent figures. (and wonderful, evocative words; the previous sentence was entirely lifted by us from her website.) Her art is deeply spiritual and magical; it celebrates humanity and interconnection and nature and more-than-human life. She shares her art with 50,000 kindred souls on Instagram and Facebook, with a community of people from all over the world who find inspiration and meaning and healing in her art.
But she has walked many roads in many worlds to get here, and it all started when she was very young.
The Early Years
Adrianne has always known that she was destined to be an artist. As a young child, she was able to focus on a single piece of art for long periods of time, even as all her friends were running around. Her earliest art memory is from when she was 5 years old; she was obsessed with whales, and drew whole schools of whales on pieces of paper. They were fairly simple: sideways teardrops with dots for eyes, but she lined them all up, and created an entire ocean. Raised in a religious environment which was sometimes repressive, Adrianne reacted by creating her own inner worlds full of color and beauty and freedom.
During her teen years, she discovered concept art for Star Wars: Episode I online, and it changed her life. She realized that people could actually be paid for creating concepts for fantasy films, and focused all her energies on making that happen for herself. When the time came to decide what she would study in college, art school seemed like a logical choice. But it wasn’t easy; even though neither of her parents discouraged her outright, it wasn’t necessarily a career that they had thought of for her. Her deeper truth as a visionary was already within her, and there was a strong elemental force pushing her towards pursuing her truth. But family forces pushed her rather in the direction of a traditional safe career. She knew that art was the risky choice, that it would be a large investment, and that making it work in the long term would be hard, and would necessitate other skills as well. But, even then, Adrianne’s vision was strong, and her awareness of her calling – that of bringing her vision to the world – helped her make the right choice.
Her mother’s support helped her make the art school dream happen, and Adrianne went to the Academy of Art University in San Francisco in 2009. At the time, she was still very religious, and carried those influences within her for a long time.
And art school taught Adrianne many useful things; she learned the basic tools of her chosen field of work, and she learned them formally. But two years in, she had to make the difficult decision to drop out; she’d hit a financial wall, and art school is particularly expensive in SF. But she had a contact at LucasArts, and she went along for an interview. Which is when she had her epiphany, and decided to pause her creative career and figure out how she could make art whose inspiration came from within.
How Art School Helped
Adrianne receives messages from artists every day, asking about whether her time in art school helped her, and if she’d do it all over again. Even though the inspiration for her art comes from within, and many of her techniques are self-taught, she still thinks that art school is important because:
1. Foundation Courses Helped: Color theory classes, especially, taught her a lot she needed to get to the next level; today, thousands of commenters on social media notice how vivid Adrianne’s color palettes are, and how they are always harmoniously chosen.
2. Composition and Perspective: Adrianne is an intuitively flowy thinker, and it was initially hard for her to pin down the logistics of how objects interact structurally. But after a class called “Analysis of Form”, she began to realize that it was like eating vegetables: not necessarily boring, but very important.
3. Basic Oil Painting: This foundational course saw Adrianne paint forms, teacups, and lemons; she still remembers the professor, Frank Lanza, who was an older artist, and a great teacher. This class was important because it taught her the rules of depicting reality on canvas; today, she references so many things she was taught, and makes forms look real and fantastic at the same time by subtly bending the rules.
To Adrianne, the knowledge she gained during her years in art school gave her the power to wield her surreal magic. Even today, she is always learning.
Dropping out of art school and closing the door on a potential LucasArts opportunity were two pivotal moments in Adrianne’s evolution as an artist. At the time, it was a little terrifying, and she took a break from creating for a year. She worked as a massage therapist, something she’d trained in after high school, and did really well. Within a year, she had a select list of clients in the Bay Area, ranging from tech CEOs to successful investment bankers. She was booked out two months in advance; she was happy that her hands, which were accustomed to creating magic on the canvas, were being used to enhance well-being, and she could easily have done that forever.
But something within her knew that she was destined to go back to art.
Adrianne’s Spiritual Awakening
In 2013, about two years after Adrianne left art school, everything changed. She had started to ask questions about life and her purpose and her own truth that couldn’t be answered by religion or her existing mindset any more, and she had a few interesting spiritual experiences, including her first attendance at a Native American medicine ceremony. After one particularly powerful altered state experience, her consciousness expanded, and she saw everything in a different light.
The realization included her new understanding that a lot of what she was doing was for other people and not herself, and Adrianne is completely fine with that – at the time, it was required, and she’d do it again. But as her spiritual beliefs solidified and her understanding deepened, she realized that she would have to change many things, including her environment.
Not long after that, she moved to Colorado. The impulse to move was powerful; one part of her mind thought up reasons to stay in San Francisco, but her body knew; once again, she had a visceral urge to pack up and move, and she listened to it.
Adrianne likens her move to Colorado to walking through a portal of magic and transformation. She felt like the whole world was open to her, and she opened herself up to experimentation, new friends, new people, and bounced around the spiritual scene in Boulder. Her spiritual renaissance informed her artistic journey; she started making art that took her initial inspiration (that of being a fantasy concept artist creating new worlds) and melded that with her new interests, especially shamanism and earth-based spirituality. She started to trust her inner voice a lot more; she realized that part of her fascination with creating new worlds was actually because she wanted to bring people’s inner worlds into visionary realization.
Over the past ten years, Adrianne has led the life of a seeker and has been initiated into various schools of spirituality, and that has been very important. But, at some point, she realized that she was still looking outside for answers, and needed to look within as well. Recently, since the pandemic, her art has been about getting very intimate with the whole spectrum of human experience. Her visionary representations now deal with the rawness of humanity, and she currently finds this more interesting than dissociated spirituality. Her Human Nature series is a great example of where Adrianne’s art is in 2024.
Human Nature
In 2023, Adrianne embarked upon the biggest project of her art career: a series of ten paintings that collectively sought to explore the “human emotional and experiential wilderness”. After a gestation period of several years in her body and her mind, Human Nature came into the world between May and August 2023, in preparation for a fall exhibition at the Threyda Gallery in Denver, Colorado. It is unique in that Adrianne documented every step of the creative process, and there were several stages: the concept development phase – which involved preliminary sketches and associated poems – can be found on her website, and then she spent four months creating the final paintings.
Each painting has a theme, and each reminds us what it means to be beautifully and vulnerably human. They are, in order:
1. Initiation: This piece shows three stacked deity figures in the sky, among the clouds. The lowest one has a lightning bolt coming out of its mouth which strikes a person on the ground. Below the ground is a fetus – a symbol of rebirth. Adrianne painted “Initiation” to tell a story about someone going through an experience so intense that they are transformed forever. This piece also has personal significance, and feels sacred to her. Although the painting is very intense, showing how difficult initiation can be, the positive aspects of transformation can be seen in the topmost face lit by the sun, looking upwards with a hopeful expression.
2. Presence: The second painting in the Human Nature series presents a unique composition of animals and glowing light effects. At the top is the face of a blindfolded woman with animals surrounding her on each side: deer, owls, foxes, and snakes. The arrangement of animals is symmetrical and there is a glowing chair in the center. In her poem for Presence, Adrianne writes about accepting someone for everything they are in order to allow them to be fully present. With a beautiful contrast of complementary blue and orange hues and a wispy blue glow filling the background, Presence talks about the wild returning to itself, and showcases all that is majestic in nature.
3. Grief: In this powerful piece, a human face emerges from a mountain face, and tears cascade from the eyes, forming a waterfall that covers all the slopes. The hands have crows eating from them, symbolizing death and loss, and the color scheme evokes memories of grief and sadness.
As with the other paintings in the series, Grief comes with its own poem, forming a work of art in two parts. Adrianne writes about how grief can lead to a tsunami of water consuming a person whole, washing away everything that isn’t real. The poem emphasizes how this difficult emotion is something that we should own, as our capacity to rebuild even after loss is a beautiful and very human thing.
4. Survival: The fourth piece in Human Nature is tense and fraught with danger, as a woman swims in a dark sea, surrounded by dozens of sharks with razor-sharp teeth. There is hope; however, the woman has one hand stretched upwards to the light above the surface of the water, and she cradles a ball of light to her bosom, a ball of light with a baby turtle in it. Survival is inspiring, and reminds us that even when there is impending doom and a sense of urgency, we will find a way, and that we will save everything that is fundamental to us.
5. Longing: In this painting, a version of Adrianne is seated cross-legged, silhouetted against a burning sunset. The burning fire inside her body highlights many symbolic shapes, including an hourglass, continuing the theme of urgency and limited time, horses with manes afire, and burning loins. This piece is one of her most vulnerable creations, but is also a universal depiction of longing for something that may never be available, of burning with desire.
6. Dying: In Dying, a man walks down a long and winding path, one that’s textured almost like fire. The sides of the mountain road are made of bones and skulls; the fragility of life is apparent. But the duality of the painting is where it is at its most powerful; nothing that has died is truly dead because it has lived before, and we go back into the Earth. Adrianne’s treatment of death and dying captures this duality; the fear that we all have of the unknown, and the hope seen in the bright color scheme and the blue sky.
7. Listening: The subject of Listening sits in a lovely, dark, deep forest, at one with nature. She holds a large bowl full of what looks like whimsical winds, magically swirling around. Her ears are vessels that have streams of light flowing into them, she truly listens to nature, and to her true self. The background of the painting is full of lush green tones in the forest and water.
8. Connection: This painting continues the exploration of our most fundamental human selves seen through the prism of nature. Two beings – forest spirits, tree-like humans – hold each other, and their faces are full of peace and love. But around them is both fire and water, brightness and the dark, chaos and serenity. The poem talks about how human meetings and connections and closeness can often be complex and risky and chaotic and wild, and that all this can be worth it in the end, much like how trees take years, decades even, to put down roots and be truly at one with the wild world around them.
9. Hope: This piece is titanic in scale, and has one element in common with the earliest artistic expressions of Adrianne’s life: whales. The subject of the painting sits on the water next to the immense skeleton of a whale, and its spirit can be seen issuing from her heart, soaring majestically into the luminescent sky. This symbol of hope contrasts with the trappings of death (the skeleton) around her, and Adrianne writes about finding the strength to go on despite life’s “relentless indifference”.
10. Power: In Power, a woman stands in the forest. She holds a multitude of plants and green living things in her hands like a votive offering, and her head is crowned with the radiant rays of the Sun. When Adrianne was coming up with ideas for this painting, she thought about what power meant in her life, and how part of American culture is about striving to gain a significant amount of power over your own life and those of others in a way that can be self centered. She feels strongly that power should be used in consonance with the rest of the web of life by people who seek to empower everything around them, and not just themselves.
All About “The Dragonhearted”: a Personal Piece
The Dragonhearted, created in 2021 as an oil painting on a wood panel measuring approximately one square foot, is a power piece that Adrianne made for herself. Inspired by shadow work sessions centering on an essential piece of her heart, its true colors, and its availability to give and receive light and color, it is very personal, and very special, and has a unique visually powerful concept.
The creation of The Dragonhearted, which still lives with Adrianne to this today (she has never sold it), took place in several steps:
1. Concept: Adrianne wanted to create a portrait that would remind her of an essential part of her nature, when she has a huge feeling in her heart, full to bursting with inspiration, set on fire by the beauty of nature or the world or humanity. She wanted it to be a power object, one that would lift her up when she felt that life wasn’t worth it. And so she started with the creation of the piece, imbuing it with her very own brand of magic.
2. Photo References: Adrianne gets asked – a lot – if she uses photo references, and she usually does, just for the pose. It’s important to get the forms right and be semi-realistic before she has a soul spark and adds surreal imagery to her paintings.
3. First Layer: After executing the broad vision of The Dragonhearted, painting the figure and the background, Adrianne let it dry for a week. She always tries to stay as natural as possible – she does not use drying agents, but relies on organic solvents and linseed oil. She adds no chemicals to alter the behavior of oil paints; if it was good enough for the Old Masters, it’s good enough for her. With The Dragonhearted, Adrianne had a clear vision in her head, and didn’t need to make many rough sketches. The whole piece was finished in less than a month – maybe even two weeks!
4. Refinements: During the next phase, she used smaller brushstrokes to make the painting come to life.
5. The Glowing Heart: The core element of the painting came together in a single session; this is very rare even for Adrianne. She gets many questions about how she makes her paintings glow like they are living things; of course, there is a technical aspect to it, going from light to dark with great precision. But there is something more, the special sauce is partly secret even to Adrianne herself. There is a magical space that invests her glowing paintings with something more than just the technical details, and that magic is present in the glowing heart in The Dragonhearted.
6. Photography: When the image is dry, before it’s varnished, Adrianne gets a really good photo or a scan. This always looks best and most vibrant before the varnish stage.
7. Final Steps: After the image is varnished, it’s ready to begin its journey into the lives of those it is intended for; in the case of The Dragonhearted, it was, of course, destined to stay with Adrianne. Many of her pieces are accompanied by detailed poems, to the point where the words are works of art that complement and add depth to the main painting. The words usually come after the painting; she sits with the finished image for a while, and the poem arises from her heart.
Evolution
As Adrianne kept learning more about her art and herself, and went on more and more fundamental spiritual journeys, her style evolved. From 2014 to 2019, she created a lot of pieces inspired by fantasy and magic; visionary animals were a major part of her work. In 2020, she began to create spirit portraits depicting people. She remembers one piece from that period vividly, as marking the shift to her current style.
It was the summer of 2020, and the world reeled under the impact of the pandemic. In America, the George Floyd protests forced a nation to look at itself, and Adrianne was working on a piece called Eclipse.
Eclipse shows an African man whose face is surrounded by animals and powerful symbols. It also has a deep meaning in the larger context of racial injustice. When things are a certain way, in the light, we get used to how they look, and what they mean to us. But during an eclipse, we get to see things as they actually are.
The painting flowed from Adrianne; she was a vessel, and it resonated with a lot of people at that time and afterwards. It was one of her first paintings which was both very personal and had a clear connection to a larger theme. Her experience with Eclipse was very fulfilling, and it is very special to her, even today.
Before – and after – the Human Nature series in 2023, Adrianne worked on a large number of spirit portraits for people. They were often created as power objects, individual pieces for a person. But because the symbols she used are universal, many people related even to personal pieces at a deep, visceral level.
Going forward, Adrianne has a few ideas for subjects she would like to tackle. The world is at an interesting tipping point with the development of technology, and the intersection of that with the climate crisis, and humankind’s relationship with the environment (or lack thereof), are all themes that she wants to speak about through her art. For a while, she has felt like she has created paintings within her own little world, and she would now like to enhance the dimension of her art which brings people home to the planet and to themselves. Adrianne has the gift of being able to see, interpret, and show familiar things in a different light, and she is confident that she can use this to help people feel more connected to the Earth. She sometimes thinks that it’s funny that she started out wanting to create new worlds with her art, and now she has achieved the ability to allow people to experience the wonder and beauty and majesty in this one.
Adrianne is grateful to…
Community at large. She wouldn’t have gotten anywhere she’s gotten in life without help, support, and connection from community. Her artistic success really is a success of community coming together to believe in art and storytelling, and support her as one of the people who does so. There’s plenty of important individuals that make up that community… but truly, it’s everybody.
Adrianne would also like to thank the indigenous elders that have so generously shared their traditions with her over the years. Representatives of the Shipibo tribe, Navajo Nation, Curenderos, and many others. These people have helped her generously on her path towards reconnecting with what makes us inherently human.
And finally, Adrianne would like to thank all the women in her family line who were talented artists, engineers, inventors, intellectuals, and geniuses who were never recognized, and had to suppress and sacrifice the development of their abilities in order to play a role that the social norms of the time assigned them. When she thinks about the life she gets to have now, she realizes that she is the answer to their prayers: a woman who got to choose differently. She only gets to do what she gets to do on this planet because of woman after woman after woman throughout history who fought for more. And it’s on their shoulders she stands.
Links
Adrianne’s website: https://www.adriannetamararachne.com/.
Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/adriannetamararachneart/.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/adriannetamararachne.
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/adriannetamararachneart/.