Soul drawings, core paintings, perspectives on consciousness, spiritual art - although the names may differ, art which reaches into the essence of individual human beings has its own extraordinary intensity. Margaret Evans speaks to three established artists whose work has appeared as NOVA covers over the years - Donalea Patman, Kali Shub and William Harper Reid, who paints as Shorty Forty.

Donalea Patman
Bridging the worlds

Fremantle-based Donalea knows better than most the full range of her capabilities and readily explores many of them on a daily basis. As a successful graphic designer at home with logos and corporate images, drawing was something unknown to her before she found another, more spiritual, pathway through art she calls "soul drawings".

Her journey began at a channelled writing workshop when another participant asked her to design a book cover for her. As Donalea remembers, "Her reaction was incredible and I recognised it as something that was healing and deep". That first step into the unknown has developed into a steady demand for Donalea's distinctive pastel and pencil drawings based on sacred geometry with elements of colour healing in each.

She now estimates she's completed "around 50", but still seems surprised at - and maybe a little in awe of - the well of creativity she's untapped within herself. "I have always been interested in spiritual art but I never thought it was my lineage. So when I started creating it myself I was quite surprised." She explains her new direction as an "awakening" of her own internal talents and talks of images "flowing" from her hand without any conscious creative drive on her part. "When I start a picture, I just let it come through. I don't know what I'm creating, I have no concept of colours… I am totally guided when I do my soul drawings."

Like other spiritual artists, Donalea tunes into the energy of her subject, rather than having to rely on meeting them in person. For instance, she's had soul drawings commissioned from the East coast of Australia, as well as mainland United States and Hawaii. "My drawing is a soul perspective. I believe we are all made up of filaments of light and are just a projection of our soul as we are living in third dimensional reality," she explains. "When I'm commissioned by someone to do a drawing, they're giving me permission to tune into them and then I can feel that energy just coming straight through. It's like I'm encoded with that person's energy and I draw an interpretation of it."

Donalea is conscious that she is entrusted with her subject's essential self, even if only a small part of it… and is prepared for the emotional reaction that often accompanies that person's first viewing of their soul portrait.

"It's never a full picture. it's really just keys to help them align more fully to their own purpose, their own destiny, their own healing." The emotional reaction in so many cases, she believes, flows from helping that person overcome some sort of emotional block in their lives. "Or maybe they just see how beautiful they are."

Donalea's increasingly busy lifestyle- she finds time for fine art and plus size modelling as well as corporate graphic design, and is currently on the west coast of the US on her first fullscale promotional tour as an artist - still allows her other avenues to express her deep spirituality.

A style of drawing she calls Perspectives on Consciousness is also winning wide interest and giving her the joy of working with mischievous sprites Donalea laughingly calls her "dudes or devas".

"They give me another perspective on reality and I love them because of the fun and humour they bring to everything. With them, nothing is serious!"

A conversation with a friend who had just attended a workshop on bushflower essences was the creative spark for Donalea's sprite-like devas to emerge, bringing a new emotional intensity to her work. "I think we all have an emotional response in looking at them because the visual concept awakens us to our full potential." The first devas to emerge for Donalea are unmistakably elements of the Australian landscape including gumnuts, poppies and water sprites.

The devas, one senses, are guiding this multi talented and sensitive artist in her new directions both physically and spiritually. As she takes on her latest, biggest challenge - to break into the US art scene - they remind her of her deep seated sense of purpose: "They remind us of our innate beauty. I think we all have something exquisite and exclusive and individual to offer the world. And my journey is about assisting people in exploring that and really believing it's there."

Shorty Forty
Visiting internal landscapes

Talking of souls doesn't sit easily with this quintessentially laconic Aussie, a printer by trade but an artist in every sinewy fibre. In a typically self-effacing way, he refers to his own work as "core painting" rather than soul art because "soul carries the notion of identity and there's no identity to soul energy". He offers the example of the Zen concept of "the path of no path" as essentially the same idea.

Shorty's intense love of the Australian landscape has clearly influenced his life and work with regular trips "out bush" to reinforce his energies and stimulate a unique creative imagination.

The extraordinary energy he feels in certain special places has spilled over into heightening his response to the unique energetic resonance of individual people.

"It started when I'd be out bush doing my conventional painting, but for some reason I'd find a particular spot that had its own magic about it, its own essence, its own core. Out there with great distances in between, there are special sacred places like Ayres Rock and Kakadu, table top hills and rocks honeycombed with caves where the oil from people's feet walking over the rock for thousands of years has worn the surface smooth.

"The resonance of these places is so strong… the energy is so extraordinary. And then I started seeing this uniqueness in people." The experience, he says, has made him more attuned to people he now meets "because I am tuning into their core energy and discovering them in a new way". It has also freed him from the conventions of landscape and allowed him to play with colors, medium and form in a far more experimental way.

Working in printer's inks which give his paintings an intensity of colour and almost seamless blending of one with another, Shorty has won both critical acclaim and a growing circle of enthusiastic admirers. At first glance, many of his core paintings give the appearance of landscapes, but for the subject and often their family and friends, the other layers of meaning can be an intense spiritual experience. When Shorty invites the subject to view the core painting for the first time, he's become used to open displays of emotion. "When I was still experimenting I would invite the person and their friends to get their feedback. Often they would cry because they were so deeply touched and people in the group would be amazed." Now he usually leaves the subject alone in a room with the core portrait and avoids what he calls "any poetry" to convince them of its merits.

"When they cry because they are so deeply touched I know I have succeeded with that person's painting. People won't give them away." A typical example is one woman who hangs her delicate moonflower image on her bedroom wall to reinforce the "rapport with herself that bounces off the painting every time she sees it".

Other core paintings masquerade as wide open Kimberley landscapes of stately gums or stunted spinifex and endless sky, vivid flowers, still water scenes mirroring sky and trees, and even the reflection of the moon on dewdrops.

Many of Shorty's core paintings tell a story treasured by the subjects. One male subject was so impressed with his own internal landscape that he commissioned another for his fiance working in distant Dubai. Although Shorty had never met her, he was able to tune into her energetically from a photograph. The result is a stunning pairing of bush scenes, the first a sunrise on the waning moon dominated by pale blue Kimberley sky, and the 'female' partner, a reverse image with white lightening forking out from stormy clouds. "If you walk into the first painting and go behind the trees and look back you get a reverse image of the trees with a sunset and a new moon," the artist explains. Just as the two core images are a perfect pairing, the couple are still together.

And just as each of us has a resonance that's totally our own - " it's like comparing lavender and a rose- they're both plants but they're different" - so, too, it's always part of us regardless of mood or circumstances, says Shorty. He explains it as a combination of the five elements of earth, fire, water, air and the Chinese element of metal, "and the mix is what distinguishes you from every other person". With this intuitive artist, that's just the starting point for a fascinating journey of self discovery.

Kali Shub
Creativity is our birthright

Awakening the creative spark latent within every human being is a source of profound satisfaction to another Western Australian artist Kali Shub, whose work is well known to NOVA readers over the years. Gifted with a strongly individualistic style which draws on her spiritual awareness and love of vibrant colour, Kali conducts SpirArt courses for beginners through to "master classes" - "because everyone does a masterpiece".

Kali's starting point is that everyone has creation in them which, in so many cases, has been blocked off or denied expression as they grow to adulthood. "It doesn't have to be in painting, it can be in cooking, dressing, gardening and some people are even creative in the way they think negatively," she says with a characteristic bubbling laugh.

One of her favourite techniques which she shares with students is to begin a session with meditation to open up a pathway through emotional and spiritual blockages. Then, limited to a choice of three colors, which can have personal as well as universal symbolism, she and her students work with fingers or brushes to create an image by folding a card in half and opening it out again. The childlike approach is deliberate, and just like uninhibited youngsters, the joy is contagious, says Kali. "And when people open up their card and see the picture, the images are just so pertinent. Some are just magnificent."

Combined often with channelled writing or other techniques like stream of consciousness writing, Kali's approach is obviously an effective form of art therapy. "It's their feeling and their dreaming which starts to come through and opens up to all sorts of creativity". A wolf, a charging bull, a living goddess, a giant phallic symbol, a heart chakra, a Buddha and a butterfly are just some of the striking images which spill out from a collection of SpirArt cards which illustrates her point. Students gradually develop skill and confidence in their own expression for more advanced work like energetic self portraits using colors they can see in their own auras, mandalas and paintings of personal guides which arise from their own meditations.

Kali is well attuned to the hunger of many of her clients to open a door towards some form of creativity in their lives. "If someone's creativity is stale or dormant, their life will be too. You can't have one channel of your life working fully and another channel closed. It's all about getting a balance and broadening your life," she says.

Her individualistic approach also helps people work through life issues like attachment and impermanence, even if sometimes, it " really annoys them", confides Kali. "For instance, I'll get them to turn their picture upside down which is just what can happen in life when you think you're going along nicely. Or I'll tell them to go to the next person's work and take that over which brings up a range of reactions from being scared to the sort of person who says ' I can see what's wrong there - I'll fix it!'" Perhaps the most challenging of all is her suggestion to take the painting outside and turn the tap on it. "It's a lesson in impermanence, but sometimes it turns into something much more beautiful than before".

Her constant questing and exploring her own rich vein of creativity contributes to Kali's stature as a artist who can free the spirit of even the most inhibited among us.