The Magical Art of Francene Hart
Of the visionary artist, I now sing. Paint for us, Francene Hart, so our hearts are cleansed by your life-affirming purples and tangerine tetrahedrons. Pour forth your liquid lavenders, indigo insights, and passionate pinks to nurse our thirsty souls. May those of us twisted by 10th-grade geometry be straightened by your icosahedrons and elevated by your “Elemental Embrace.” May we find in your primal patterns that the Pythagorean Theorem is both visually beautiful and mathematically true, and as spiritually bold as it is naturally light.
By Marya Mann
I enter the bright bungalow on the slope of Mauna Loa volcano where visionary artist Francene Hart lives, works and communes with her muse. Lining the walls of her sanctuary, Hart’s vibrant watercolors reveal mystical essences normally hidden from the naked eye.
“Nature is my greatest teacher,” she says, traversing her cozy living room to open the sliding glass door. She steps onto the lanai, overlooking her kitchen garden and Kealakekua Bay. “Getting in the ocean or getting out in nature, you can’t help but connect with devas and nature spirits. They’re all around you, unless you’re just so locked up in your story.”
Painting in the “language of light,” the ancient geometric code that guided Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Mayan astronomers, and Egyptian architects, Hart discovered an incandescent world at her fingertips.
“Painting is really a meditation, because my technique is very time-consuming, so it’s one way I go to sacred places, with the geometry,” she says.
Her work is an evolutionary process, she says. “I do a drawing on artists’ vellum, a heavy translucent paper you can erase on. Then I use a light table to put it on the watercolor paper. So I have an outline. Then I go straight to the watercolor with my #2 brush.
“I work in layers, very thin layers. It allows me more flexibility. You can’t take anything out of a watercolor. What you put down is there. So, my only rule for myself is don’t go too dark too fast, because then you can still adjust the color. One of my other main concepts is the way every life is in layers. So, you see through one layer to another reality, another vision.”
This layering technique conjures an alluring dimensionality in paintings like “Traveler’s Prayer,” “Expanded Shri Yantra,” and “Ho’oponopono Sunset.” These torso-sized pieces express at least three “ways of seeing” — the eye of the flesh, the eye of the mind, and the eye of contemplation – common to almost all spiritual traditions. Art using the geometric “language of light” appeals to all three levels of perception, and thus is said to be like a magical doorway through which spirit enters the physical plane, manifesting thought into matter.
Hart’s eyes glow like sapphires as she recalls the exact moment when the vision for “Sunset Activation” came to her, full-blown with sky-surfing spirals and whirling glyphs. While attending a friend’s birthday party at Pu’uhonua O Honaunau, a magnificent twilight shimmered into a dazzling display of storm clouds and rainbows. She had to paint it.
“An intricate formation borrowed from a crop circle is embedded in the center,” she says, pointing to the Mayan-like glyphs in a wheel of teal, violet, and gold. “Several times while painting, I felt as if I were being thrust through time. This feels appropriate, since the Mayans are revered as master timekeepers.”
Like the Southwestern painter Georgia O’Keefe who influenced her, Hart has always needed the rhythms of nature to gestate her visions. As a child in Kansas, the patterns in crystals, trees, flower petals, and snowflakes fascinated her.
“I lived in a suburb on a little street. There weren’t a lot of wild places, but down the road there was this little gulch with a tiny stream. I remember sitting there and having this experience of everything shifting and the light changing.” She came to see the continuum of geometric codes in honeycombs, nautilus shells, the cornea of the eye, the star we spin around, and the galaxy we spiral within, not as abstract forces, but as vitalizing forms.
From the tiniest atom to our DNA, from the Milky Way to the way Francene’s hands dip and dance when she speaks, the same designs interweave everything.
“When I started looking into sacred geometry, I realized how it balances the right and left sides of the brain. I was extremely right-brained, creative,” she says, “and I was OK with that, but as far as business, science, and left-brained stuff, I was hopeless.”
Incorporating sacred geometry into her life harmonized her inner male and female, she says, while balancing the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Because of it, “I am now better able to do business than I was previously,” she says. Her international following might attest to that.
Acclaimed scientist Bruce Lipton, Ph. D., author of The Biology of Belief, now recommends Hart’s work to his seminar students because her art provokes the “whole-brained” state essential to health, maturity, and conscious evolution.
Her sacred geometry cards were also featured on CBS-TV’s The Ghost Whisperer, but she owns no television set. “The news is so fear-based,” she says. She prefers the positive states aroused by nature and her paintings, which she considers to be “places of refuge,” gateways where the divine imagination cascades into the world.
An avid traveler, Hart has visited Ecuador, Nepal, and Great Britain to draw inspiration from sacred sites, but in 2001, she chose West Hawai‘i as her home. “I was summoned by spirit to this incredibly activated pinnacle on the earth grid,” she says, “to be a part of birthing new consciousness. I honor that sacred responsibility, my kuleana. Exploration of the culture and beauty of this island paradise unfolds as a daily wonder.”
Reverence for the land, ocean, and Big Island traditions has sparked new outpourings from her virtuoso brush. “I think living here has expanded my vision, partly because Hawai‘i, and in particular this part of the island, is very open and progressive spiritually. I can be, do, and say anything I want here. I don’t feel that automatic censor which you do in a lot of places.”
The images gracing her art studio and in her two books, the Sacred Geometry Oracle Deck and Sacred Geometry Cards for the Visionary Path, are so rich with nature’s blueprint you can almost smell the forest perfumes, taste the sea salt, and feel the ocean swirling through your toes.
Even if you can’t find time to spend in nature every day, she says, you can select one of her cards or view sacred art to reconnect with your creativity. “Choosing a couple of cards helps you remember to remember, because that’s what we’re all doing. We’re waking up and remembering our divinity, remembering our oneness.”
Hart is currently offering sacred geometry workshops at Kona Stories in South Kona. “Geometry helps us realize we are not separate beings but part of this beautiful whole,” she says.
“It’s all about our shift to unity and goodness,” she adds, swirling her hands and smiling in the exact same pattern, I notice, as the noni leaves twittering in the breeze.
And I remember to remember. ❖
