Ashtoreth Valecourt  USA

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Ashtoreth has long been drawn to aesthetics in many forms, the study of world myth, especially goddess cultures, mysticism, the language of symbols; and a plethora of things. Art is a calling, but also a way of seeing the world. She was largely self-taught after early art classes, inspired by a life-long interest in art and art history. She grew up in the Washington, D.C. area where weekend expeditions to the Smithsonian Institute fed her love and fascination with art, natural sciences, and all schools of aesthetics.

Ongoing studies into subject such as psychology and archetypes feed her artistic expressions. In her paintings, her goal is to communicate the ideas of many words and to explore her thoughts and experiences through the language of the right brain, in the poetry of images. Her paintings are often visual riddles layered with meaning and codes that hold the key to unlocking themselves, though they can be enjoyed for their pure aesthetic pleasure.
In her book 'Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement', art historian Whitney Chadwick writes, "Internalizing the muse, women artists rejected the search for an idealized Other and interrogated the image in the mirror..." Ashtoreth often inhabits the poses that will express the feeling she is seeking to convey, embodying the characters, then stepping away, and then works from photographs using many sheer glazes built up on canvas, and letting elements of symbol, code and fantasy enter.

Art is a means to communicate in the language of the unconscious; through color, symbol, and archetype. Color is emotion. Texture is emotion; whether whispering pianissimo with a sheer glaze, or striking fortissimo with bold strokes and impasto laid down fast and furious with a knife. A picture says a thousand words, and becomes a mirror, first relative to the artist, and then for the ones who encounter it. It is always interesting to see the pieces that people resonate with, because they are telling something about themselves. The revelation goes both ways.
Ashtoreth’s paintings are spiritual, mystical, often alchemical; speaking in the language of archetypes and the mytho-poetic, of the mysteries of life, death, and renewal. Her work could be seen to have elements of fauvism and expressionism at times, but flows most naturally in the currents of the women surrealist painters, who also explored the landscape of the unconscious, their own personal totems and experiences, the sacred feminine, female power, and alchemical transformation through visual mytho-poetic allegories.