Beautiful Souls Healing With Art: Holly Irwin

The title of this post is purposefully ambiguous. Are WE the Beautiful Souls Healing With Art, on the receiving end of healing from another’s art? Is the ARTIST the beautiful soul, healing others with her art? Yes and Yes. Herein lies the beauty of fine art: unity of creator and beholder, both caught in a lavishly mysterious web of healing. Amen?

By healing I mean divine processes at work at a subtle energy level moving us closer to wholeness. Our masterfully created human bodies naturally want to heal themselves and return to health, and surely our souls long for it too.

In fact, the work of the soul seems to most often carry on quietly beneath awareness. Lovely soul anesthesia, I suppose. Who has yet to experience the dark night of the soul? The trauma of being locked out of paradise? Who can say when and how art heals? Maybe it’s like a garden.

A supernatural seed is planted in the ground of the soul of an artist. When she aligns her heart with purity, with a higher call, the seed flourishes. She opens hands and heart to receive. Blessing rains down. And as she brings full expression to beauty swelling like sunlight within her, beauty grows. The beholder’s soul finds rest and nourishment within the artist’s garden, feasting on its fruits. Fruits?

Unity. Enlightenment. Harmony. Sweetness. Understanding. Intimacy. Compassion. Tenderness. Redemption. Restoration. Hearfulness. Healing.

The harvest is healing, friends. What Eden we enjoy thanks to the artists tending our spirits. Thanks to radiant lights in our midst such as Holly Irwin, a Georgia-based painter of figures, fashion, and flora…a beautiful soul with uncommon healing in her hands.

Beautiful Souls Healing With Art: Holly Irwin

Let’s taste the fruits of her glorious paintings in today’s delight of an art tour, but not before we meet this beautiful soul, up close and personal. Holly Irwin inspires me as an embodiment of who I long to be.

Irwin’s paintings are heartful creations, honored by collectors, galleries, and design publications.
(all images – Holly Irwin)

A Few Favorite Paintings

Her work “Trusting” (above) conveys for me a deep
sense of life’s fragility, nature’s gentle acceptance
of change, and the soul’s vast capacity for beauty.

Like the French Impressionist Renoir and both of my
younger sisters, Irwin has rheumatoid arthritis (RA)
and brilliantly eclipses what others might
regard as limiting circumstances.

The auto-immune disease,
debilitating pain, and a dozen surgeries
on hands and feet came not  to curse,
but to BLESS…

to usher in the flow of beauty emerging from her soul and overflowing on canvas.

Perseverance of an Artist

Holly Irwin is also a serial covergirl.

Beautiful Souls Healing With Art: Holly Irwin

My own painting on paper by Holly Irwin…a treasure indeed.

Beautiful Rooms Graced With Her Art

The work for me is a poetical blend of childhood wonder and spiritual wisdom. A graceful, fashion-informed collection of brushstrokes birthing a decidedly gossamer-like tranquil mood.

Interview with Holly Irwin

What a privilege to interview the artist (and loyal friend to Hello Lovely!) whose courage and outlook bids us all to embrace gratitude, to aim higher.

H.I.: “It’s therapy and joy and wholeness and healing

all wrapped up into one big bundle.”

“Anyone who has been really ill or close to death looks at the everyday with a renewed sense of wonder when they have a second chance at life.

There was a time when just walking from

one room to the next was so excruciatingly painful

and draining for me that I surely missed

all the beauty around me. 

The pain of rheumatoid arthritis robbed me

of my joy for living. Now that it is pretty much

under control, I am so thankful I can walk

and get exercise..the experience has given me

a whole new perspective of how lucky I am.”

 Thoughts About Perfection

Inspiring the Artist

1.
“Nature and the lush colors of springtime and summer;
I can sometimes imagine a whole painting based solely
on seeing a color that strikes me in a certain way.”
2.
“Femininity, like the way a woman feels in a beautiful dress. When I was a child, my mother (whom I adored!) was a fashion illustrator; she had a great love of fabric
and sewing and made all of our clothes.
This has influenced my paintings a great deal
over the years and continues to do so.”
3.

“Patterns…like the formation of leaves on trees,

the repeating patterns in flowers and plants.”

Art and Healing

Holly’s story reminds me
that by
t r a n s f o r m i n g
my pain,
I can avoid
t r a n s m i t t i n g
it;
and by embracing divine creativity,
I may even
t r a n s c e n d
it.

To view Holly Irwin’s available work, visit here. Live near Marietta, Georgia? Lucky!

July 6th is opening night of MASK at dk Gallery, 5-9pm, and you are invited!

p.s.

Dear Holly,

Your heart and hands are surely in the healing business, and we are grateful. Thank you for bravely answering the call, for welcoming the rich flow of living water and allowing a baptism of sorts to transform you into light. So many days it is easy to look around and grow cynical, to become hardened by disappointments in the culture. Yet your art points us to the eternal, to hope everlasting, to the fruits of the spirit. Your light makes all the difference.

Oh, may healing wash over our dry land, and may our hearts grow as tender as your lovely palette.

I independently selected products in this post—if you buy from one of my links, I may earn a commission.

Peace to you right where you are.

-michele

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