Yeah, it’s been a minute since I last posted a blog. A lot has been going on, though!
This piece of art on the left completely changed everything for me a few months ago (see more art at the bottom of this blog). A new client approached me and asked for a spirit guide reading, and then, after seeing that I’m an artist too, she asked if I could do a portrait of her guide. Now, I should say that I’ve done a couple of these in the distant past but I never had adequate help to keep up with it. A quality personal attendant matters a lot when you’re a quadriplegic artist. That’s an entirely different discussion, however. Needless to say, producing a continuous stream of new art has become infinitely easier in the last couple of years since I’ve gotten better quality help and longer attendant hours.
Back to this spirit guide order. I wasn’t sure how it was going to go initially because doing it in the past was really tough on me. But when I agreed to try it, I found out that it was just as rewarding for me as it was for my client. I didn’t tell my attendant exactly what the art commission was for right away even though she knows I communicate with the dead and she has a history of root workers in her own family. For some reason, it’s a lot easier to tell strangers in a blog what I’m doing than a person sitting at my desk with me.
The process is more involved than ordinary art, as one might guess. I have to see the client through a photo (or in person, but that hasn’t happened yet) in order to make the connection with their guide. And guides don’t communicate verbally at all, whereas most spirits still going through the reincarnation cycle are at least willing to verbally communicate once in a while. The natural method of communication for all spirits, human or not, is mostly sensation through emotion or visual images. They can also cause smells, tastes, etc. Most mediums like me develop a visual language. For example, if a spirit is directing me to the Civil War, I’ll see my Gettysburg DVD cover, or if a spirit is trying to convey romantic love, it’ll be a flower bouquet, or the sensation of an old quilt for family love.
Spirit guides are a little more different than those still going through the reincarnation cycle in that they’re more advanced and their frequency is higher. Frequencies are like tuning in a radio. The bad entities (for me) are metaphorically on the low end of the dial, ordinary souls going through life like you and me are in the middle, and the advanced spirits who no longer reincarnate like guides and healers are on the high end. I used to have trouble establishing a useful link with spirit guides because high frequency spirits are hard to hear, so to speak.
This Crete woman was like learning how to do this work with training wheels. I was taught to use reference photos and how to feel out which ones are right for that spirit because doing art completely from scratch would be too stressful. Now that I’m working on my fifth commission, I see she was right. Reference photos give me a base that I can change as the spirit requires. So far, they’re all okay with my working method. This Crete woman came from a model I found online, except her clothes and hairstyle weren’t right. She wasn’t like what the guide was showing me. I began doing research on historical art from Crete and I found the correct way to do things. Still, most of the women had exposed breasts in this period. My client’s guide indicated that naked breasts hanging on a wall wasn’t going to work in this period, so I was told to cover them.
As I began posting drawing progress on Instagram, I noticed my likes and viewership started climbing. So I told people what I was doing. It wasn’t just an art commission. It was spirit communication channeled through art. My viewership went way up again when I finally came clean about it. Before I even finished the Crete portrait and mailed it to my client, I had arranged four more art commissions privately. I was stunned. Over a year of toiling away at my art to try and make some money, and then suddenly working with spirits opened so many more doors for me.
The funny thing is people have been asking for art based on their past lives as well. It’s fairly simple to alter the working process I use to do spirit guide portraits. Instead of connecting to an outside entity, I’m connecting to the client’s subconscious memories just like I’ve been doing in written readings for years.
Here are some of the other spirit art commissions I’ve done since then. Click on them to see them in detail.
Right now I’m all out of room in my schedule to make Christmas as a deadline. To be honest, I probably have enough work to reach March at this point. Isn’t that insane? I went from a fair amount of print sales to being very overwhelmed by my workload.
This is such satisfying work for me even if my family and friends are starting to say the “ghost stuff” in the house is getting out of hand. A few weeks ago, while I was doing past life work connected to John Wilkes Booth, one of my kitchen drawers completely flew out of the slot and skidded across the floor. Now the drawer is broken and won’t fit in the slot right. People are hearing voices and footsteps in my house too. It’s par for the course in my life to attract the dead but it’s getting crowded enough that people without a breath of extrasensory ability are feeling them in and around my house. Nothing is dangerous, though. I just need to re-establish spiritual boundaries around my property.
This work is good. This work is right. I’m making the greater universe tangible for people and that matters a lot to me.
If you’d like to get your own art commission, here’s the link: Custom Portrait of Your Spirit Guide or Past Life (8 1/2 x 11) on Etsy.
They are $85.00 US plus shipping and handling. Please be advised that I’m definitely booked through the end of January 2019 right now. Since I do the art on a first come, first serve basis, there is no better time to buy one than another. Just go ahead and get your spot in line.
I love this work so much! I can’t even describe how fulfilling it is to keep this link open to different people who have walked so many different places on this earth. It’s really opening my eyes as much as it is the people who ask me to do this for them.
Who knew this was where my work would lead? It certainly was a plot twist.
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I have been a portrait artist for so long that I almost got to a point of never imagining myself doing anything else. That’s not necessarily a good thing, however. Artists, in my opinion, should definitely develop a style but not at the expense of challenging themselves. There comes a point when you’re doing the same thing again and again that your creativity goes flat, so it’s incredibly important to find ways to stretch your style into new subjects.
This is my second year participating in Inktober, although I didn’t finish last year. I made it halfway through the month, and then I caught a really heinous cold … or maybe it was a sinus infection. I can’t remember. Needless to say, I didn’t finish so I was very determined to finish this year. Not only finish but create a body of work that challenged and stretched my artistic abilities.
I’ve been tapping into my spirituality to create more interesting art and touching the deeper, more authentic part of myself has resulted in more self-fulfillment. It happened because I was starting to feel my creativity dry up and that’s a dangerous thing for any artist. Part of me was starting to fall into the trap of creating what I thought people wanted instead of engaging the people who find passion in the same things I do. I thought I was simply taking time to make art that I care about without any plan for engaging people. As it turns out, I’ve engaged many more people because I’m showing more of who I am. Authenticity is what makes an artist great. I’ve found that an artist can have all the technical skills in the world, which I certainly don’t, but it won’t mean anything unless the creative process comes from a real, true place inside.
Art By Jessica Jewett 