Numinous (2020) Original Mixed-media Painting by Megan Ashman

Numinous emerged from an experience the artist understood as a premature awakening of kundalini energy—an opening into heightened intuition, altered consciousness, and spiritual intensity before she felt prepared to contain it. What began as revelation became disorientation: the sensation of being overtaken by darker forces, while gradually recognizing that some of those forces also originated within the hidden self.

The commanding eyes at the top of the composition belong to an oracle-like fortune teller. Adorned with coins and metallic fragments, she appears to see beyond the visible world, yet her expression offers no reassurance. Her gaze suggests foresight without protection—the ability to perceive what is approaching without knowing how to survive its arrival.

Beneath her, hands ignite a flame in an act that feels distinctly shamanic and ceremonial. It may be read as an invocation, a divination ritual, or the instant dormant energy is called into motion. The flame marks the threshold where curiosity becomes initiation and spiritual seeking becomes something far more consuming.

Nearby, layered hands cover an entire face. They conceal sight, identity, and expression, suggesting both self-protection and psychic blindness. The figure is prevented from witnessing what is occurring, yet remains unable to escape it. These hands become an image of consciousness overwhelmed—buried beneath instinct, fear, memory, and forces it cannot yet name.

A zipper curves through the painting like a ruptured seam in reality. It does not merely divide the composition; it appears to open one state of existence into another. Its path flows directly into the hidden female body, connecting the act of revelation to embodiment. The zipper becomes a passage into the subconscious, an opening through which the restrained, repressed, or unknown self can emerge.

When the painting is turned upside down, the image of a woman’s body appears from the neck downward. Nude but veiled in translucent, windblown fabric, she seems to dance, drift, or surrender herself to an unseen current. Her movement is sensual, but there is also something unmoored about it. Without a head, she represents blind consciousness—a body animated by energy without the guidance of reason, identity, or clear perception.

She may be dancing in liberation, or moving unknowingly toward danger. The ambiguity is essential. She embodies the moment when surrender and possession become difficult to distinguish: when spiritual expansion opens into shadow, and the seeker can no longer tell whether she is directing the ritual or being carried by it.

The shifting orientation of Numinous mirrors the experience at its center. Turned one way, it presents the fortune teller, the concealed face, and the ritual flame. Turned another, it reveals the headless woman moving through a parallel visual world. Neither image is complete without the other. Vision exists above while the body wanders below; the oracle understands, but the woman must endure.

Dense with hidden figures, metallic objects, fragmented anatomy, flowing fabric, and weathered layers of pigment, Numinous rewards prolonged observation. Its imagery does not remain fixed. Forms emerge, dissolve, and return differently, creating the feeling that the painting possesses its own shifting consciousness.

The word numinous describes an encounter with something sacred that inspires both fascination and fear. This work occupies that unstable threshold: between awakening and descent, prophecy and confusion, ritual and rupture, the divine and the darkness concealed within the self.

Hidden imagery and interpretation
The fortune teller’s eyes: prophecy, heightened intuition, spiritual sight, and knowledge that arrives before understanding.
The ritual flame: kundalini activation, invocation, initiation, and the dangerous moment when dormant energy is awakened.
The face covered by hands: psychic overwhelm, lost identity, suppressed vision, and consciousness unable to witness its own transformation.
The zipper: a breach between realities; the opening of the subconscious, body, or spiritual threshold.
The upside-down woman: blind consciousness, surrender, sensual energy, and a body moving without the stabilizing presence of the rational self.
The sheer, windblown fabric: the boundary between concealment and exposure; spirit moving through physical form.
The reversible composition: the sensation of crossing into a parallel inner world where meaning, orientation, and identity no longer behave as expected.

Numinous is created for the collector drawn to psychologically charged, spiritually symbolic work—art that does not disclose itself immediately, but continues to alter as it is studied, rotated, and lived with.

“She conjured the future, but wandered into it blind.”

Materials used:

paint markers, acrylic painty, india inks, distress oxide ink, acrylic inks, watercolor, walnut stain, heavy gel medium, protective UV varnish, archival images. mica powders

Details:

• Mixed-media painting on Canvas
• One of a kind artwork
• Size: 27.94 x 35.56 x 2.54cm (unframed) / 27.94 x 35.56cm (actual image size)
• Ready to hang
• Signed on the back
• Style: Surrealistic
• Subject: People and portraits