Loose Leaf Notes

~ The following recently appeared in the winter issue of All About Her magazine, a regional newspaper insert.

Most people don’t know that Santa’s red suit has been depicted in the past with white polka dots, or that the red and white-dotted amanita mushroom has been a popular image on Christmas and New Year cards around the world.  Considered a good luck symbol, like a shamrock or a horseshoe, the mushroom has been an underlying theme in Ruth Neumann’s visionary art since she began painting as an art therapy while recovering from a health crisis in 1992.

“Whether it’s a spaceship, an animal, a mushroom or an abstract, with every dot I do, I try to put good intentions into it for the people who view my art,” says the folk artist, musician and online radio host, known as Starroot.

Sipping tea, poured from a red and white polka dot teapot into a matching polka dot cup, Starroot explains that the mushroom is also a symbol of magic and that there is a connection between the Santa story and Siberian shamans who sold reindeer for the mushrooms, which they carried in sacks.  She owns an extensive collection of mushroom inspired items, including vintage cards and postcards, Old World Christmas ornaments, dishes, clothing and knick-knacks.

Born in Southern Germany, Starroot lives on 63 acres in the mountains of Floyd County, Virginia, with her husband and fellow-musician, Rick Hall.  She traces her artistic inclinations back to her childhood in Germany, where she grew up without TV and with parents who fostered her creativity.  “I was encouraged not to buy gifts but to make something. I’d write a poem or a song or go into the woods and gather natural materials to build something,” she says.

In Germany Starroot was a kindergarten teacher. “There was no question about working with children.  Possibly because I’m a big child myself,” she jokes.  Combining her work with children and her interest in music, she studied with Gerturd Orff, daughter of composer Carl Orff, to become a music therapist.   A musician who plays the accordion, keyboard, guitar, piano, harmonic recorder and Native American drum, Starroot has worked as a street musician and has been in various bands, performing her original children’s songs and folk songs.

Flipping through a 40-year-old journal from when she lived in Germany and England, Starroot comments, “I didn’t study art. I wasn’t very good at doing do what they wanted.”  The yellow-paged journal is filled with paintings and poetry that reveal the early signs of her artistic potential.

Prompted by her inner guidance and concerns about being downwind from of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, Starroot came to the U.S. with her two young children, first living in Tennessee and then finding Floyd in 1986 through a homespun community newsletter, A Museletter.   “It felt like home,” she says about her first visit to Floyd.

Starroot’s first creative surge of painting produced a vibrant and colorful body of work, titled Arturian Dreams.  Painted intuitively from visions and dreams, the series of more than 50 large paintings in acrylic and ink on canvas and wood was done as Starroot recovered from a painful internal illness.  Inspired by galactic and totem animal themes, the series included paintings with names like Back Home, The Mother Ship, Rainbow Rhino and Red Cosmic Dragon.   “I got such positive interest from my friends that I didn’t stop,” she remembers.

Following the Arturian Dreams series, Starroot entered a show at Virginia’s Museum of Transportation in Roanoke with an entry of a space train that she thought would be a prize winner.  She didn’t win in the traditional sense, but her work drew praise that set her career as an artist in full speed motion.

At the Roanoke exhibit she noticed two men in suits studying her paintings.  One said, “Don’t be sad if you didn’t win a prize.  You are the winner for us.”  The men, the director of art department and the director of museum art at Radford University, made her promise not to take art lessons and told her she would be the only one at the show who would be known in the future.

That fortuitous meeting led to an invitation for Starroot to exhibit 40 of her large paintings at the art department of Radford University.   She was invited to teach university students about her visionary approach to art and to speak as a visionary artist at a symposium focused on the sacred yarn paintings and beeswax and bead art of the Huichol Indians of Mexico.   A private art collector who attended the show began collecting Starroot’s art, purchasing more than 100 paintings from Starroot’s spirit animal series and many others over a four year period.

The success of the Radford show led to calls from galleries.  Starroot’s paintings have been exhibited in New York City and Germany, as well as regionally.   In 1995, the opening of the American Visionary Art Museum piqued Starroot’s interest. Located at the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, Maryland, the museum has a mission of promoting the innate intelligence, intuition, self-exploration and creative self-reliance of self-taught artists.  Happy to have her art process further validated, she visited the museum and donated an original painting, the Mirror Goddess, to their permanent collection.

Over the years, Starroot has hosted Native American medicine men and artists at her Floyd home, including the late Jose Arguelles, a visionary author and artist who Starroot attributes to breaking the Mayan calendar code.   Having studied the calendar with Arguelles and on her own, Starroot has incorporated Mayan glyphs into many of her paintings.  Always interested in infusing positive intentions into her work, she explains, “The sun glyph is for enlightenment. Dragon is birth. Wind is for communication with spirit.”

In 1999 Starroot suffered a debilitating back injury and used art as a healing therapy once again. During this time she produced a series of paintings with a special focus on the amanita mushroom, titled Amanita Dreams.  She has also produced a music art video, titled Visonquest, and a book of visionary poetry, called Jam on Mars. 

Good luck and magical line-ups continue to follow Starroot on her journey as a musician and artist.   This past summer while attending Floydfest – where Starroot’s band, Sauerkraut, has frequently performed at the festival’s Children’s Universe – she met Trevor Hain, owner of Eternal Jamnation, an internet radio station out of Colorado that showcases a broad range of groundbreaking music.

Impressed with the scope of Starroot’s music and art, Hain invited her to host a radio show.   Despite the technical learning curve that had to be overcome before recording with equipment in her home, she now hosts Time is Art, an hour long radio show every Sunday at noon Eastern time.  Along with original music drawn from her solo work and her bands, Somersault and Forever Young, she plays the music of her favorite musicians from Floyd and beyond and conducts on air interviews. A recent show featured the music of singer/songwriter fiddle/violin player Mike Mitchell of Floyd.   On her thirteenth show now, she says, “I started with 13 listeners and by the 5^th show I had 300 already, many from Germany.”

Later in the summer, Starroot received a call from the American Visionary Art Museum.  The museum had chosen her painting for their exhibit “All Things Round: Galaxies, Eyeballs and Karma,” which opened September 2011 and will remain open through September 2012.   After traveling to Baltimore to see the show (and donate a second painting to the museum’s permanent collection), Starroot enthusiastically encourages others to make the trip.   “It’s such a gorgeous show,” she says.

All of Starroot’s paintings and songs are born from the same intention.  “They all have healing undertones,” she says. Throughout her life, creating art has been an intuitive process that has helped her to heal and grow.

She hopes her work will evoke healing influences in others and provide them with spiritful inspiration.   ~ Colleen Redman

 Note: Starroot’s art is available at the Taubman Museum in Roanoke, The Floyd Artist Association at the Station in Floyd, The Floyd Country Store, Château Morrisette Winery, Green Heron Art Center in Radford, and the Art Pannonia in Blacksburg.  Visit her website at starroot.com and her Facebook fan page.