The Misconception Series
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Soul Whisper (Misconception Series)	Heart's Demise (Misconception Series)	Void (Misconception Series)
Illumination (Misconception Series)	Genesis (Misconception Series)

The Recorder, Greenfield, MA, Thursday, November 17, 2005
Artist finds ultimate expression of creation
Story by Janet Bond

Leyden – “The power of creation. That’s what I explore, what I’ve felt compelled to do in my life.”

As a woman and an artist, Alicia Adams Hunsicker was drawn to portraying the feminine in nature. It was an intuitive exploration using colored pencils, pastels, and oil paints.

As a woman and a wife, she also spent seven years trying to conceive a child with her husband. It was an effort that led into the sterile arena of the medical laboratory.

Finally, though she was pregnant. She only carried that ultimate expression of creation for about nine weeks. However, the experience would serve as a catalyst on her journey as an artist.

In one of her earliest artist statements Hunsicker wrote: “I celebrate the Divine Feminine in my work by trying to create a visual language that is symbolic of the feminine energies and power in harmony with nature. In connecting with this energy, I realized that part of my spiritual journey is the experience of birthing and creating.”

She went on to say “whether we are weaving tissue in the womb or pictures in the imagination, we create out of our bodies.”

Hunsicker’s red hair frames her face with a pillow of energy. She moves quickly and lightly as thoughts flow into action with no hesitation. Her studio is small and cluttered with bits of this and that, mostly items of interest she has picked up on her walks. The really special finds—“sacred objects, artworks unto themselves”—She has on top of a large metal flat file she uses to keep her drawings, prints, and pastels. “I have butterflies, feathers and wings and crystals and my favorite thing is a nest.”

Walking over to the flat file, she brought out a nest to point out its intriguing weaving. “It’s made from curlicues from a grapevine,” she said. She then pulled a rose from a vase, pulled aside the petals and talked about the shapes and, in the very center, the stamen, the male sexual part of the flower.

These images found their way into a painting called “In Gaia’s Womb”

Which shows the figure of a woman curled knees- to- her- chest, in the most interior petals of the opening rose.

“I take long walks and I always find things that are interesting in nature. I use them for inspiration,” she said.

The shape in nature that betrayed her was the shape of her own womb. The problem wasn’t discovered through years of trying to conceive until she finally did get pregnant and then lost her baby.

She has an ultrasound picture of the child. She pulled out the tiny black- and –white picture, the edges of which are softened and smudged from much handling. “It’s about 4.4 centimeters. I miscarried at eight to nine weeks. This was the only picture I had.”

Her doctor told her that unless she corrected the fold in her uterus, she would continue getting pregnant and miscarrying.

Hunsicker said she had doubts about whether she should correct her birth defect.

“There was a part of me that felt like I should live with it, that this is the way God made me. Live with it and learn from it. I felt that when you come into this world with a birth defect, you should use it to make you stronger…there is a reason for it.”

But the idea that she would continue to get pregnant and miscarry persuaded her to try the surgery quickly.

It was easier to recover from the surgery than it was to get over the grief of having lost her baby.

Hunsicker took the ultrasound image and decided “to do a portrait of my child.”

It was an experience, she said, of “honoring the existence and transforming the grief, healing a part of myself that didn’t feel whole.”

The pastel portrait is called “Soul Whispers.”

Hunsicker enjoyed the intimacy of pastels and using her fingers to portray her baby. “I like the ethereal part, how light gets dark and comes out to light.”

Then, six months after her operation, she got pregnant. “When I found out I was pregnant, I was completely afraid I was going to miscarry again.”

She returned to her pastels and worked through the series she calls “Misconception.”

“The inspiration was how to get over this fear…transform this fear. In a series, I explore what happened to me physically so I could understand it emotionally, process it emotionally.”

The first two pastels, like “Soul Whispers,” are mostly black and white.

In “Hearts Demise,” she captures her heart shaped uterus as a vortex, “creative energy coming out to the womb.”

The bleakest image is the repaired uterus, which sits bean-shaped and empty, like a black hole with energy swirling around it. She called it “Void.”

Hunsicker had hit the three –month mark in her pregnancy by the time she was working on the third pastel, “Illumination.” “Color came in once I was past three months…color represented hope.” She had begun to sense that maybe everything would be alright.

“Genesis” came at four months, when Hunsicker allowed herself to celebrate the pregnancy. “I knew everything was going to be fine. All the fear and grief was transformed into hope.” “Genesis” is an orchestrated explosion of color, “the spark of life.”

Hunsicker said she looked at people’s eyes to get the inspiration for the explosion. In the very center of the dark, inside the white genesis, she drew what she now calls “the fetus,” the miscarried bit of life that had been her hope more than nine months ago. “It’s a thank you”, she said.

Hunsickers son Benjamin is now 4 years old. Her miscarriage, the decision she had to make that enabled her to carry a pregnancy to term, and the work she did as an artist to embrace her experience, carried her along and opened her palette to the masculine part of creation.

“It’s like Yin and Yang.” She said with a happy smile. “Instead of just exploring the feminine in nature, now I want to explore both the masculine and feminine in nature.”

Walk into Hunsicker’s studio these days and the first thing you see is a large canvas of a slender man, bare chested, jeans riding so low on his hips they almost look unbuttoned. His face is in profile, he’s staring at his hand, and around him are painted dragonflies. It’s a portrait of a friend with his totem, the dragonfly.

The oil painting is her second of a man. The first masculine painting compliments an earlier canvas. In that painting, a woman is holding a blanket up to her chin, a blanket that cascades out of the painting in folds, the shapes of which resemble bird feathers. The blanket is alive with vines, leaves, rosebuds, branches and at the bottom a bird’s nest with eggs.

The woman she finished in 2004. The man she began shortly thereafter. He stands with intense eyes and pulls on a blanket of the same weave as the woman’s.

Hunsicker said she liked to think of the paintings placed opposite each other. “Sometimes I think he is pulling the blanket off her,” she said laughing.

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