“ Language falls, comes from above as little luminous objects that fall from heaven, which I catch word after word with my hands,” says Maria Sabina.

My heaven is the river, and language once came out of a drop of water bursting into my cupped hands!

This to say that heartist was synonym with artist from the beginning. I got to art for no other reason than… I was feeling for a river!

For many years, I used Marina Abramovic’s quote as preamble to my biography: “Art, it’s not about doing, it’s about being.” Years later, I met Ulay in Japan while working on re-alivening a deserted island, who correcting his ex-partner, said, “Art, it’s not about doing, it’s about becoming.” Doing art is partly becoming one’s definition of art. For me, it comes to the word heartist. I have written about heartist, but today I prefer to let it speak for itself.

It speaks like Mercury of old who carries a message from the soul whose meaning changes before it can be caught. Perhaps the whole is there from the beginning and it is just a journey of awakening.

We can receive only what we already have! We can become only what we already are! We can learn only what we already know! It is a matter of realizing potentialities. It is not a matter of “adding to” but of “developing,” of “evolving.” We contain within ourselves a world of capacities, of possibilities, which the outer world summons forth, speaks to, releases. Perhaps this is why we learn most about ourselves through devotion to others; why we become joyful and active as we respond to the formative forces in the materials in our crafts: their potentialities call forth our own, and in the dialogue of which I have spoken,we discover our own inner vision by bodying them forth. — M. C. Richards

The heart’s function is aesthetics. — James Hillman