I don’t know anything about art, which should probably disqualify me from writing this story. But then I met an energetic 78-year-old woman outside the Palace Market the other day, and she invited me down the street to see her show. When she asked me to write about it, how could I say no?
Toni Littlejohn’s installation, “Beholding Healer Archetypes,” is on display at Gallery Route One, where she’s been a fixture since the place opened 41 years ago. She was a founding member, served on the original board of directors and established the Artists in the Schools program, which is still going strong 31 years later.
Ms. Littlejohn’s show, which runs through Oct. 20, pays tribute to the teachers and healers she has known over the years who have helped her tame her demons and show some kindness to herself and others.
Her mentors have many influences, including Sufism, Buddhism and the teachings of Carl Jung, who stressed the importance of universal archetypes, dream analysis and the role of spirituality in psychological wellbeing.
Entering the installation is like entering a warm, cozy cave. It’s dark inside, and you need a flashlight to illuminate the nine paintings stationed around the room. (You pick up a tiny flashlight from a basket on your way in.) The paintings are displayed in what the artist calls “emotional chronological order.”
The room has a primordial feel—the walls are covered with brown fabric, and the floor is composed of enlarged prints of a Hawaiian lava field with rippling, crusty layers of volcanic rock. (These were made by Ms. Littlejohn’s partner, the fine art photographer and printmaker Charles Anselmo, who lives in Inverness.)
Small LED candles illuminate the perimeter of the room. There’s a dreamlike feeling in the space, which is appropriate, since the first painting, titled “Agamemnon,” sprang from a dream Ms. Littlejohn once had. In it, a handsome man—a mythic embodiment of a gorgeous Southern California surfer dude—has a small wound on his arm. He tries to ignore it, but it keeps nagging at him, so he picks at it until ooze and blood and then guts and organs start gushing out.
Like the other paintings in the show, this one is abstract, depicting a figure without facial features or hands. The outpouring of his innards is not graphically represented, but a caption tells us all we need to know.
“The more he worries his wound, the more his guts and organs will ooze out of his body,” it states. “I, the dreamer, recognize with horror that my beautiful Adonis will die from his dermatillomania unless he stops.”
The man needs healing. His heart appears to be cracked and bleeding. He needs to confront his wound, and he must seek help to heal it.
The next painting, titled “The Request,” features a ghostlike image that appears to be extending a hand (or a phallus, depending on your point of view). Presumably, it’s Agamemnon.
“Trusting that the purpose of dreams is to foster health and wholeness, the dream awakened in me a fierce desire to heal my wounds,” the caption states. “I requested help from therapists and spiritual teachers.”
The images progress as you circle the room, depicting fear, acceptance, healing, vulnerability, wisdom and joy.
Ms. Littlejohn created the paintings over three decades. She wasn’t thinking of them as a series. It was only in hindsight, as she began curating this exhibit, that she saw them as part of a spiritual progression.
Like many of us, Ms. Littlejohn has spent a lot of time working through childhood trauma. Hers involved the crib death of her younger brother when she was 2 years old—a tragedy that her parents hid from her and which she only learned about from a former babysitter when she was 20.
After her brother’s death, her parents removed all traces of him from the house and never spoke of him. He died at a time in her psychological development when she probably wished he would just disappear. She spent years feeling guilt—a sense that she harbored a dark, toxic entity that was somehow responsible for a mysterious, unnamed tragedy.
Two years after his death, her parents had another boy and gave him the same name. When Ms. Littlejohn finally discovered the family secret, she demanded that she tell her surviving brother the truth. But her father protested, fearing it would upset her mother.
“Delicate topics weren’t talked about,” Ms. Littlejohn said. “Everything was kept way underground.”
It wasn’t for many more years that she finally told her brother the truth, though upon her father’s insistence, they did not reveal their conversation to their mother.
Like the Agamemnon depicted in her exhibit, we’re all wounded, Ms. Littlejohn said. “I am Agamemnon, and Agamemnon is me. My wound was the sense that my father honored my mother over me by keeping the secret. I couldn’t trust reality. I knew there was something much deeper underneath.”
In one painting, titled “Hugging the Beast,” two figures are interlocked and embracing. In Ms. Littlejohn’s telling, the image represents someone accepting themselves in all their complexity, both the darkness and the light. “You’ve got to love your beasts,” she told me this week in her Point Reyes Station studio. “You’ve got to accept the whole kit and caboodle. You have to tell your wounded self, ‘I’m sorry that happened. I love you and I will do my utmost to take care of you in the future.’”
The studio takes up nearly half of her home, much of which she built with her former husband. She holds art workshops there every Tuesday and Thursday with a group she calls Wild Carrots.
“She calls herself a ‘permissionary,’” said Nancy Bertelsen, who has been participating in the group for 10 years. “She encourages everyone to pursue their own vision, their own inclinations. Everybody’s work stays unique, even though we’re all painting together.”
Although the paintings in her exhibit depict human-like figures, much of Ms. Littlejohn’s work is purely abstract—a blur of energy, motion, color and spirit. Her paintings have been shown widely across the Bay Area, and even in outer space.
Ms. Littlejohn’s daughter, Alessondra Springmann, is a planetary scientist who worked on a NASA project that launched a spacecraft to collect materials from an asteroid called Bennu. On board was a flash drive with two of her mother’s paintings stored inside.
Ms. Littlejohn will turn 79 next week, but she retains a youthful spirit. “She has boundless energy,” Ms. Bertelsen said. “She’s a maker, and she likes to go big. I look at what she does, and I’m confounded by it.”
As we exited the gallery last week, Ms. Littlejohn gave shoutouts to the monks, mystics and meditators who had helped her gain insight over a lifetime of reflection—and a nod to her former Jungian shrink. The show was a cathartic culmination of hard emotional and spiritual work.
“I’m finally cured!” she said with a laugh.