The first time I painted NoriLand, it was on the wall of an apartment in The Valley, where I lived with friends in 1974.
Twenty years later, while studying oil painting with Scottsdale artist Lu Bellamak, I began to revisit the images. With inspiration from the surrealist art of Desmond Morris, I painted these five canvases in 1994 and 1995.
Above left: Desert Garden, an abstract rendering of a front yard in Tempe, Arizona. Above right: Mount Ranier at Dawn. The mountain and cloud came from a photograph in the book, Sacred Mountains of the World.
Below left: Noriland Islands, the original NoriLand image. Lower left: The Creators. This illustrates the power of autosuggestion. You think or do something and the Universe sends it back to you. Below right: Noriland - Highway 10, the beautiful desert between Phoenix and L.A.
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Excerpt from the Noriland Manifesto:
Here I am in heaven again, about to go down the chute. It's a serious, intense world, where you can't pretend to hide. Oh yes, I took a stand in my last life, wrote down everything I could remember. Kicking through the webs, walking around the lake (a lake of miracles). My new life will be by the sea (a heaven lake, glittering like diamonds). Look at it - a holy miracle of eternal love. Hypocrisy like hell! See you down there. I have taken a stand, now it's my turn to live.
Nori Muster studied art at College of the Redwoods, Humboldt State University, UCLA Extension, Bush Barn (Salem, Oregon), Western Oregon University, Marylhurst College (West Linn, Oregon), and the Lu Bellamak school in Scottsdale, Arizona (link).
