Local artist Doctress Neutopia lets her intuition run free in new exhibit “Meditations on Neutopia”

Over the last nine months, Tucsonan Doctress Neutopia, aka Libby Hubbard, Ed.D., has completed 20 new works of watercolor and gouache paintings for her show, “Meditation on Neutopia,” at the Joel D. Valdez Main Library.

Neutopia describes herself as an artist that has explored numerous mediums to express her Neutopian consciousness, including woodcuts, oil, acrylic, photography, podcasting, poetry, video and digital arts.

Neutopia holds a doctorate in Future Studies from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst . In addition to being a multi-medium artist, she is a 500-hour yoga teacher and is currently developing what she calls “Climate Change Yoga,” a practice ultimately aimed toward the creation of ecological cities.

Through her art, Neutopia hopes to heal herself and others.

“My art shows the spirit within me that has a sense of liberation,” Neutopia said. “I am waiting for liberation, but I am portraying it in my two-dimensional art.”

Neutopia compares making art to her regular practice of yoga because of the world depictions she “builds” from the practices.

“My art remains focused on building a new world view in which art and creativity are honored,” she said. “These images come from my unconscious through automatic drawing and opening up to intuitive, cosmic forces.”

For Neutopia, art, much like yoga, serves as a way to tap into these intuitive powers,

“Intuitive knowledge comes from a place beyond words and concepts. It is based, not on the logical self, but on the intuitive self,” Neutopia said.

Doctress Neutopia said that the art created for this event is not corporate art in the sense that it is probably not the sort of art that one would see hanging in a dentist’s office.

Crediting a large part of her exhibition to meditation, Doctress Neutopia said anyone can do art, so long as they open themselves up to the intuitive mind.

Neutopia credits the name of the exhibition, “Meditations on Neutopia,” to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who literally created the word “neutopia” themselves.

“They promoted themselves as ‘citizens of nutopia,'” Neutopia said. “They spelled it differently than I do since I added the ‘e’ to the word.”

A major part of the creation of this event sprouted when Neutopia realized the arts aren’t as promoted as they should be — they, in fact, are being flat-out “oppressed,” in her words.

“Ultimately, it is an oppression of self when art does not receive the funding or attention that math and sciences do,” Neutopia said.

Hoping remedy this under-funding, Doctress Neutopia works as an activist for the arts and local artists.

A big inspiration and message throughout “Meditation” is sustainability.

When Neutopia finished all of her art and ordered the frames for her paintings, she said she was heartbroken to find that the wooden frames came from Thai forests and that her art contributed to further deforestation in Thailand. She doesn’t want to communicate this theme of destruction in “Meditation.”

“In this exhibit, the message of the paintings is this — that everything is connected,” Neutopia said. “If we want to live successfully with planet Earth, we have to move into a truly sustainable world in which the byproduct of one organism is the food for another. In nature, nothing is wasted.”

Neutopia will demonstrate her use of watercolor, gouache and automatic drawing on Tuesday, Oct. 25, from 12-1 p.m. in the café area of the library.

The Halloween closing reception will take place on Oct. 31 from 4-5 p.m. in the Children’s Meeting Room of the library. “Meditation” will be on exhibit throughout the entire month of October.

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