You Are Seen: Drawing In Spirit is the remarkable story of Antoinette: a spiritual journey founded in a willingness to be open, an artist who, unable to see beauty in herself, yearned to show people their inner beauty and strengths. Beauty was the touchstone that shifted the commercial artist Toni Martignoni into Antoinette, a voice for beauty in life and art. At age 73 her platform began with the Inner Portraits and soon revealed the underlying currents that move us from one part of life to another. At any age we are never stuck in the decade we’re living in. Through this book Antoinette teaches the reader, not only about her extraordinary life, but about how art, in all its varied forms, allows us, sooner or later, to truly see our expanding selves and each other. Unlike anything that’s been compiled, You Are Seen: Drawing In Spirit is Martignoni’s story and the stories of people who have uncovered new possibilities for themselves through the informed eye of their Inner Portraits. It’s an adventure story of how Inner Portraits brought hope, healing and potential to others. As Antoinette says, "The Inner Portrait is simply a glimpse of the light of your own true nature. It’s an opportunity to see yourself 'out there' and then to explore what you see. Try meeting yourself as you really are." Art is a language. Turn an Inner Portrait four directions. You’ll notice images that surprise you. Bring it back to the way it was originally drawn. Take another look. It doesn’t feel like the same drawing. The mystery is that it’s not the same drawing. The energy shifts within the observer and we can recognize the images—a revelation of the whole self. The book will include color images and anecdotal information about the Inner Portraits, as well as side bars of enlarged portrait sections that reveal hidden symbols and images. Sometimes the story of a portrait has a memory to check out. Sometimes it’s a dream that wants to be seen. If you look at any of the portraits shown in this book, there will be one that you, too, are drawn to. It’s our human condition to be moved by feeling and to try to understand our own emotions by running them through the example of others. Antoinette’s journey is the reader’s journey. And the journey is quite a ride! Regardless of the ups and downs of privilege and setbacks, Antoinette faced challenges and assimilated these experiences to create a perspective that informed her ability to move forward. Born into an all-American family of Brooklyn intellectuals in 1918 – less than a month after the World War I armistice, a year after the Russian Revolution, the same year actress Rita Hayworth and South African leader Nelson Mandela were born—Martignoni pursued a University degree before it became the norm for women, thriving in the male dominated engineering world as an entrepreneurial business woman. Antoinette approaches life with a willingness to explore. You go with her to some unusual places—a voyage on the QE-I for an audience with the Pope, an old-time séance in a New England farmhouse, process sessions in a New York brownstone that would become the Pathwork, a Psychic Fair where Toni Martignoni, the commercial illustrator, found herself born as Antoinette, the Inner Portrait artist—at age 73. The ride includes an extraordinary redefinition of her own identity, when in her 80’s she learned that her great-grandfather was an African-American, the noted Dr. James McCune Smith, who was the first Black with a medical degree in the United States. This mixed racial discovery had been lost for three generations, now honored in the naming of Antoinette’s great-grandson. You Are Seen: Drawing In Spirit is the first book to introduce the unique life of a practicing intuitive artist who carried a sketch book around for 70 years, viewing people and the world through the lens of art. Sooner or later we each ask ourselves “What Am I Doing Here?” and “Who Am I?” For Antoinette the one constant, when all else failed, was that “through-out my life art pulled me back to a way ahead.” |
