TERRE HAUTE — The age-old practice of the once secretive and to, modern minds, bizarre practices of historical alchemy — most famous for medieval alchemists’ furtive attempts to transform lead into gold — is not a career path many 21st century people choose.

   But for Rockville native and current Parke County resident and artist James Owen Loney, the transformative aspects of alchemy’s many-sided heritage have been his elixir since he became fully introduced to its unusual techniques in 1994.

Examples of Loney’s uncanny alchemical art are currently on display through Sept. 25 at the Halcyon Gallery, 25 S. Seventh St., in the form of his original creations, “Seven Stations into Alchemy,” a series of intriguing art installations coded with symbols and icons enabling viewers to decipher and interpret his work.

The show debuted in the gallery at a public reception Friday,

“I purposely chose Jim’s work to kick off my 2010-11 season,” said Halcyon proprietress Petra Nyendick.

“I’ve always been fascinated by alchemy and images of medieval practitioners trying to turn lead and other common substances into gold and precious commodities. Some alchemists even attempted discovering the secret of life. Jim’s art not only provides people with an overview of alchemy’s many aspects, it offers stimulating clues into its processes,.” Nyendick said.

Transformation

Although alchemy has been practiced around the world for more than 2,500 years, its key theme has always been transformation — usually the transformation of ordinary materials into valuable substances. In spite of alchemists attaining their most notoriety for far-fetched tinkering, by no means was all of their work useless by modern standards. They had real successes creating useful new materials, and their methodology set in motion the development of modern inorganic chemistry. Early alchemists may not have found the secret of life or the “Fountain of Youth,” but their work did lead to modern pharmacology.

Around 900 A.D., while looking for an elixir of immortality, Taoist monks stumbled upon what was to become gunpowder by combining sulfur with other chemicals. The word “gunpowder” appears to have come from the Chinese word “fire medicine.”

Other alchemists discovered silver nitrate, which for years was used as a treatment for skin conditions, including syphilis. Now silver nitrate is used in the process of developing photographs. Early discoveries in inks, dyes, paints, glass manufacturing and cosmetics also came from alchemical laboratories. Some alchemists were given jobs by royal families in hopes that they would make discoveries that could enrich and preserve their empires; other royal courts considered alchemists to be consorts with the devil and banned them from practicing their methodology. 

Alchemy was not limited to the physical realm. Some alchemists developed spiritual practices they hoped would transform their minds to higher, godlier planes. By the Middle Ages, many artists and mystics had become knowledgeable about alchemy. Leonardo da Vinci used secret alchemical codes in his work. Another enthusiastic practitioner was Sir Isaac Newton, who during the last years of his life in the early 1700s is said to have become virtually obsessed by alchemical studies.

One of the most important personages to give alchemy a modern renaissance was psychologist Carl Jung, who in the beginning of his 20th-century career was a close associate of Sigmund Freud. Jung was the first modern psychologist to believe man by nature is religious. To him, dreams were a window into the human soul. During his alchemical studies, he found linkage between alchemical symbolism and human dreams. Jung believed there was a similarity between alchemists’ attempts to take ordinary substances such as lead and trying to turn them into gold and artists using ordinary, everyday images and substances as the basis for their artworks. He interpreted many of alchemy’s spiritual practices as being historically similar to yoga and other Eastern meditative practices.

In the 21st century, alchemy has shown up as a central theme in the best-selling series of Harry Potter books.

‘A brilliant artist’

Loney’s journey to alchemy from being a Rockville High School graduate who loved (and still loves) basketball and the Indianapolis 500 motor race started at Indiana State University.

“I had no sense of purpose for my life when I was a freshman,” he said, “but by my sophomore year, I was an art major. I liked creating things, especially ceramic sculptures. My father had been a jeweler in Rockville, so I had grown up appreciating the relative quality of objects.

“When I was in college around 1963-’64, ISU’s art department was into making a transition from being a teachers’ college training students to be high school and grade school teachers into having as a part of its mission producing students who might go on to become professional artists.

“One of my ceramics teachers, Dick Hay, made me come to believe I could become a professional artist.”

Following the completion of his undergraduate work at ISU, Loney’s ambition to provide for himself as an independent professional artist was still years away from coming to fruition. When he did rise to the front rank of artists in greater Pittsburgh, it became the keyhole opening the way for him into alchemy.

Loney taught art in the Clay County school system for three years after getting his undergraduate degree at ISU. During this time, through the relationship he developed with State Lab School teacher John Laska, Loney developed his professional portfolio to the point that he was accepted into the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, where he earned his master’s in fine arts and eventually taught for a year at the college.

“Finding jobs teaching art at the university level was just about impossible in the early 1970s,” said Loney. “To provide for myself while working as a sculptor, I took a series of positions in museum work during the next 20 years.”

Loney’s first museum-type role was as the executive director of education for the arts and sciences in Pine Bluff, Ark. His involvement with museums led him to design children’s museums. He drew up the plans for and founded children’s museums in Muncie and Pasadena, Calif. Then he designed and founded the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum.

“During my years working with museums I always kept producing my own art,” said Loney. “Eventually, the main body of my work evolved from more traditional contemporary sculpture to doing installation art for museums and corporations.”

Installation art, according to Loney, is thematic art set up in environments that are appropriated for that purpose like corporate lobbies or museums. One of Loney’s most famous installation artworks was composed of suspended huge glass plates. The structure was hung for several years in the atrium of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Corporation.

Loney resigned as the executive director of the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum in 1990 to have more time to operate his own studio, which consisted of 3,000 square feet in a loft above a rowdy biker bar. According to Loney, as he was working in his studio, at about 2 a.m., there always seemed to be two dozen Harleys coming to life simultaneously.

“The resulting rumble and racket being emitted from those motorized contraptions invariably left me in a quite different state of transformation than the one I had been pursuing at the time,” said Loney.

While managing his studio and doing installation art for organizations in the greater Pittsburgh area, Loney was one of 17 Pittsburgh area artists invited to participate in a series of readings and lectures on alchemy organized by Pittsburgh artist Janet Towbin, who brought together the artists’ group to create art exhibitions with alchemical themes to be shown later that year at three venues in the greater Pittsburgh region.

“I was the only one of the artists who got caught up personally in alchemy,” said Loney. “I was especially intrigued in its artistic potential. ‘There’s subject matter here for a lifetime,’ I told myself. I read all I could about Carl Jung. He believed dreams were a window into our souls. I began keeping track of my dreams in a dream journal and interpreting them. As a consequence, not only was I better able to understand the inherited psychic common history of the human race, I could for the first time sense the alchemical symbolism of being an artist.

“Some of my dreams gave me clues about the best way to go forward with my art projects. I incorporated one of my dream images into the installation art I was commissioned to do for PPG’s corporate headquarters. I called the piece ‘Golden Gate,’ and it was actually a doorway to infinity. A dream also inspired the work I did with Towbin’s group. My dream was transformed into a giant hedge maze for the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust in downtown Pittsburgh.”

In 2006, Loney, his wife Ann (a textile artist), and their daughter, Heather (a metalsmith) moved back to the rural Rockville area to take advantage of the area’s very low real estate prices as compared to those in the Pittsburgh area. The home they found is large enough that each member of the family has his or her own on-premises studio.

After moving back to the Wabash Valley, while attending art shows in Terre Haute’s Arts Corridor during First Fridays, Loney became inspired to do original work for an exhibit at the Halcyon that would express his passion for the lore of alchemy. The underlying theme of each component of his exhibit is alluded to in its title.

Loney’s work consists of seven installations, both two- and three-dimensional, that deal with transformational themes. Installations range from “Ascension & Convergence” (“Two Resurrections”), which not only has a theme of Christ ascending to heaven and being resurrected from death, but also records solar observations Loney made while standing outside of his studio during a solar eclipse one summer day. Another Loney installation theme, “Anima vs. Animus,” is a visual representation of male/female individuation and influences as they were explored by Carl Jung. This installation includes Loney’s artistic impression of Jung’s theoretical work — the psychologist sought to access the knowledge of ancient gnostics and apply it to modern circumstances. In “Anima vs. Animus,” Loney also attempts to reveal why Jung’s theories were such a powerful influence in his life.

“The inquisitive souls who practiced the mystifying craft of alchemy from antiquity through the Middle Ages were known as adepts,” Loney said. “They were an insular, deeply suspicious group who guarded their knowledge closely. To communicate, they created a highly refined and specific vocabulary of symbols that only another alchemist could understand. With an understanding of those symbols, an ancient alchemist could accurately duplicate a colleague’s experimentation.

Loney has enabled his viewers to understand the meaning of the symbols by means of a master codex that makes it possible for a person who comes to his show to decipher each of his seven installations in some detail.

“Jim’s a brilliant artist,” said ISU art professor emeritus, Whitney Engeran. “His ‘Seven Stations into Alchemy’ Halcyon exhibit offers a bridge viewers can cross that will enable them to see gross matter or base materials not merely on a material level. If a viewer is willing to be a co-participant, not just a passerby wanting to see something pretty, the artwork has the power to stimulate a mind to a higher plane through the influence of its imagery.”