"We must move into the future, creating it as we go.
We have been placed on the edge of history too long now.
We have always been here."

~ Sue Hoya Sellars

Where It All Began...

Intentional Creativity has emerged as a lineage that goes back to Eleanor Roosevelt. Under her guidance and invitation, Master Teacher, Lenore Thomas Straus created art that imaged idea with intention during the New Deal. Lenore taught Sue Hoya Sellars and Sue Hoya Sellars taught Shiloh Sophia.

When Lenore Thomas Straus and Eden McCloud (Shiloh's Grandmother) were making their living as working artists in the early 1900’s they likely never dreamed that the powerful teachings they infused in their art would ever reach this many women seeking meaning and self expression. However, Shiloh Sophia has gone on to teach the Intentional Creativity Method to tens of thousands. Her work has also resulted in presentations raising awareness at the United Nations Comission on the Status of Women for the last 6 years. The Intentional Creativity Foundation, 501c3, is where much of the training is held, in the Sonoma Art Center and School, MUSEA. Serving women both on-location and online at a global scale. 

Bio of Sue Hoya Sellars, Artist, American 1936-2014

"We must move into the future, creating it as we go." Homesteader and master painter Sue Hoya Sellars encouraged everyone she knew to “commit art.” Most of the people who knew her say that she told it like it is, while never missing a beat. With a groundbreaking, futuristic, classical and anthropological approach to art, the work of Sue Hoya Sellars is the work of an American Master. Sue filled any room she entered with intellect, authentic eccentricity, unforgiving wit, humor and a fierce stand on the protection of women and girls.

Sue Hoya Sellars was born in Prince George’s County, Maryland, on April 20, 1936. Sue grew up working the cotton and tobacco fields in Acoceek, Maryland. During her youth, her stubborn dreams and a pointed vision toward the future stayed firmly attached to her creativity, personal expression and her great wonder and connection to the natural world. Sue remembers drawing at the early age of four “to keep her occupied,” as her older sister Eva was given the job of babysitting.

Eva would have Sue draw and redraw the same thing with a pencil about two inches long. So began the legacy of taking her time and learning to see, to really “see,” that Sue was famous for in her circle of influence. She would later say,“As a teenager, I made myself think about painting and drawing from nature all the time. I made myself do it. I made myself think about that instead of going out and partying or getting a new pair of blue jeans. What I knew was that I was studying to be an artist.”

As a young girl Sue heard about an artist who lived in a town 7 miles away, and she began to work towards building a “body of work” so she could show this artist her intent to study art. It took her two years to get her portfolio ready and to pay off a bicycle and ride it those 7 miles to ask if she could study with her. That artist was the famous artist, poet and sculptor Lenore Thomas Straus, who immediately recognized Sue’s rare talent and agreed to take her on as an apprentice.

It was in 1937, only one year after Sue’s birth, that Straus had worked for the U.S. Office of President Roosevelt through the President's famous New Deal art program. The WPA (Works Progress Administration) program for the arts brought art to public spaces throughout the U.S., and it was a time that gave American artists much needed recognition as well as money for their artwork. Fifteen years following the push for the WPA, Straus officially became Sue’s legal guardian as she mentored and trained her in sculpting, painting, writing and clay work, as well as in poetry and zen sumi ink technique.

She also found other artists for Sue to study with to expand her talent. Sue described how Lenore “got on the phone and called local artists that had clout, and set me up with a painter who gave painting lessons in exchange for babysitting, drawing lessons in exchange for doing yard work and sculpting lessons with her in exchange for babysitting.”

In 1955, Lenore arranged official employment for Sue at age nineteen, when she became the youngest person to hold the position of head illustrator for the George Vanderbilt Foundation at Stanford University. Sue began a career in art during a time when women in the arts who dedicated their lives completely to their own artwork were very scarce throughout the United States. Her diverse interest in the arts and sciences brought her many powerful opportunities to share her work and her vision.

Sue studied biological illustrating with Jan Roemhild, attended the Corcoran School of Art in Washington DC and the San Francisco Art Institute under the instruction with Wayne Tiebaugh. She studied anatomy at the San Francisco School of Physicians and Surgeons while illustrating with Dr. Forbes and biological engineer, Hugh Hinchcliff. She was an illustrator for Janet Bollow and Associates for three decades, illustrating college text books covering Anthropology, Biology, Geology, Psychology, and Sociology.

Sue Hoya Sellars was part of America’s explosion of independence in the feminist movement of the 1970s. It was a time when she began to open to the great adventures of the world as she witnessed the beginning of the California revolution through women’s rights, feminism and the legions of activists that began to “wake up” to what needed to happen in the lives of women and their families. She lived those years bringing the issues of inequality and the needs for ‘woman-only power’ to the attention of the women’s community. For years she was referred to as the “The Separatist,” both fondly and through the criticism of her peers. She worked to define spaces that were only created by women. She felt called to work the land with the hands of women, from the building of structures to the chopping of wood to the raising and slaughtering of livestock.

For her, everything was a part of the creative process. Sue could often be found having tea with the goats with her notebook in hand. She found joy through the eyes of the artist even in the hardest of times.

Schooling her community, she invited the redefining of thought, language and images of women and family through art and history. Her move to the Anderson Valley in 1975 was a chance to put her vision into action through co-creating sanctuary and ‘safe space’ for women as well as building an art studio to produce work to sell and teach others. When asked about her stand regarding woman-only spaces, she said – “no one is standing here, so I am going to. Someone has to stand here regarding women – lots of others are standing other places. I will stand here.”

Sue’s visionary activism remained an integral part of her work and art throughout her entire lifetime, as did advocacy for women suffering from domestic violence and her concern for the safety of children who had been abused. Her final series of paintings included abused children riding on horseback to safety. Sue truly believed in the power of art to heal and was featured at the United Nations in 2013 as a part of an exhibit demonstrating how art could serve women in healing trauma.

Expanding the freedom that came with the women’s liberation movement in California, Sue’s professional work in illustration made its mark and could be seen throughout the country in academic and biological publications from McGraw Hill publishing among others. One of her many accomplishments was illustrating a book by Rita Mae Brown, A Plain Brown Wrapper, in 1976. Bringing image to the political climate brought Sue’s work into the forefront – if we were going to redefine women, image had to be a part of that movement.

Sue was a part of creating Gaia Wood studio, now Blue Heron Studio, producing illustrations and Objets d’Art in porcelain and stoneware. Her work was handled by a number of galleries throughout the country, and has been showing with Color of Woman and Wisdom House Gallery since 1999.

Sue Hoya Sellars defined her artistic inspiration in terms of inquiries: “After illustrating biological structures for over 45 years, my questions shifted from ‘What does life do in these structures?’ to ‘How did life get into these structures?’ and ‘Who is this consciousness that lives in here? Who is it that is even doing this wondering?’”

In the computer era of the 1990s, Sue brought her brilliant and mind expanding work into the digital world as a demonstrated innovator with the use of a Macintosh computer in ‘fine art painting’ through MacWorld expositions in San Francisco and the new online dictionary called C-Bold.

At the very beginning of the digital art movement, in 2000, she attended the School of Electronic Art in San Francisco where she studied digital art and demonstrated on the very first digital drawing board. Printing some of the first large-scale fine art giclées in the world from her mountaintop studio in Anderson Valley California, Sue knew that the power of digital image was here to stay. She later began showing and selling her digital artwork to the public in Sonoma, San Francisco and Mendocino.

She was a pioneer of art making from clay, wood, metal and paint, often combining all of them into one creation, including even items like bone, feathers, or stone. She worked deeply with themes of consciousness, transcendence and “our place in the cosmos.” She created images of beings that were in between, not fully incarnated, showing them as half in the cosmos and half in form. She also expanded beings beyond their “framework,” as she extended the image onto the frame. She handmade most of her frames with wood and metal from her land. She also created furniture, tables, and chairs, and sculpted entire offices from driftwood.

The lineage that began with Sue’s mentorship by Lenore Thomas Straus continues through Shiloh Sophia McCloud, with whom Sue worked on a weekly basis for close to 15 years, but had co-parented together with Caron McCloud since birth.

Sue became the Art Matriarch for Intentional Creativity and Cosmic Cowgirls, a global woman and girl owned tribe, gallery and school, founded by Shiloh Sophia. Together they brought forth the teachings of the Intentional Creativity Movement which has been reaching hundreds of thousands of women over the past 20 years.

Intentional Creativity is rooted in Sue’s teaching of bringing mindfulness into whatever one creates. She believed that when we put love into our art, the love goes into the creation as energy as well as out to those to whom we are sending love. She called art made this way “generators,” a concept she learned from Lenore.

Sue helped art students gain an appreciation of being on the land, of deep listening, watching, seeing and integrating art with every aspect of life. She openly shared her knowledge of quantum physics, biology, human understanding; and the importance of opening the heart ever wider to compassion and love. Terra Sophia today serves women artists around the world who come to study in the lineage of intentional creativity as passed from Lenore to Sue, and from Sue to many of us.

Sue Hoya Sellars was as powerful at the age of 78 as she was in her younger days. She was still chain-sawing fallen trees on her property and helping neighbors slaughter animals for food. In her final summer, she was able to realize a lifelong dream of visiting Paris, teaching her art approach to students there, and finally viewing her beloved Mona Lisa, whom she always called with great affection, Giaconda! Shortly after her trip to Paris, Sue went into the cosmos in September of 2014 to return to the stardust.

Sue's estate is now held in trust by the Intentional Creativity Foundation. In 2014 the Greenbelt Museum in Maryland featured an art show of Lenore Thomas Straus's work and invited Sue's estate to exhibit one of Sue's creations, called “Raise the Bar,” which is a work on learning to love more fully and freely. Shiloh was also invited to show a piece, demonstrating Lenore's enduring influence. Sue was asked once what she would like to tell Lenore if she could tell her anything, and she replied, “I just want her to know I am doing my work.”

Sue Hoya Sellars taught us how to see, to truly see with the eyes of the artist, and to honor the gift of being incarnate in a physical body. She said, "We are just sacks of cooling stars. How did we choose to end up here, incarnating into matter? Who lives in here?" She taught us how, as “sacks of cooling stardust,” we have a choice of how to use our precious energy. Sue told us the best way to use what we had is through expressing it in art, with an intention to heal. And we listened and were transformed.

Shiloh's Family

The roots of Intentional Creativity were nurtured within Shiloh's upbringing in a family and community of women.

The creative and activist environment she was raised in had a great impact on her work as an artist and blooming educator. 

Her Grandmother Eden on her mother Caron's side was legendary and the first and oldest Cosmic Cowgirl. It is said - she could shoe a horse, plumb a house, make a dress, build furniture, write stories and poems, she was a master archer, cow-rider and was an herbalist with healing gifts that she shared with her family. Her and Caron ran a dress design and manufacture business together, as well as she was an award winning - thread painter.  They not only passed their creative gifts onto Shiloh Sophia - but as well their passion for independently woman owned business and providing work for other women.

A Memory from Shiloh Sophia

"I remember the day that my mother and grandmother had picked up a young woman who was hitchhiking, I was 14. She came home with them that night and then moved in with us. My grandmother taught her how to work with fabric. She stayed with us and worked at our in-house sewing business. At first I was surprised about her moving in, but then I got the spirit. The spirit of supporting and connecting. We became friends and I joined my family's effort to provide a nice environment for her. In time, she moved on, as they all did. Yet I remember over a year later her calling and telling us she was doing well, and had a baby girl and named her Shiloh, after me. That was a moment in time…even a young girl can make an impact in the lives of another human being.  

As time went on, this pattern of supporting other women became an integral part of my life, and it is for me today. As part of our own NGO not-for-profit work, we provide education to over 4000 women a year through our free online education. Every month in our free community calls, Red Thread Connect reaches 1500. So far, that has been financed by personal funding from Jonathan and myself, and our Intentional Creativity Guild (Color of Woman Graduates)." ~ Shiloh Sophia