ABOVE: A stack of recent watercolour paintings from memory by Kathleen Fonseca based on her psychic readings.

Cliff Eyland Interviews Kathleen Fonseca, December 2006

CE: Kathleen, when did you first have spiritualist visions?

Kathleen Fonseca: I know as a child I had many spiritual moments sitting by the river behind our house. I would sit and ponder how the universe was made and where everything came from and what were the stars. When I was about ten I became very ill after drinking well water at our cabin. I was throwing up for days and couldn’t leave my bed. I felt as if I were going to die; I sat and stared at the wall in my room beside my bed. I didn’t know what I was looking at only that I needed to heal myself. A bright light appeared in the wall and I suddenly was better as it wrapped me in light. The next time I recall this happening was when I was about 16. I was laying on the couch in our living room. Everyone was away at the lake or somewhere. I had been meditating a lot at this time. I suddenly saw a bright light appear on the wall that had no windows. The light was pouring over me and grabbed me and made me go over to a table in our dining room. There was paper and a pen there and I began writing very quickly in an ancient Roman language from the area of Pompeii. It was signed by Amandez. I found this out later as my sister’s boyfriend took it and got it analyzed by a language professor at the University of Manitoba. This was in the late sixties. I than realized that this was a gift and I could speak as often as I wished to this person. I could ask him questions about the universe or about anything and he would answer me in English. I also wrote a lot of poetry. I even used the gift in school to write essays in English class. I once wrote a sonnet about Hamlet describing and analyzing the play in verse from Shakespeare. My teacher wouldn’t even read it because it wasn’t a proper essay. I didn’t fight about it. I learned to keep it to myself.

CE: Did your interest in psychic phenomena coincide with your interest in art, or did they evolve separately?

Kathleen Fonseca: I was always drawing as a child and making books and things with my hands. I recall now as I think about it that drawing was a way to escape into my own world and meditate. I taught myself how to draw by drawing pictures of dead soldiers from current to the time Life magazines of the Vietnam war. I sat up every night as a 12 to 14 year old and drew and was very tired at school. Later I was given a room in the basement and I began to do oil paintings. I painted with very thick paint on masonite boards or old plywood that I could find on the riverbank. These paintings were all from my subconscious and were of people and abstract landscapes. I would paint a few faces and than I would go somewhere and I would see the people I had painted. All of this work was destroyed when I ran away from home at the age of 17.

CE: What goes through your mind as you make a watercolour?

Kathleen Fonseca: As I am doing a watercolour from a past life of myself I am usually thinking about the life of the person I am painting. I see where they lived or a particular activity that they were doing such as visiting a cave with candles and writing things on the wall. Or being trapped somewhere. I usually become very emotional and cry while I am drawing if it was a very painful experience. With someone else I am also seeing the life of the person that I am drawing or some kind of scene such as in a movie as I am painting.

CE: How do you see past lives in a person’s face?

Kathleen Fonseca: I feel that the same power that is in me to see and remember my past lives is also in other people but they haven’t tapped into it and so therefore when I am connected to them somehow I can see their past faces. I believe that we are all connected by a sort of bloodline that is an invisible string that nets us all together. When I find the connection as the string is activated than I can see the faces. I don’t exactly remember how I figured out how to do it. I think I was looking in the mirror and saw my face change and then I tried it with someone and I saw faces. This was about ten years after I had done my first writing.

CE: Where do you feel the writing or drawing comes from?

Kathleen Fonseca: I feel that I am remembering my past lives for a reason and it is all part of the larger picture of the universe. There is a reason that not everyone can remember. There is too much negative energy. I believe and have been told that 2000 years ago all people could remember their past and it was a part of there genetic make up. Now it is cluttered with technology and electricity. The magic has almost totally been erased from our existence. I feel that the writing to me comes from souls that have passed on and are incarnated in myself or others around me, and for reasons which I don’t always understand I have been given the privilege to tap into. I also meditated very hard as a child to tap into the unknown and it opened for me.

CE: Do you connect your automatic writing with the Surrealists and other artists, or do you think of the writing as being completely unrelated to past art?

Kathleen Fonseca: When I first began this writing I had no interest or knowledge of art history. It may be connected but I had my own part in it. I feel that most artists have a connection through the subconscious which is similar to the writing and drawing that I do but most artists are unaware of what the connection is, or where the images are coming from. It is the same with music. Why does music such as a symphony come through someone’s thoughts? Where does creativity come from if not from the subconscious and this past life connection? Where does our storage of unseen images come from?

CE: Did you always have friends who were sympathetic to your psychic practice?

Kathleen Fonseca: No. People whom I talked to about this thought it was strange and usually didn’t discount it but didn’t encourage it.