Celebrating the Female Energy : Three women explore their inner selves in an exhibit at the New Canyon Gallery in Topanga.

When fires raged in Southern California last fall, Minisa Crumbo of New Mexico called two friends--Kristine McCallister of Topanga and Lynn Creighton of Northridge--to find out how they were faring. She also learned that her artist friends were addressing the same theme in their work that she was in hers.

The myth about the Handless Maiden had engrossed them all. In that myth, a father tries to give his daughter to the devil, but she resists. As punishment, the devil makes the father cut off her hands. She sets out on a pilgrimage to reclaim them.

Motivated by that fable and other influences, including Clarissa Pinola Este’s book, “Women Who Run With the Wolves,” these women have chosen to take rather brave journeys through their own hands to find their true selves. They have brought their different but harmonious artistic efforts together in the show, “Chrysalis: Emergence of the Intrinsic Feminine,” at New Canyon Gallery in Topanga.

“None of us is trying to depict the myth,” Creighton said. “My work is about women discovering that they have hands and how they are meant to be used. Hands are for bringing joy into our lives through what they are capable of doing.”

A ceramic artist for 30 years, Creighton started developing her figurative pieces only three years ago. That was just about when she became single for the first time in 30 years.

The lissome abstract female figures of her series, “Reclaiming the Sacred Source” flow with a sense of strength, sensuality and genuine reverence for and delight in the female body. “I am speaking from my center of the individual ecstasy of being in your own body with yourself,” Creighton said. While creating a figure, she “has a love affair with the form as it evolves.”

Creighton sees her work as part of the efforts of her exhibit colleagues and other women to “identify the source of their energy in order to be more fully alive in whatever they’re doing. Creative energy comes out of orgasticness,” she said, explaining that she is not referring solely to sexual experiences with another person, but also to such pleasures as singing and dancing. “My work is about women experiencing the joy of their own intrinsic nature: the ability to open completely to everything.”

McCallister’s paintings developed from a dream. A friend, who appeared more beautiful than ever in the dream, had no hands; yet, her handprints were everywhere.

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So strong were the dream images, McCallister felt compelled to paint them. Paintings preceding those in the gallery depicted large women, the earliest ones without faces.

“I was stuck in a quandary of expressing myself and exposing myself at the same time. Everything I was afraid of came out on the canvas,” she said.

Those faceless images have evolved into the women of such paintings as “Handless Dream”--where hands abound on and around a woman--and “Deo Gratias.” The three figures in this painting represent the earthly body from the natural world, the heavenly body with its wings and halo, and a woman in-between. The faces of McCallister’s current work seem like a blend of herself and her 12-year-old daughter, Sarah.

McCallister said she has “seen herself unfold” through this work as the women in it “get stronger, more at ease. It’s been a path to wholeness for me as I try to reach deeper and deeper into the truth.”

Crumbo delved into her Muskogee Creek Indian heritage to create the “Corn Maiden” series. From a body of corn, figures develop with very abstract references to hands. Out of this progression of portraits, the fully realized “Angela” emerges with hands. The image in the upper corner of this painting is not a cross, but the Morning Star.

Crumbo said that in corn--a grain of great significance to Indian peoples--”there is a being that comes in perfect harmony and balance to feed the mind, heart, body and spirit.” Her work is “my acknowledgment of what we say--that our people came from the stars. I’m depicting my star ancestry and history with the spirit beings through dream vision and life experience.”

While Creighton sees our own human form as a manifestation of spirit, she also said that such a “spiritual connection to something larger informs us.”

WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Chrysalis: Emergence of the Intrinsic Feminine.”

Location: New Canyon Gallery, 129 S. Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga.

Hours: Noon to 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Sunday, and by appointment. Ends May 31.

Call: (310) 455-3923.