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Heilig House: An Artistic (and Religious?) Revelation
by Burt Sommers, for the Atlanta Daily Picayune
January 10, 2011

You wouldn’t expect to find a place of pilgrimage in a 1960s era Atlanta suburb like this one, much less in an unassuming tan stucco craftsman-style home on this tony side street. But the Heilig House is turning heads and drawing enthusiastic crowds just days into its reopening after a year of careful renovation.

Before it was the Atlanta metro’s hottest art spot, Heilig House was an ordinary residence, home to Hubert and Elly Heilig. Hubert worked as an actuary from a home office on the ground floor. While remodeling the bedroom upstairs, he had what he would later describe as a religious experience after completing the painting of a wall.

“There was no blemish on it, no fancy design or artful brushstrokes. It was just a field of sky-blue, flat and even,” Hubert would reflect. “And yet it contained all the possibilities, like touching the ever-receding sky.” He said that in that wall he could see a “land beyond this one,” and a “paradise he could never describe in words.” Other times, he referred to the wall as a personified “she,” and said the wall literally communicated with him.

Hubert summoned Elly, who didn’t see the elusive depth in his handiwork, or hear mysterious voices. And so he set out to enhance the experience. On the subsequent wall, he added a single off-center black dot.

“She still didn’t get it,” Hubert later said. “Until I said to her, ‘The dot is, well, it’s the point. Pretend you’re the dot. Just fix on that dot, and forget that you’re standing here. Be the dot. Feel the sky-blue from the point of view of the dot.’ And that’s when it popped for her too.”

Hubert and Elly worked together from that moment, painting one wall after another, each a variation on the last. The dots proliferated and rearranged themselves. Then the couple began to paint the outer rim of each dot with a different color, the inner part of it the same sky-blue as the background.

Visitors were transfixed, and word began to spread about the Heilig House, and soon people were lined down the block to witness this extraordinary experience. Some openly wept upon seeing it, others called it life-changing.

Art critics have been lukewarm in their response. Steve Fleishman, art critic with the Chicago Sun Times, said that Heilig House “is best regarded as a religious phenomenon, akin to finding the Virgin Mary on the side of a barn.” One local church declared the house demon-possessed and held an exorcism from the driveway of the home last year.

But the exhibit has highly-placed admirers, too. The Dalai Lama visited Heilig House last year and praised it as “an authentic tulku,” the building itself a reborn bodhisattva who returned to help metro Atlantans along the path to nirvana.

Elly Heilig has been managing and growing the legacy of Heilig House since Hubert’s tragic death in a boat hijacking off the coast of Greece in 2008. But even as its fame spreads, the question at the core of this artistic oddity remains: What did Hubert really see in the sky-blue wall that first time? In one of his last interviews, he left a tantalizing riddle: “The voice in the wall cried out. She was pregnant, and needed to give birth. She begged me. ‘The child will be born in the heart of the witness,’ she told me.”

The Heilig House is waiting for you to visit and witness its mesmerizing, minimalistic beauty. Admission is free until March 15. Phone ahead or visit the website to schedule your tour.