Art and Spirituality.

Art and Spirituality.

At the flea market the other day. Yes, I use that venue to display my work. On my blog about flea markets go to https://www.yabberz.com/ my neighbor was a Jehovah's Witness distributing her literature. She commented how the children were fascinated by my paintings pointing out how we are granted at birth the gift of possessing a sense of beauty and a connection with that which is spiritual.

Indeed, whatever theories one may dream up about aesthetics must find their roots in our primal sensibilities. And work may become more attractive or for that matter seductive when a spiritual element is included in the painting. My neighbor though focused on an Abrahamic religion that stresses the centrality of scripture as fact did not deny the possibility of a spiritual dimension for artistic expression. My work is about nature even though most of the scenes portrayed are from the imagination.

The giant's shoulders upon which I stand are those from the American landscape movement who saw divinity ensconced within the natural world. These painters did not only venture inside stone structures in search for holiness. They went outdoors hiking up mountains, camping in valleys, and trekking through dark, virgin forests seeking sacred spaces and capturing the solemnity, solitude, and tranquility of the wilderness in their paintings. Ultimately succeeding in conveying a sense for the sacred in their paintings spanning the romantics through the luminists to the tonalist painters. The founders of the Hudson River School were drawn to New England Transcendentalism. George Inness, a famous American Tonalist painter, was a follower of Swedenborg. Other painters were drawn to Theosophy. They were bending boundaries moving beyond orthodoxy in search for a connection with the divine finding her within their own world liberating her voice that had heretofore been trapped within an ancient text

Even those devoutly following an orthodox world view do not exclude this possibility that outside of scripture one can here that same voice to which the prophets of old hearkened. They too acknowledge that still soft voice can be hear through the rustling of leaves in the wind upon a summer day. And they too find that spirit hovers over all things and that the living is vested with it. What then can be said of the artist who paints for this goal of conveying the spirit? Not only will her work radiate a quality that uplifts and fills the viewer with joy but as with nature possess that which is sacred.

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