I have spoken about the correlation between artistic and spiritual practices in my previous articles, however, I focused on the more mystic and personal connections between the two. Today, I would like to focus on the more direct, visual, or obvious interconnections.
With the Autumn Equinox coming around, I have been putting a lot of thought into decorating my altar for the occasion. Just as an artist curates and stages a work, we curate and stage our altars, our homes.
I dare you now to look upon your altar and try not to see something that the great Flemish artists would not want to preserve on canvas forever. Think of the items that are commonly found on an altar, and how they match classic objects that make up a still life; flowers as offerings and decoration, glasses of moon water, candles, a book of shadows, perhaps a crystal or bone, items of food, an altar cloth. Vanitas still life artwork in particular hold such direct visual resemblance to Pagan altars through their exploration of symbolism to depict the transience of life, mortality and the vanity of worldly pleasures. Artist Jacques de Gheyn II pioneered this style of still life at the turn of the 17th Century with a particular Protestant viewpoint, followed by artists such as Pieter Claesz who arguably perfected Vanitas later on that century. Clara Peeters, the most well known female Flemish artist who created still life artworks in the same century, created works more typical of what comes to mind when thinking of the Flemish still life masters. However, even the vibrancy of her delicious scenes evoke that of a personal altar. I am thinking particularly of a piece painted in 1607 in which she sneakily included her own initial through the use of a ‘P’ shaped pretzel, alongside a candle and chalice.
Artistic devices and techniques such as chiaroscuro or sfumato are so effortlessly represented in everyday Pagan practices. Chiaroscuro, the use of strong contrast between light and dark (think of Caravaggio or Giovanni Baglione), is present whenever we practice in the dark of night with a candle. Sfumato is the fine shading or layering that softens the transition between shapes and colours (think of the delicacy of Da Vinci’s work) with the word coming from the Italian ‘sfumare’ meaning to evaporate like smoke. How many of us use smoke in our daily practice? I ask you again to look to the candles on your altar.
Art has always been associated with reaching and depicting spiritual or transcendent states. I now ask you to cast your minds to the plethora of artistic movements and styles that we know of today: the High Renaissance, Baroque, Surrealism, Cubism, Abstraction, Impressionism, Neoclassicalism, Expressionism to name but a few. All of these movements, and of course there are plenty more, have something connecting them to the realm of the spiritual. Think of how the High Renaissance and Neoclassicalism aimed to capture divinity, grace, and the ideal, how Baroque artists then brought that divinity within the human concept of drama and movement. Then to Surrealism and even Dada exploring the subconscious, dreams and sense itself; all such devices are drenched in spirituality. Cubism and its fight to capture every side and dimension of an object within one flat image, Impressionism by capturing light, Abstraction and Expressionism exploring concepts beyond the physical – ALL these movements stand heavy with spiritual inuendo and explanation. There is ritual in each movement taking on what has been learned from its predecessors, and exploring something deeper within its visualisation. If that is not a mind-numbing connection – no – justification for art and spirit to be seen as one, then I don’t know what is.
Even the fact that both are considered ‘practices’; the repeated use of the same language cannot be ignored or overlooked, and in so many other principals, the use of identical vocabulary intrinsically links to two.
And so, I ask you to seek the art within your altar – those little flashes that would have inspired some great Master cooped up in their stuffy 17th Century artist studio. Afterall, we are all the artists of our own spirituality.
Images:
Jacques de Gheyn II, 1603, Vanitas Still Life
Pieter Claesz, 1628, Vanitas Still Life with a Skull and a Quill
Clara Peeters, 1607, Stillleben or Still life with dainties, rosemary, wine, jewels and a burning candle
By Ivy Bradshaw-Easton
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