This essay is a break away from my other essays as I used to occasionally talk about my spiritual beliefs via the quotes I chose and my role models but now I am moving away to trying to make spiritual art and writing rather than occasionally broaching political ideas. I realised I am too sensitive to get involved in politics but that was all part of me growing up. So rather than talking about my beliefs in this essay I have chosen an equal number of male and female artists through history from modernism through to contemporary art who make in my view what I call spiritual art. I am not sure of all their backgrounds and life stories but I know what I like when I see their art. I feel it’s of great importance in my creativity to learn from and be influenced by an equal number of female and male role models. Also, I feel one should choose one’s role models carefully as that is how you become weather, you consciously realise it or not. In my opinion the best sort of spiritual art weather its abstract or figurative, video or painting, drawing or sculpture, installation or temporal art or photography, or new technological art forms is that it transports your mind and soul into a meditative state where the conscious and unconscious mind connect or in other words the mind and heart are connected in equal balance. So, these are just my views and tastes on art not my spiritual beliefs.
The following quote after this paragraph is by Marina Abramovic an artist, I heard about her through my late artist friend Katthy Cavaliere who studied under her on a scholarship in Europe I think it was Italy. Both were installation, performance female artists so I’m sure Katthy would have learnt a lot from her but I am sure Marina would have learnt a lot from Katthy too as she was one of the most innovative Australian artists in recent decades in my books. It’s interesting that she wanted to stand out as an original contemporary artist of Italian birth and Australian adult life by changing the spelling of her first names spelling from Kathy to Katthy. Sadly Katthy died of breast cancer at the age of forty and was sadly missed by everyone in the Sydney art community, family and friends. This left her cutting short an art career that took her from showing at top contemporary galleries in Australia such as Artspace to Italy on self-funded art trips, the travelling art scholarship and Australia Council residencies and studying under Marina as I mentioned.
“Time is an illusion. Time only exists when we think about the past and the future. Time doesn’t exist in the present here and now.”
Marina Abramovic
I love this quote by Marina as it seems to remind me of a movie, I saw recently on Netflix this last week about the connection between time and space as studied by the astro physicist Stephen Hawking. However, it also reminds me of Buddhist philosophy such as the importance of living in the moment not dwelling your mind to much in the past or future. I’m not so sure about the connection between astro physics and Buddhism however I keep buying the book the Tao of Physics ( An exploration of the parallels between modern physics and eastern mysticism by Fritjof Capra and it explores the similarities between breakthroughs in the understanding between space and time and how humans fit into that equation between the fields of Buddhism and Physics and what makes the universe and infinity beyond and sometimes the ideas seem to connect and sometimes collide. Yet I studied one semester of physics at school in Australia on the northern beaches and ironically couldn’t even figure out the first three problems in the test to see if you were brainy enough to take physics as a subject at school. However, I never enjoyed the sciences such as chemistry either because I was more interested in the natural world and took biology and without hardly trying topped the class every test and got 90%. Then, I thought it was an easy subject of rote learning remembering facts and figures but it gave me a great insight into the natural world and its wonders and the internal mechanisms of humans and their relationship to nature. My biology teacher Mr Downey taught us about the advances in biology at that time that weren’t in the syllabus and most importantly the human genome project where biologists were attempting to map the human DNA strand. I still don’t know much about this and should make a note to study this later which would have been in 1989. Most importantly when he wanted to give us an easy day he would put on a documentary by David Attenborough and through these learnt the most about the wonders of all aspects of the natural world and human’s relationship to it which incidentally a mainstay of early spiritual art particularly in the late sixties and early seventies explored in the book Overlay by Lucy Lippard which explored the role of feminism, art and nature. Once again, I regress but its through such seemingly disparate subjects coming together that spiritual art and art about nature intersect.
The following is a quote by Stephen Hawkings about the nature of space, time and the universe that he backed up with mathematical theories so complex that they baffled scientists and layman/woman for decades.
“There was never a Big Bang that produced something from nothing. It just seemed that way from mankind’s perspective.”
Stephen Hawking
What struck me most about Hawkings, understanding is that in his research he believed in God and a holy creator and at other times he was an atheist.
This quote suggests that the Big Bang, while a pivotal moment in the universe’s expansion, might not represent a literal creation from nothing, but rather a change in how the universe was perceived from our human perspective.
Anyway, enough about the connections between science and art and back to Marina Abramovic.
“Marina Abramović is a Serbian conceptual and performance artist. Her work explores body art, endurance art, the relationship between the performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind.”
Wikipedia
Marina is 78 years old and in my opinion: the most revered performance artist in the world male or female.
“Art is the easiest thing in my life, and that’s ironic. It doesn’t mean I’ve worked little on it, but it’s the only thing I never had to… I have no fear. I could take risks.”
Eva Hesse
While at art school in second year I was all over the shop due to the loss of my best friend Nick Cuttell in the first week of art-school aged 17 and all my sculptures were about emotional pain and deep grieving and I found great solace when I discovered a book of the very minimal but spiritual art of Eva Hesse. She mainly used simple latex forms and used the power of repetition to induce a sort of mesmeric state in the viewer who was open to the revolutionary abstract simplicity of her work. I tried to mimic these ideas in my own interpretation of them however using transparent paper glued together and they didn’t work and they looked tacky and simplistic.
“Eva Hesse was a German-born American sculptor known for her pioneering work in materials such as latex, fiberglass, and plastics. She is one of the artists who ushered in the post-minimal art movement in the 1960s. “
Wikipedia
“I’ve always felt that if one was going to take seriously this vocation as an artist, you have to get beyond that decorative facade.”
Anish Kapoor
Anish Kapoor is in many ways my favourite not just spiritual artist but favourite sculptor and one of my top three drawing artists. I love what he says about getting beyond a decorative façade and making something that is still bold in form. My two favourite types of sculpture were his early pigment covered simple forms obviously reminiscent of temple structures and mounds of bright herbs and spices that anyone would recognise if they have travelled in India or seen in documentaries about India and the big limestone rock blocks with geometric voids with black pigment in them so if you look inside, it’s like a visual effect of gazing into infinity. I’ve seen a series of these that were exhibited in the contemporary art floor of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
“Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.”
Vassily Kandinsky
I like this musical metaphor by Kandinsky as that is exactly how is abstract paintings translate where the lines and other shapes are like colourful notes dancing on the canvas and the audience the musical audience at a symphony enjoying the spectacle.
I chose Kandinsky as when I was in New York last year there was a Kandinsky retrospective at the amazing Guggenheim Museum that is an incredible feat of architecture and is a kind of giant architectural spiritual sculpture itself.
“I would like sculpture to sing, sigh, reflect and inspire according to the continually changing elements of any light and sound movement … to be a place of reflection and stimulation of what is in existence here and now.”
Joan Brassil, n.d.
I love this quote by Joan and its one of the most joyous, meditative art quotes I have read. Joan was good friends and colleague of one of my favourite art school lecturers Joan Grounds who also made spiritual, meditative art.
Joan Brassil was an Australian installation artist whose work dealt with the issues of spiritualism and connections of art and nature as a. meditative state for the viewer. When I was a COFA my art school she was doing a residency at my art school and I would often see her walking around the sculpture department smiling and chatting with students like a grandmother mentor.
“For the sculpture Randomly – Now and Then, Joan Brassil wired solid rock to electronic components that cause their crystalline structures to vibrate at their resonant frequency. The rock cores, drilled from deep within a mountain, ‘sing’ with their own resonant energy between periods of unexpected silence. The diorite cores hang from microphone stands, sounding at random intervals, connecting lines of sight and sound between object and viewer. Hearing them sound is a reminder of the deep processes of energy transformation from molten lava to igneous rock that formed them. Brassil has noted that “this work is a measure of time, from when the rocks were formed – to one nocturne”.1
Jenny Zimmer, ‘World of Cosmic Potatoes’, Sunday Morning Herald, 23 September 1990.
“The more you complicate things, the more you lose,” Laib says. “In renouncing you-achieve more.”
Wolfgang Laib
I find this quote by Laib ingenious and profound and you look at the minimalism of his art you see the genius of it.
The European artist Wolfgang Laib studied medicine but ended up becoming a deeply spiritual installation artist, sculptor and drawer and some days I think he’s the most spiritual contemporary male artist and other days its Anish Kapoor. He also makes beeswax sculptures and uses other simple humble materials such as rice and copper and simple drawings. He spends years collecting yellow pollen from yellow flowers, in the fields near his country house with a brush and a glass jar and then makes a large square with them on the floor of galleries and its intensely mesmerising and simplistic like a reverted Rothko painting. I think it’s the process in collecting over the years leading up to a show is what makes them so spiritual and Zen. The following is my favourite artist YouTube video at the moment of past or present artists:
“To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage,”
Georgia O’keeffe
I love this quote by Georgia O’keefe as I feel any kind of spiritual art and other avenues in the arts takes courage not because of the cost or time but you need to have the courage to look inside one’s self and record what you see with uncanny honesty good and bad but then see the silver linings and pluses so what you put out isn’t to cathartic and jarring but balanced and visually stunning. To be honest I hadn’t looked at her work since art school decades ago but I recently borrowed a book on her paintings from the local library and didn’t like all of them but the paintings of flowers were visually striking and simply show flowers which are complex mechanisms of nature that David Attenborough explores in the kind of documentaries I mentioned earlier when he studies the amazing wonders of nature. Also, the quote by O’keefe also shows how much courage it takes as a creative in any medium or form and the courage to put yourself out there pouring your heart out and what people see being open to scrutiny.
“A form gives me an idea, this idea evokes another form, and everything culminates in figures, animals, and things I had no way of foreseeing in advance.”
Joan Miro
Joan mixed abstract forms and animals and humans in a cohesive colourful field that evokes study of the dreams and subconscious of surrealist painters. The quote shows how he intuitively makes connections between things in his paintings. He was what they call a modernist artist in art theory terms.
Joan mixed abstract forms and animals and humans in a cohesive colourful field that evokes study of the dreams and subconscious of surrealist painters.
Although this essay has a structure in order of interest but non chronological, I actually wrote it skipping all over the place writing logically and intuitively in balance: female artist then male artist in balance and left Miro until last not because I liked him least but knew the least about him.
“Joan Miró was a Catalan painter who combined abstract art with Surrealist fantasy. His mature style evolved from the tension between his fanciful poetic impulse and his vision of the harshness of modern life.”
People also ask Google
Thirty most famous Joan Miro paintings:
“I must create the world in order to breathe in the world; I don’t exist unless I create.”
Mariko Mori
I love this quote about Mariko Mori’s process of creativity being organic and creating giving birth to self-esteem and positive identity.
I chose Moriko Mori for two reasons one because I saw the sheer scale and grandeur of her work a huge photo when I worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney setting up and packing up contemporary art exhibits the official name for the job is preparator. I like it for two reasons not only because she explores spiritualism with photoshop and I am sure it was but often digital animations as well. To me it didn’t seem that long ago but it was 2001 or 2002 I can’t remember. Also, it seemed to explore the role of Japanese women in the world and seemed kind of pro feminism in a way. However, the main impression I got was it was similar to the break throughs in CGI in futuristic science fiction movies of the previous decade and the decade to come.
“Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.”
Mark Rothko
I think what Rothko was trying to say is that minimal art captures the intangible nature of the spiritual domain not something you can touch or hold but comprehend with your soul and your mind connecting together.
To be honest when I first saw Rothko’s work in the first few years of art school, I didn’t understand it but later on in art school after taking a break I saw the work of Indian born English artist Anish Kapoor and his early pigment sculptures and abstract small drawings used a similar minimalism absolutism of absence and nothingness on the surface and within the artwork.
They found their true context while being exhibited as a commission in a church.
“The Rothko Chapel is a non-denominational chapel in Houston, Texas, founded by John and Dominique de Menil. The interior serves not only as a chapel, but also as a major work of modern art: on its walls are fourteen paintings by Mark Rothko in varying hues of black.”
Wikipedia
“As an artist, these are the spaces that you have to courageously step into every day, and turn all the anxiety and worry and uncertainty into a kind of superpower,
Del Kathryn Barton
I like this quote by Barton and she explains the kind of balancing act of the metaphysical artist or like the ying and yang symbol of light and dark explored by Carl Yung in the book Man and His Symbols. By citing Jung I am showing the thinness of my intellectual rigour as its probably the most read book about mandalas and contemporary art (which was modernist art at its time of writing and was written in spurts over decades and finished by Jung soon before he passed and their link to the subconscious that every art student reads in the first few years of art school. While I write I’m looking at a poster above my desk of a Tibetan mandala and this form of art is my favourite abstract art in many ways outside the realm of the western art paradigm.
Barton went to art school with me at College of Fine Arts an off shoot of the University of New South Wales in the top twenty universities in the world I think but we weren’t friends but had mutual friends and she has gone on to be Australia’s most successful painter male or female both critically acclaimed and commercially including exhibiting at top galleries such as the Art Gallery of NSW and winning Australia’s quite traditional but most prestigious painting portrait prize the Archibald held annually at the Art Gallery of NSW. I don’t know what gallery she is currently in a stable of but last I looked on the internet it was the Roslyn Oxley Gallery in Sydney. Her paintings sell for a packet and there is a waiting list of keen collectors waiting for one of her ideas or commissions I think but I’m not sure if that’s true. Del has gone onto collaborating with her paintings with a high end fashion designer and made a critically acclaimed film and digital/ drawing animation..
“Painters were also attorneys, happy storytellers of anecdote, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists, engineers, but there were no creative painters.”
Kazimir Malevich
This quote by Malevich shows how artists are multi skilled and fantastic multi taskers when it comes to practical issues and amazing lateral thinkers when it comes to issues of spiritualism and logic.
In conclusion spiritual art in all mediums such as painting, sculpture performance art, installation art and drawing and new technology art is not something wafty and intangible but a tool box for the artists female and male and the audience to stay centred in themselves and calm and happy no matter how chaotic the outer world is around them. Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself but I hope art teachers can use this essay to be adapted as a unit of work on this topic both in Australia and in other countries or expand on any of my ideas in related topics. Today I feel I am the spiritual artists loved cat and I wish I could go back in time to have herbal tea with them who aren’t alive now with honey: their advice and compassion being soothing and sweet. I think at the back of my mind I wrote this essay to couch my art which in my books is becoming spiritual in a female and male artist historical context. Such as the following photo:
