Rhineland Mystics in the Studio

                                            The Wonderer - 2010     65" x 72"

2011.
What will unfold in this, the year of the Iron Hare? (Losar-Tibetan New Year is March 5th). What insights and epiphanies will manifest as I grow another year older, deeper and broader in my scope of studio painting?
Time in the studio is filled with my awareness of threads of conversations and reflections weaving their way into my painting practice.  I am spending time "sitting with" the wisdom of my theological and spiritual rootedness in the writings of Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich and the Tibetan Mystic, Longchenpa.  

There has been an interesting number of recent articles on religion and art, the intersection(s) of art and theology, and spirituality in the arts.   Issue 135 (November-December 2010) of frieze magazine, a journal Contemporary Art and Culture is entitled Religion&Spirituality and features a work by Hilma af Klint (Altar Picture, No.1-1915) on the cover.  I am not sure where all of this will lead.  I do know there
 is an internal mandate to listen and sit with an awareness and attentiveness both in and out of the studio.


Quotes from Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen with commentary by Matthew Fox (Vermont, Bear&Co. 2002)

Einstein warned that "science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind." Hildegard would surely concur. But she would add that science and religion without art are ineffective and violent; and art without science and religion is vapid.


Who are the prophets?  They are a royal people, who penetrate mystery and see with the spirit's eyes.  In illuminating darkness they speak out.    So wrote Hildegard in the 11th century.    In the 21st century,  Enrique Martinez Celaya writes of the artist as prophet:  ...art is not revealed in or as stable meaning but by a very particular instability of meaning.  Art is that vibration between meaning and no-meaning, whose experience renders their opposition meaningless and dissolves our separation from the primal nature of the universe.  ( Celaya, Collected Writings, p.232  Lincoln, UNPress, 2010).

This early 21st century artist and  the 11th/12th century mystics of the Rhineland and Tibet have much to say to each other in 2011.  I am reacquainting myself with my own rich tradition(s) of study and practice as I carry them into the studio.