Contemplating the Spiritual Essence in Art
When I recently sought a grant from a foundation supporting the “Spiritual in Art,” they asked me to write a 5,000-word essay on the following two questions.
What has drawn you to the spiritual in art?
How do you see the role of art in spiritual and social transformation?
At first, the questions seemed easy enough since I had contemplated the deeper meanings of the universe as the foundation of my art practice for the past three decades. However, as I started writing, I realized that honing my thoughts into something clear and concise became daunting.
As an artist, I have always wanted to bring myself and others into contemplative realities beyond the five senses and carry the viewer into abstract/iconic representations of spirit.
Lauren Mantecon, Duende, oil on canvas 72 x 60, 2024
But how do I describe the role of the working artist and their interpretation of the spiritual for social transformation?
As I dug deeper into question number two, I noticed I was becoming more and more agitated.
The Spiritual in art is so ineffable; it’s much like trying to put your arms around the ocean. The spiritual in art is also highly subjective.
The more I wrote, the more I found myself in a nonlinear realm of what I experienced as random rambling. It made no rational sense. That may be the point, but not for a thought-out linear essay.
I leaned further into my rambling writing to see where it might lead. What began to emerge surprised me.
When we are touched by art and transformed into a heightened awareness that can often be described as a spiritual experience, we are usually left with elevated feelings of connection. A feeling that we are not alone in this vast universe but touched by something larger than ourselves- maybe a word here could be called grace.
As we move with the presence of an omnipotent force, we might even find ourselves transported into inexplicable and supernatural realms. It's a certain something beyond the five senses that transports us directly into deep soul recognition.
It’s felt, not seen, even when we directly view a piece of art that takes us on this journey of connection.
The keywords here are feeling and a recognition of the power of emotional intelligence. For spiritual art to open itself into social transformation, we need a consensus that what can not be seen in 3d or the naked eye holds just as much importance to humanity as our linear, logical world.
Here, I remember that evolution hurtles itself into an AI (artificial intelligence) universe that is said to be rapidly excelling beyond the IQ status of Einstein and may surpass any intelligence on this planet in the next decade.
In many ways, this is a scary thought.
Maybe spiritual works of art slow us down to remind us that our feelings, sensitivity, and psychic sensibilities, i.e., emotional intelligence, are in jeopardy of being left behind as AI reaches a god complex status.
After all, we are not robots. We are souls with etheric bodies, heavenly bodies, with all our pain, joy, and heart-centered consciousness.
Let us remember this every time we rely more and more on AI to produce our content. Let us remember that the emotional charge of existence keeps us connected.
The more we rely on the AI consciousness to keep us up to speed with the rapid pace of technology and social media, we may be giving in a tiny bit from our feeling centers in a logical reasoning computer to make more and more choices for us.
Some of you might be saying - what is wrong with that?
When we lose balance, we lose energy. Suppose we break this down into feminine and masculine archetypes. In that case, we might recognize that we live in a world where logic, reason, and 3d reality are superior to intuition, emotion, and sensitivity.
Anybody who has ever been told they are “ too sensitive” or “ too emotional” might know exactly what I mean here.
Is there really such a thing as “ too sensitive”? It sounds like gaslighting to me.
I call this the feminine wound. We feel this wound of humanity when discussing inexplicable phenomena and are met with disdain.
We feel this wound when we are told that what can not be seen or proven is just our imagination.
We feel this wound when we feel slightly slighted, and the power of connection and our inner authority to trust our gut and psychic sensibilities is called unproven.
The feminine wound gap first needs to be recognized, talked about, practiced through the words we speak with each other, and then practiced with self. We do this by trusting our inner authority. No excuses.
This healing brings us into the balance needed for social transformation to take place through the spiritual in art.
We can flex our spiritual sides and commit to social transformation by staying close to what it means to hold space for grace and presence, connecting to nature and, as artists viewing inspirational works, then diving to our cores to retrieve what has uplifting personal meaning in our creative acts.
For more on spirituality in art, check out my blog post: Taking the woo-woo to a higher level - the work of Hilma af Klint.