Channeled Art Making
The artist does not unearth their creations from malnourished soil. There is always a process of research, digging, concept and development that is less than striking, often dirty; leaving the artist with the task of making poetry out of the mundane, the turmoil, the thick, the mud, the madness.
Is that not also what forming a relationship with spirit is like?
We set the candle, put out offerings, write our petitions, speak our prayers or mantras, rock back and forth in our chants and rhythmic ceremony. We convene with our tarot, oracle, various divinary tools. We hold sacred space for our pain, our wishes and manifestations, our grief. We drive up prophecy. We ritualize the elevation out of our despair, reaching out to the ethers and the guides for answers we expect “them” to know how to give, from behind the curtain of the afterlife. We take advice from the whispers, bringing forth wisdom and lessons from the tiniest seed in the unknown. We do this in elaborate fashion until we finally discover, the underbelly of our ritual is to connect deeper to the oneness that is, all that is, even in the mundane; all that never was separate from us. If we remain dedicated to spiritual practice long enough, we will see the entire time, we were leaving offerings at the feet of our own embodiment. That we, too, are spirit.
A place we often don’t connect the dots to when we imagine this sacred process, is the artist’s studio.
The incantations of whiskey in half filled cups, offerings of cheap deli meat sandwiches placed on the one clean corner of the table, the stretched canvases leaned face down against the wall in the corner, the piles of sketches and gridded pages, the books sprawled on the floor opened to musings by the ghosts of artists’s past, the charcoal dust and pieces of ripped paper all over the floors, the smell of turpentine and paint filling the air like frankincense and myrrh. The breathwork replaced with the hems and haws of annoyance in frustration of translating concept into image, failing miserably and trying again until we can see through the fog of annoyance.
This is the ritual.
Convene with your art and cards at the same time.
Just as you ask the cards: what am I not seeing? Where am I ignoring my inner knowing in this? Just as you let your eyes go blurry and your head fall into trance when you shuffle, cut out the paper this way, draw the image this way, paint the canvas this way. Blurred, entranced, channelling.
My spiritual practice is a living, breathing organism that stretches her arms out to stroke the hairs of life in its wholeness;
She does not remain perfectly placed on the altar or on the meditation pillow- she pushes her way into the very spaces where creation lives, because if not for creation, we would not have so many ideas about spirit in the first place. Most of us learn about diety worship and the timeline of mysticism through the commissioned works of artists from history’s past. Spiritual work and artistic practice have forever been intertwined in each other, even if we don’t often marry them in our own lives. To express, is to channel spirit.
I channel all of my art. All of my creative ideas and finished pieces are offerings.
And so are yours.
I get it, ‘but it’s not all art,’ I guess - we utilize our spiritual practice to invite in healthier and more authentic experiences for ourselves, in regards to healing and self development - rising out of addictive cycles, oppression, all the things we feel compelled to request supernatural aid, for miraculous change to occur. All of this, we argue, is much more “important” than art.
One could also argue, you do not need to be healed to be an artist. That healing is actually the antithesis of good art.
Cheers to misery and talent, right?
But isn’t art, good art, always reflective of the human experience? Aren’t artists always driving up the unconscious themes around struggle, construct, political strife, emotional turmoil and social concern?
This process has always been more than, “just art.”
Back to spiritual practice in its own right.
Yes, we sometimes need to separate our spiritual connection from other forms of ‘doing’- to give ourselves access to something that isn’t ‘for the good of anything’ other than simply being, not assigning another adaptation of overworking to a process that is meant to be sacred, personal, and healing. Isn’t art technically a form of productivity? I see why it seems like a separate practice. But, if we think our spiritual practice is always meant to remain this separate, holistic prescription to heal the fuckery of life- Eventually, we will have peeled back so many layers of ourselves, dissected so much that we have to make a decision; we wither away in a state of psychosis and over analyzing, or we start making.
For the longest time, I too needed to separate my spiritual practice from the rest of my life. I had to come home to a private space with the windows covered, to convene in the broom closet without the eyes and ears of the world peeking in on the preciousness I was hiding there. In the outside world, I was an artist, a service provider, creating and teaching techniques that were secular in nature, to the naked eye. But inside, I was convening, learning how to lean into ocular blindness to allow intuition to take over my moves, as the way to real form and process.
In other words, I spent my private time with my spiritual work and it informed my creative process without me being direct about it.
My altar space was more like a hospital room than a space of ceremony, a place where I tended to my open wounds and watch my blood and tears pour out onto the floor. I needed to imagine this was all separate in order to handle life elsewhere. Something ‘just for me.’
But this is the exact point I want to make here. My art studio space was like this too.
Your artistic process deserves as much space as your spiritual practice does, and you can find love for it again if you detach the idea it has to be ‘for anything’ other than its own sake, the way your spiritual practice can also be. If you allow life to bubble up through you, naturally on its own, the essence of deeper meaning will show up without you needing to endlessly place parameters around it.
The work is best when we detach from the specific outcome, anyway. We can see a more realized and fluid embodiment of the work when we divorce from the mainstream ideas about production and productivity. When we allow the process to live in a feminine, intuitive place, we evoke something much deeper than good design.
We evoke spirit. We lean into trance.
All spiritual workers are artists. All artists, are spiritual workers.
I mean this exactly as a write it. With intense admiration, a deep knowledge of the history of creators and diviners, both living on the edge of society with the ability to translate the unseen into manifestations of thought, image, sound, and form.
Eventually, my creative practice became the hidden skeleton in my closet, while my spiritual work took center stage, as I shared wisdom with others all over the world through writings, channeling and tarot readings that I had refined in my sacred, ghostly space for years alone - and now, I spend most of my days hiding away my little torn up pieces of paper and glue, my sketchbooks, my creative writings messy and shoved in the corner.
I am committed to the process of marrying the two. To practice what I preach.
To live, as I create.
Spiritual work reminded me that being an artist, is channeling spirit.
My spiritual practice helped me to hone back in and stop the bullshit, to regroup and focus on the parts of the creative process that matter.
I sit. I light my candles and speak my incantations. I set the sacred space and ask to be cloaked with the protection of the mother, I drink my water as I pray her devotions over it.
Then out comes - you guessed it - the cards. The pen and paper.
If I am really tapped in, I sit and allow whatever comes up to be written down without judgement, meaning I do not dissect it as im channeling it, I simply allow it to flow. words, messages, song lyrics- you name it. I open the magazines, and take out my exacto knife, and I trust to cut where I am being led to go.
I convene with spirit.