What is art

[blanc]

Clearing out my bookshelves I came across Tolstoy's. So, what is art, anyone?

[teamdaemon]

I love these threads.

What Is Visionary Art?

By Alex Grey

The artist's mission is to make the soul perceptible. Our scientific, materialist culture trains us to develop the eyes of outer perception. Visionary art encourages the development of our inner sight. To find the visionary realm, we use the intuitive inner eye: The eye of contemplation; the eye of the soul. All the inspiring ideas we have as artists originate here.

The visionary realm embraces the entire spectrum of imaginal spaces from heaven to hell, from the infinitude of forms to formless voids. The psychologist James Hillman calls it the imaginal realm. Poet William Blake called it the divine imagination. The aborigines call it the dreamtime; and Sufis call it alam al-mithal. To Plato, this was the realm of the ideal archetypes. The Tibetans call it the sambhogakaya � the dimension of inner richness. Theosophists refer to the astral, mental, and nirvanic planes of consciousness. Carl Jung knew this realm as the collective symbolic unconscious. Whatever we choose to call it, the visionary realm is the space we visit during dreams and altered or heightened states of consciousness.

Every sacred art tradition begins with the visionary. "Divine canons of proportion," mystic syllables, and sacred writing were all realized when the early wisdom masters and artists received the original archetypes through visionary contact with the divine ground. After a sacred archetype has been given form as a work of art, it can act as a focal point of devotional energy. The artwork becomes a way for viewers to access or worship the associated transcendental domain. In sacred art, from calligraphy to icons, the work itself is a medium: a point of contact between the spiritual and material realms.

The Role of Art

Our inner world � the life of our imagination with its intense feelings, fears, and loves � guides our intentions and actions in the world. Our inner world is the only true source of meaning and purpose we have. Art is the song of this inner life. Art�s key role in the human drama is that of a "great convincer." The artist posits one myth, religion, or ideology over another, yet also always expresses the raw passion and evolutionary force of the inner world itself.

The artist attempts to make inner truths visible, audible, or sensible in some way, by manifesting them in the external, material world (through drawing, painting, song, etc.). To produce their finest works, artists lose themselves in the flow of creation from their inner worlds. The visionary artist creatively expresses her or his personal glimpses of the Divine Imagination.

Every work of art embodies the vision of its creator and simultaneously reveals a facet of the collective mind. Art history shows each successive wave of vision flowing through the world's artists. Artists offer the world the pain and beauty of their souls as a gift to open the eyes of the collective and heal it. Our exposure to technological innovations and diverse forms of sacred art gives artists at the dawn of the twenty-first century a unique opportunity to create more integrative and universal spiritual art than ever before.

The Visionary Tradition

A complete historical account of the global visionary art tradition would fill volumes. The sixteen thousand-year-old cave paintings of human/animal hybrids, such as the Sorcerer of Trois Freres, are a good starting point. Much ancient shamanic art, such as African ritual masks and aboriginal rock and bark paintings, clearly depict visionary dreamtime wanderings and encounters in the lower and upper worlds. A visionary art history lesson would include representations of mythic deities and demons: the Mayan feathered serpent; Egyptian and Greek sphinxes; and Indian, Balinese, and Thai portrayals of many-limbed, many-headed beings housed in complex mandalas.

One of the earliest known Western mystic visionary artists was Hildegard of Bingen, a twelfth-century German abbess. While enveloped by a fiery inner light, she was told to "speak and write not according to human speech or human inventiveness, but to the extent that you see and hear those things in the heavens above in the marvelousness of God." The icons created from her visions are direct and authentic gifts of spirit.

Perhaps the most famous visionary artist was the fifteenth-century painter Hieronymous Bosch, who portrayed an extraordinary array of grotesque beings, tortured souls in hell, and angels guiding the saved to the light of heaven. His Garden of Delights is one of the strangest paintings in the world � an encyclopedia of metamorphic plant/animal/human symbolism. Pieter Bruegel was touched with the same visionary madness when he created Fall of the Rebel Angels and Triumph of Death � an amazing landscape featuring a coffin go-kart and armies of skeletons herding the struggling masses. Northern and Italian Renaissance artists like Grunewald, Durer, and Michelangelo delineated the revelations of Christian mysticism with searing, Gothic realism.

Our historical sketch of visionary art would have to include the seventeenth-century alchemical engravings of Johann Daniel Mylius and mystics like Jacob Boehme and Robert Fludd, who detailed complex mandalic philosophical maps pointing to union with the divine.


William Blake, the nineteenth-century mystic artist and poet, conversed with angels and received painting instructions from discarnate entities. Blake published his own books of art and poetry, which revealed an idiosyncratic mysticism arising from his inner perception of religious subjects. He resisted conventional religious dogma, proclaiming that "all religions are one." The characters in Blake's paintings and engravings seem akin to those of Renaissance masters Michelangelo, Raphael, and Durer � yet are softened with a peculiar magic. His artwork exalts an ideal realm of inspiration that he termed the "divine imagination." Blake's work laid the foundations for the nineteenth-century Symbolist movement that included such artists as Gustav Moreau, Odilon Redon, Jean Delville, and Frantisek Kupka.

The realm of visionary art also embraces Modernist Abstraction like the works of Kupka, Klee, and Kandinsky; Surrealist or Fantastic Realist art; and Idealist work like Blake's. The twentieth-century Surrealists operated in a territory without clear moral order: a dreamship adrift on the ocean of the unconscious. Artists like Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Hans Arp, Hans Bellmer, Stanislav Szukalski, Juan Miro, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Frida Kahlo mixed images from childhood memories, adult desires and fears, sex and violence � wherever the creative currents led them. The visions of the Surrealists help to define a dream realm where any bizarre juxtaposition is possible. A profound truth resides in such strangeness, for these visions can shock us into deepening our acknowledgment and appreciation of the Great Mystery.

The Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew was one of the great visionary artists of the twentieth century (his obsession with anatomy and mysticism relates to my own work). Tchelitchew's paintings evolved through metamorphic symbolism to x-ray anatomical figures glowing with inner light, and eventually progressed to luminous, abstract networks.

Perhaps the most widely respected visionary painter of the twentieth century is Ernst Fuchs, whose highly detailed and symbolic works are often based on biblical and mythological subjects. Fuchs combines the technical mastery of Durer and Van Eyck with the imagination of Bosch and Blake in a completely personal fantastic realism. Fuchs has had a widespread and profound influence on many of the greatest contemporary visionary artists. The masterful Mati Klarwein, Robert Venosa, De Es Schwertberger, Olga Spiegel, Philip Rubinov-Jacobson, and many others count him a key teacher or inspirational force.

The post-World War II Vienna school of Fantastic Realism included artist friends of Ernst Fuchs, like Arik Brauer, Anton Lehmdon, Wolfgang Hutter, and Rudolph Hausner. In 1940s America, the artists Ivan Albright, George Tooker, Paul Cadmus, Peter Blume, and Hyman Bloom were known as Magic Realist painters.

The psychedelic sixties spawned a new kind of poster art, leading many painters in a visionary direction. In the 1960s and 70s, a loosely associated group of California visionary painters � Joseph Parker, Cliff McReynolds, Clayton Anderson, Gage Taylor, Nick Hyde, Thomas Akawie, Bill Martin, and Sheila Rose � were published by Pomegranate Art Books. Pomegranate has also featured the shamanically inspired work of Susan Seddon Boulet. A more visually aggressive psychedelic pop surrealism energizes the work of Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Robert Williams.

Paul Laffoley, a painter and architect, is one of the most encyclopedic of visionary geniuses. Dystopic visions of contemporary hell worlds are stunningly portrayed in the paintings of Joe Coleman, H.R. Giger, Manuel Ocampo, and Odd Nerdrum. Visionary abstraction is articulated in beautiful infinities in the works of Allyson Grey, Bernie Maisner, and Suzanne Williams.

Some of the most promising new visionary painting is by A. Andrew Gonzalez, Erial, and Guy Aichison. The archetypal mindscapes of Francesco Clemente and Ann McCoy enjoy the rare distinction of visibility and success in the contemporary art marketplace. The word "visionary" has also come to be associated with "outsider, naive, insane, and self-taught" artists, who include Adolph Wolfli, Reverend Finster, and Minnie Evans.

What unites these various groups of artists is the driving force and source of their art: their unconventionally intense imaginations. Their gift to the world is to reveal "in minute particulars," as Blake would say, the full spectrum of the vast visionary dimensions of the mind.

On the musical side, this guy is pretty awesome. Especially the song were the cat sings.

[Project Willow]

I had the fantasy that Blanc's thread would remain forever un-replied to, unanswered, and that would be the perfect explanation for what art is.

(no offense Blanc, and hope you are well.)

[blanc]

PW I had a fantasy that it would remain unreplied to as well, but not for the same reasons! But I think I know what you mean, that art (the visible or plastic stuff) stands without words - words, or wordy explanations, conceptualisations, are not what it is.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Art is a thing with girls and birds. It's often NSFW, at all.

[sunny]

Art is anything you do because you absolutely love to do it and you pour your heart and soul into it. It doesn't really matter what 'it' is because your love transforms whatever 'it' is into something beautiful to behold.

(geez I'm high. You'll have to forgive the unicorns and rainbows. And the puppies and kitties too. cue the violins, but I really mean it)

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Art is anything you do because you absolutely love to do it and you pour your heart and soul into it. It doesn't really matter what 'it' is because your love transforms whatever 'it' is into something beautiful to behold.

(geez I'm high. You'll have to forgive the unicorns and rainbows. And the puppies and kitties too. cue the violins, but I really mean it)

FWIW, Oscar Wilde kind of agrees with ya. But probably without the passion or highness. Same result anyhow. And I kind of agree with you both.

I can't remember what he said exactly (it was ages ago) but it was something like: True art must be useless.

In orther words, if you can hot-wire a truck with it, it's not Art. It's just some handy wire.

[sunny]

Art is anything you do because you absolutely love to do it and you pour your heart and soul into it. It doesn't really matter what 'it' is because your love transforms whatever 'it' is into something beautiful to behold.

(geez I'm high. You'll have to forgive the unicorns and rainbows. And the puppies and kitties too. cue the violins, but I really mean it)

FWIW, Oscar Wilde kind of agrees with ya. But probably without the passion or highness. Same result anyhow. And I kind of agree with you both.

I can't remember what he said exactly (it was ages ago) but it was something like: True art must be useless.

In orther words, if you can hot-wire a truck with it, it's not Art. It's just some handy wire.

I'm just making excuses for myself. I've always wanted to be artistic in so many different ways but I've never had the talent for being artistic with my hands. I've got *some* long forgotten musical ability, and I can throw down in my southern kitchen. Once upon a time I thought I could write and I cannot. However, my collection of internet communications and interactions with real folk, regardless of the medium, brings it's own satisfaction akin to being "officially" published.

All I have is love. My family is the most loved I know. All of us are secure and happy and close and we always have been. We get together now just to hang out and both my kids are grown and do not have to indulge us so much. A friend of my husband is fond of saying this about him: "dude does love him some Sonya". (I'm Sonya btw. ) Any one of my friends, if they were so inclined, could say the same about me, about him. A happy family is a work of art on it's own and requires the work and dedication of an artist endlessly painting a masterpiece.

I do love Oscar Wilde.

(geez, there I go again. I'm REALLY in a good mood.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

A friend of my husband is fond of saying this about him: "dude does love him some Sonya," (I'm Sonya btw. )

It's you who is the drug then. Or the main ingredient to the happiness, even your own. Or something.

Any one of my friends, if they were so inclined, could say the same about me, about him. A happy family is a work of art on it's own and requires the work and dedication of an artist endlessly painting a masterpiece.

I do love Oscar Wilde.

(geez, there I go again. I'm REALLY in a good mood.

Aye, well, don't rub it in ya cow!! I get jealous enough watching Gilmore Girls.

You're right, though. A happy family, even a happy individual, is worth a million works of genius (since nature supplies those free). I'd give up all the works of Van Gogh for one less tortured alkie like Van Gogh on the streets. Partly because he wasn't all that good.

ON EDIT: ach, well, he was good enough though. let's not judge too harsh!

[sunny]

A friend of my husband is fond of saying this about him: "dude does love him some Sonya," (I'm Sonya btw. )

It's you who is the drug then. Or the main ingredient to the happiness, even your own. Or something.


Any one of my friends, if they were so inclined, could say the same about me, about him. A happy family is a work of art on it's own and requires the work and dedication of an artist endlessly painting a masterpiece.

I do love Oscar Wilde.

(geez, there I go again. I'm REALLY in a good mood.

Aye, well, don't rub it in ya cow!! I get jealous enough watching Gilmore Girls.

You're right, though. A happy family, even a happy individual, is worth a million works of genius (since nature supplies those free). I'd give up all the works of Van Gogh for one less tortured alkie like Van Gogh on the streets. Partly because he wasn't all that good.[/quote]

Not a drug, just a steadfast refusal on my part to repeat the mistakes of my mother. I figured if I did the opposite of nearly everything she did we would be fine. I was right. My husband took the same approach and was just as right. We are the perfect storm of dysfuntion having a positive effect.

(what the hell have you done with the quoting Ahab? I can't figure this mess out for shit. I'll come back to it later, lol)

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Not a drug, just a steadfast refusal on my part to repeat the mistakes of my mother. I figured if I did the opposite of nearly everything she did we would be fine. I was right. My husband took the same approach and was just as right. We are the perfect storm of dysfuntion having a positive effect.

(what the hell have you done with the quoting Ahab? I can't figure this mess out for shit. I'll come back to it later, lol)

I've ruined the quoting royally, and messed it up all ways but upside down. Sorry 'bout that.

I think I did it in the wrong thread as well. That happens from time to time.

We are the perfect storm of dysfuntion having a positive effect

I knew it! You're Lady GaGa!

Ahem. sorry. This be the Lounge.

And a thread about Art.

[sunny]

Not a drug, just a steadfast refusal on my part to repeat the mistakes of my mother. I figured if I did the opposite of nearly everything she did we would be fine. I was right. My husband took the same approach and was just as right. We are the perfect storm of dysfuntion having a positive effect.

(what the hell have you done with the quoting Ahab? I can't figure this mess out for shit. I'll come back to it later, lol)

I've ruined the quoting royally, and messed it up all ways but upside down. Sorry 'bout that.

I think I did it in the wrong thread as well. That happens from time to time.

We are the perfect storm of dysfuntion having a positive effect

I knew it! You're Lady GaGa!

Ahem. sorry. This be the Lounge.

And a thread about Art.

More like Lorelai Gilmore. Except I'm blonde. And I could never hope to overcome my drawl and rattle off the cultural references and witty repartee as fast as she does. I'm tall though. Oh, and I can sing just well enough people don't throw things at me and I have a daughter who's a real blue-eyed beauty.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

More like Lorelai Gilmore. Except I'm blonde. And I could never hope to overcome my drawl and rattle off the cultural references and witty repartee as fast as she does. I'm tall though. Oh, and I can sing just well enough people don't throw things at me and I have a daughter who's a real blue-eyed beauty.

Lorelai tends to use her powers for evil (you don't, though, for the record), And she talks way too fast about too much even for those who know her. She may be the heroine of the piece, but it's clear that she will one day be nothing more than a more vocal and demanding version of Emily Gilmore, whereas Rory will just be really cute and hot and lovely forever and ever and ever.

Not that Lorelai is not cute and hot and lovely, of course. She most certainly is. In extremis! But she can talk, and does so, to excess.

The show as a whole just cheers me up, though. Lighting and all. And of course the theme.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OX8JtJf ... re=related

Coming off the booze, you need a big frothy hot chocolate like Gilmore Girls, and I was just lucky to catch the repeats. Could've just as well caught a Jon Pilger doc about mass-graves in Palestine and stayed even drunker to this day.

This is, kind of, about Art. It effects you deeply, but you can make your own mind up about how and why and wherefore.

[Nordic]

Art is all in your head. That is, it's all about seeing, or hearing, something that isn't.

There's a fantastic video of an elephant painting a picture of another elephant.

Art? I don't know, did the elephant visualize the painting, did he dream it up?

[barracuda]

Neither - in order to have the creature make art, the elephant was rewarded with food pellets and punished with a lash. This does, however, offer some insight into the OP question, I think.