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What does art have to do with spirituality.   Now, I accept the difference between religion and spirituality.   Both are an important part of my life as is art.   I wanted to examine the links.   Scholars have defined art as: “the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions.    Art is a simulation of feelings, expressions, and ideas, communicated to elicit, provoke, inspire, and create those feelings, expressions, and ideas in an observer of the visual art work.”   In short, art seeks to communicate.   Universally, you find symbolism in all art.   In some art, we may have lost the cultural “language,” but even if we don’t understand the message, we can feel it trying to speak to us.   This symbolism often seems to be spiritual in nature.   Spirituality is based on a sense of connection, a sense of connection that goes beyond the physical world and one’s self.   It can include emotional experience, including those of awe or reverence.   If you’ve been reading these blogs, you know that I’ve been long interested in the fusion of art and science.    However, I accept that the scientific method is not well suited to validating either religion or spirituality.   Some of the dichotomy is that while science endeavors to “know;” art endeavors to “express.” Of course, they are not completely things of different planes.    The things at science learns find themselves expressed as art.   This makes me wonder about the purpose of art, especially as it relates to spirituality.   In this, I take my lead from an address by Pope Pius XII to a group of Italian artists received in audience on April 8, 1952: “The function of all art lies in fact in breaking through the narrow and tortuous enclosure of the finite, in which man is immerged while living here below, and in providing a window to the infinite for his hungry soul.”   Obviously, one doesn’t have to buy into the particular flavor of religion that the Pope was representing to recognize that the phrase does carry much of what some artists seek to convey when they are dealing with a spiritual subject.   A more mundane, tripartite breakdown of artistic components could be expressed as physical, social or personal. The most easily defined category is physical.   No one can argue that even today art is an important component of most day to day items, from chairs to clothing to whole buildings to, if people like Paolo Soleri have their way, entire cities.   These categories often overlap in a given piece of art.   A warrior seeking to “stand out from the mob” might well have the image of a martial god carved upon his shield.   This would not only identify him from a distance but would be a statement of from whom he derives his strength and resolve.   Many artists have felt strongly that they have to make a statement about their culture.   This may take the form of idealizing and honoring the culture or of criticizing it by making what is generally invisible, through conditioning or neglect, visible.   Without a personal reason for doing art, I doubt much would be produced.  The incentive may be the sheer joy of producing beauty or of stimulating thought, but bags of gold and silver provide an incentive equally powerful.   Here I’d like to concentrate on the personal component where the artist is trying to some spiritual or symbolic.   The symbols in art reflect a multi-dimensional reality.   We start to see the spiritual aspects of the artist’s intention.   Looking back in the history of art, one can sense the constant presence of this spiritual intention.   Take the earliest art known, the Venus of Willendorf sculpture that was created sometime between 25,000-20,000 BCE.   At first glance, it is a crude female figure much pregnant and lacking detail.    It is likely it was either the representation of a specific fertility goddess or is a general fertility charm.   In any case, it has meaning far beyond its first appearance, being an attempt on the part of humanity to influence powers beyond its ken.   It simply amazes me that this earliest know art has this art-spirituality link.   This concept came to me recently when I visited the African Art Exhibition at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art.    There was a multitude of masks and other things used in their rituals.    I was struck at the many ways these people used art as an interface to communicate with their gods or as objects of devotion to ease the passage of loved ones into the next world and give them standing and status there. This seems to be consistent over time.   Art and religious were conjoined largely because generally the Church had the kind of money needed to endow artists, and the rich outside the Church were obsessed in being able to transfer their status from this world to the next. As the societies because more worldly, the short lived Metaphysical Art movement of the early 1900’s sprang from the urge to explore the imagined inner life of familiar objects when represented out of their explanatory context.   Also, Surrealism , as defined by the founder, Breton, is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought.   It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life. And so to the present.   One of the artists I’ve been communicating with through FaceBook told me about Vedic art which presents itself as a way to achieve a higher state of consciousness through artistic creativity, to create beyond the demands of technique and result-producing.   Some of their material meshes nicely with my present ponderings about art and creativity.   There have been times when I pined for the “good old days” as in the Renaissance where artists lived in communities and learned from one another, but I have come to the conclusion that I’m in an even better world.    We do have a vibrant artists community here in Southern Florida, but through the Internet I have both direct and indirect contact with tens of thousands of artists all over the world who can expose me to concepts like Vedic art, something that might well not have happened in the more conventional schools of the past.   This brings me back to how I came to be identified with the Remodernists.   First a brief definition from RedBubble, a group that I’ve found to be very valuable in my growth as an artist: “Briefly, Remodernists do not think that Modern Art is rubbish, we do not believe that communication via art is impossible, and we do believe that one of the legitimate goals of an artist can be the sincere expression of an authentic personal spirituality.”   This, of course, resonated with me, and it seems I’ve become a link in a chain for accepting it and passing it on.    I recently received an email through FaceBook saying that the writer hand read about my recognition that I was a Remodernist at heart and from what I had written she found the same feelings in her heart.   I think there is a great desire to find a meaning beyond the everyday, the physical, the mundane, and that desire is what brings spirituality to the fore.   Over the past few years,  I’ve been exploring some of the new thoughts of consciousness and metaphysics; factor in my new, practical interest in art and I can feel a synergy forming.   It’s not yet stable or tangible for me to grasp more than the fascinating outline,  but I do find myself being called to express the spiritual essences that I seem to sense.   So this is where I find myself on this dim and fog shrouded road,  filled with both thrill and unease. Ahead,  I sense wonder but know I have a long way to go before I find what I hope is ahead.