The Unsaid

Why painting keeps asking spiritual questions of me

Why painting keeps asking spiritual questions of me

Well, here we are, starting this journey together. Asking the questions so often whispered in artists’ studios, but rarely making it into the public domain. Questions about art, the body, nature — and the spiritual.

It’s the last of these that feels trickiest. It’s fraught with problems of definition. But then again, is that any different from art itself?

I know, implicitly, that there is something we call “art” that binds together so many different practices. And yet it remains fluid, ambiguous, and almost impossible to pin down philosophically. At best, we can say what it is like. We can create metaphors that give form to the experience in image and language. But still it stays elusive, and easy too fake.

Isn’t that also true of the spiritual life?

In these essays, I hope to explore, in a playful, open, and generous spirit, how we might begin to see the fullness that art and spirituality each bring to our experience of being alive, and the complex ways they intertwine. I want to look at who we become through practice, what part art plays in our becoming “whole”, and why the language of spiritual wisdom traditions might help us connect art to life more deeply and more honestly.

Sometime in the early ’90s I was in a bookshop, I don’t remember where, but I still see the dark-coloured bookcase vividly. I’d been wrestling with questions around religion for a number of years (that’s another essay), and every so often I would pick up books of that kind to scan. Usually with my eyes half closed. So much of what I found felt unhelpful, speaking in ways that seemed to diminish rather than open my view of the world.

That day I picked up The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis.

It’s a devotional text from the early fifteenth century, steeped in the language and assumptions of its time. In many ways it felt alien to the twenty-year-old me. And yet, as I stood there reading, I had the unexpected sense that something in it was grounded and true to my own experience, not as a religious seeker, but as an artist.

What it spoke about — implicitly, rather than directly — was an embodied, attentive, disciplined way of living. A life shaped by practice, by repetition, by staying with the small and ordinary. And I recognised that. It felt wholly reflected in the context of my studio life, in the slow work of making paintings. Somehow, the language of a cloistered mystical order was naming something I already knew in front of a canvas.

That moment with that book sparked a thirty-five year journey into the mystical traditions, their practices and concepts, which have helped me see painting, and its relationship to the body and to nature, in new ways. Perhaps more than anything, they have given me a language to see art.

We speak so often about the explicit nature of painting: what it is portraying, what it “means” in relation to current themes and trends. These things are not unimportant. But I often feel they are window dressing. The real story is much deeper, unique, felt, and yes, spiritual.

Perhaps that is because, at face value, it can’t easily be put into the familiar academic prose many artists now learn at university. I think this is a mistake. After all, what do artists actually talk about with friends and colleagues? I’m sure you recognise the questions, the ones that circle around doubt and certainty, meaning and purpose, beauty and truth, value and community.

I would go so far as to say that the spiritual life is the creative life, and the creative life is the spiritual life.

Even now, decades later, I find that every time I step into the studio, the same questions are waiting. Not as theories, but as demands of practice: Where is my fear? What is awareness? What is enough? What is transcendence? And what the hell is my ego doing now?

This is where these essays will begin, in the ordinary discipline of making, and in the spiritual questions that keep surfacing there.

I’d love to know: where do those questions show up for you?

Matt