Projects
Spirit Depiction Art
2. Theory of the Art (depiction versus imagination)
I like to clarify a distinction between art of the imagination and art that is depicting of spirit. I believe this contrast is important, because while we can imagine things that are not spiritually feasible, the spirit depictionists are, to the best of their abilities, immediately and objectively documenting the spirit worlds that they have personally entered. The spirit depiction artist is not trying to be unusual, he or she is just being unusually honest about what other people would consider unusual. In fact, as astral exploration becomes normalized, even the wildest spiritual depiction may become reassessed as simple realism, no more or less inspiring than a classic pose or still-life. Already some metaphysical depictionism is elementary portraiture whose only controversy comes from the caption that indicates this was a spirit sitting.
By contrast, I think of imaginative artists as tending to stylized invention and surreality, often for a dramatic effect that is meant to be a new experience in itself, one enduringly original, and not necessarily documenting at all. The imaginative artist seeks to emotionally evoke a reference point to a place that you many relate to but never see, while depictionism delivers a vastly more objective document for a place that you may one day see and but not relate to until you get there.
Imaginative art is usually localized for a culture so as to be best judged at face value; if it's scary, disturbing, or beautiful, it was meant to be. This impact likely comes from symbolism, and since symbols seek to communicate by the images of a shared experience, a symbolic palette will be drawn from and for a certain audience. The reason why there are no absolute symbols is that a static image cannot determine a movement of energy, so it is only from the viewer's filing of an image into a larger narrative sequence that a symbol can anticipate a good or bad or otherwise emotive outcome. This relativity is very important to appreciate, since most people take it for granted that a thing can be absolutely good or bad, and by locking all things into good or bad camps such people become wasteful consumers rather than generative producers of cosmic potential.
A narrow but entirely successful symbolic scope for imaginative imagery might be medieval (swords are justice), christian (crosses are salvation), or post-internet (a keyboard is worldwide knowledge access). These seem reasonable, until one considers a wrong context (swords are childhood because they are toys, crosses are criminality (in their original context of death sentencing), and keyboards are secretaries/slavery). A wider audience of civilized humanity might agree that light is progress and dark is ignorance, but melanin-rich races would be understandably less enthused with this interpretation. Of course, it is every artist's job to disambiguate their content within sufficient context, and most pictures will work fine as a whole. But one can always imagine cultures and beings for whom an imaginative artwork becomes so conflicted or opaque in symbolic composition as to be rendered meaningless. All of us can benefit from some education into ever widening circles of assumption in order to facilitate our appreciations for larger worlds of creativity, and even our so-called archetypes can come up for frequent re-evaluation.
Depictionary art is not striving to be symbolic and universal, but more artifact and personal. It is more representative than defining of an event, and if symbolism is recognizable it may be unreliable, since the viewer is unlikely to have been a member of the originally targeted audience for which the symbols had meaning. A depiction of a dream for example would include the symbols selected by spirit friends for that dreamer's unambiguous response, and later viewers could introduce many ambiguities from their own symbolic dictionaries. You will most likely require the education of anecdotal context in order to truly appreciate the images of depictionary art, which is fine, since the ecstatic artist is likely to have a uniquely
illuminating episode, heartfelt and personal, ready for the telling. If there are universal symbols in depictionary art, they would be of a divine nature, and recognition of them would require a personally won awareness of that divine nature, something not all viewers would have (witness the conflicts between those societies which literally versus spiritually interpret the Bible - and who might be correct is beside the point here). Thus depictionary art may be more difficult to enter than imaginative art, but also potentially much more rewarding to personal and spiritual growth, which would be its purpose anyway.
A spiritual depiction may not be what it appears to be at all, because some astral beings can be frighteningly alien when committed to an image, yet the artist's promise is good that when met the being will come bearing gifts of protection, love and wisdom to set all fears to rest. Real astral threats are rarely what they seem as well, since the most potentially dangerous beings are often the least puffed-up, and the classic giant devils are likely putting on a show that hopes to not be challenged for lack of much real staying power (they're hanging onto you by a fragile thread of your own negativity, since you are mostly a great and positive being who offers little home for unloving schemes).
For shocking inventiveness in the imaginative art realm, Heironymous Bosch certainly comes to mind, and although he may well have glimpsed pictorial components from personal visions, we can doubt or at least hope that he didn't actually visit in entirities the places that he painted. Bosch's world was especially rich with premeditated medieval and christian symbolism, much of which we can so resonate with today that we can assume (ego-centrically) its universality. Other imaginative artists may make liberal use of conventions and inventions to express the positive and uplifting (such as with winged angels, when the artist may have never consciously seen an angel, and wings are likely the collectively approved perceptions of nonphysical energy fields), or to interpret the psychadelic (visual cliches for the drug experience abound, and you don't have to be a hallucinogenics user to draw like one). In such cases the symbolic medium is clearly the message, and we can't know what an imaginative artist has witnessed personally, nor is the artist likely interested in resolving such issues, at least publically. That could be demystifying to their reputations.
A spirit depictionist on the other hand has been to what they draw, and while they may take some license for the fleshing out of scenic detail, they are trying to stay close to just what has been observed. Realism is important to the depictionist, because a relationship with the divine and its representatives is in progress and at stake. This realism may express itself in a primitivism which renders the work academically dismissable, yet there is depth of resolve and resolution behind the image which comes through as well. A life of spiritual conviction is declaring itself in one pose, however simple or quick. Often a spirit depictionist will accompany a work with long title, prose, or even song, in order to pay further homage to their metaphysical patrons and colleagues. The ego of the depictionist has a tilt of its own, unmistakably toward God.
I usually prefer a spiritual depiction to an imaginative work for the same reason that I have come to enjoy autobiography more than fiction. Or "the making of" more than the movie. One is made up, one is real. One invites you to deepen a subjective relationship with yourself and/or the artist through the medium of the artist's symbology, and the other invites you to discover an objective experience of the universe that is met through the medium of the artist's recollection. The philosophy of the distinction becomes so fascinating and microcosmic because each state can induce and include the other - a reality experience can lead into a real experience, and a real experience can be submerged into reality experience. Such is life. And since all otherworldly art can be equally inspiring at different times to different people, the term visionary art is well employed to embrace one large unearthly genre.
These are all my opinions only, of course, meant to stimulate your own and not offend anyone. Next up is my gallery for you of known spirit depiction examples.
