Connecting Art to Spirituality

Hello my Moons,

Sorry for the delay on the post this week. I forgot to push it through and left it as a draft!

I wanted this post to reflect more of my spiritual connection with this series and how I view art as a spiritual practice in general.  Whether you are spiritual yourself or not, I feel that creating is a sacred pastime that we no doubt, devote a lot of emotion to.  

I have been getting a lot of questions about the Noirs Animaux and how I know them.  Though I have already spoken about this, I wanted to iterate the fact that the Noirs Animaux come either from real dreams I have had throughout my life,  or encounters with real animals.  They are almost always black, and share a similar underlying energy, yet each has its own personality.  The piece above, while based loosely on a dream, is also a celebration of my connection to the black fox Ivan and how much he has done for me.   

When I began looking at my work more as a practice of spirituality and symbolism, it opened me up to so many concepts I could link together for seemingly endless ideas that held personal meaning for me.  Like the bat above, often wearing the skin of a dragon, who has come to represent the struggle between insecurity and empowerment.

I am not sure if you, like me, enjoy interpreting your dreams.  I personally do not like using guides or outside consultation for this as I have been given so many false answers from these sources.  I feel that there can be many meanings to dreams and that plenty of them might relate only to their dreamers.   I prefer to spend a long time meditating on the dreams myself and figuring out how they relate to my life.  Sometimes the answer is obvious, other times it takes searching.  What I love about this practice is how personal it is and how easily it can be done by anyone regardless of their beliefs.  Many people I know who do not believe in anything spiritual, enjoy pulling symbolism from dreams all the same.

Spirituality, symbolism, and emotion are all important elements in the creative process.  I do not believe you need to be spiritual to create.  There are certain beautiful ties between faith and passion, regardless of one's beliefs.  The piece above is a tribute to two forgotten and abused gods from dreams I had many years apart.  A reminder to myself to remain close to the easily dissipating nature of the things outside of our knowledge. 

For me, my spiritual connection to my work has aided me in the process of creating pieces that are more honest and intentional.  I grew up being raised to believe a specific set of ideas and being told that those were the one and only truth.  So, for much of my life, a belief system was already ingrained in me.  It was not until I got older, and slid away from any specific, or organized faith, however, that I began to realize how important it was for me to follow not only what felt right for me, but to release that uninhibited personal truth into my artwork and as soon as I did, my art gained an entirely new kind of energy and it became harder to let pieces go by the wayside and remain unfinished.  It may not be the case for everyone, but creating work in this way has had a stunning impact on my ability to actually finish pieces. 

Part of me is a little sad that it took me so long to start using this form of energy as a driving force for my work.  Especially when the Noirs Animaux began visiting my dreams in my early teenage years, as was the case with this little wallaby joey.  But I find that because art is such a reflection of who we are, it often grows and changes with us and can be a wonderful reminder of who we are, or were in the past.  I look back at much of my old art and even if I still feel fondness for it, I am grateful I began working in more personal emotion I was perhaps afraid to show before.

Again, I do not believe one needs to be spiritual to create.  Many of my non-spiritual friends have their own energies and passions they use to fuel their work.  I think creating personal art comes from a certain authenticity and pulling from a place inside, regardless of what that place is.  You do not need to have lived an interesting, privileged, abusive, adventurous, etc. life in order to find meaningful things to say because what counts in that you are voicing what you believe, in your own way, with your work, even if that means simply creating "something pretty".  Passion and authenticity, wherever it comes from, runs the muse. <3