ARTnews wondered which paintings would be chosen by artists, museum directors, curators, and art historians today as the “greatest.”

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“The greatest picture in the world…you smile,” wrote Aldous Huxley in 1925. Although the claim sounded ludicrous to him, he went on to make a passionate and cogent argument for his choice: Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection. ARTnews wondered which paintings would be chosen by artists, museum directors, curators, and art historians today as the “greatest.” To find out, we queried a number of them. Many, understandably, declined to participate. A few struggled with their choices, and several circumvented the question—as in the case of Lawrence Rinder, the director of University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, who chose a painting in his museum’s collection, which he sees often and knows well.

Some of the works selected tell stories of first love, beauty, and awakening; others hint at mysteries, angst, and defiance. In taking the question seriously, and not so seriously, the respondents collectively affirm that an artwork’s price and popularity are only surface criteria. What is valuable are the more subtle and powerful insights that reside in some of humanity’s most resonant examples of painterly expression.

The Altamira Cave Paintings in Cantabria, Spain.

RAMEESSOS/WIKIMEDIA

– Altamira Cave Paintings, Cantabria, Spain. “As I understand it, these paintings were made 15,000 years ago by people lying on their backs painting the ceiling by torchlight a mile into a dark cave. The images were a distillation of actual sights seen. The Altamira Cave paintings remain ritual, spiritual, essential, and magical.” —Richard Serra, artist

Saturn Devouring His Son(1820–23) by Goya.

COURTESY THE PRADO

– Francisco de Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son (1820–23), Prado, Madrid. “It is an unbelievably powerful painting. It remains timeless, universal, and forever relevant. It reflects our own anxieties as human beings mixed with social anxiety and political anxiety. The artist’s personal anxiety, his anguish, is embedded in the work. The first time I saw it, I was horrified and couldn’t breathe.” —Shirin Neshat, artist

The Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–16) by Matthias Grünewald.

COURTESY UNTERLINDEN MUSEUM

– The Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald (1512–16), Unterlinden Museum, Colmar, France. “Even in the 20th century, its influence has been profound for artists, including Max Beckmann, Pablo Picasso, Barnett Newman, and Jasper Johns. But most important, while its meaning, interpretation, and reasons for influence have shifted over the centuries, for me it is a painting that may be seen as contemporary, that is relevant for our own time, which is essential for any painting to be considered as the greatest painting.” —Gary Garrels, senior curator of painting and sculpture, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Malevich, Black Suprematic Square, 1915.

COURTESY STATE TRETYAKOV MUSEUM

– Kazimir Malevich, Black Suprematic Square (1915), State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. “Malevich described it as the ‘zero of form.’ In her recent book, Aleksandra Shatskikh pronounces it ‘the visual manifestation of a new period in world artistic culture at its inception.’ Boris Groys has written that the work is ‘the most radical gesture towards the acceptance of the total destruction of tradition.’ There are no Mona Lisa–style crowds signaling that you have arrived at a masterpiece, but Black Suprematic Square is surely a painting that possesses ineffable immensity.” —Kate Fowle, chief curator, Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow

Young Lady in 1866 (1866) by Manet.

COURTESY METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

–Édouard Manet, Young Lady in 1866 (1866), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. “Young Lady in 1866 shows Manet to be a consummate painter who rivals Velázquez. I always smile when I see it. It never disappoints in its urbanity, wit, and cleverness. It imparts a male presence without a male. It’s as if there should be a top hat tossed in the corner. It exudes sexuality in the most discreet and sophisticated way imaginable.” —Gary Tinterow, director, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Another Reinhardt, from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Abstract Painting, 1963.

COLLECTION OF MOMA

– Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting No. 3 (1960–63), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California. “What is remarkable about this painting—as well as many of Reinhardt’s later works—is that it can make sense of one’s own deepening consciousness of its qualities (color, shape, scale). It is a work of art that awakens one’s mind to itself.” —Lawrence Rinder, director, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Detail of Nine Dragons.

COURTESY MFA BOSTON

– Chen Rong, Nine Dragons (dated 1244), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. “Chen Rong’s Nine Dragons embodies the humanism of China’s classical tradition, its polity, and its moral philosophy: dragons symbolize imperial power and order in national life, and they embody qi, the cosmic energy that animates the natural universe in Taoism. By tossing the dragons’ ferocious antics in the midst of nature’s impassive flux, the painting expresses on both pictorial and conceptual levels the yin-yang interplay of form and formlessness, substance and dynamism, flesh and eternity.” —Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of Asian Art, Guggenheim Museum

Dort, or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed (1818) Turner.

COURTESY YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART

– J. M. W. Turner, Dort or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat From Rotterdam Becalmed (1818), Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. “Only when seeing the painting over time and under different illumination can one appreciate its extraordinary responsiveness to light, adapting in a way that makes the painting almost seem to breathe.” —Amy Meyers, director, Yale Center for British Art

Velázquez, Las Meninas, ca. 1656.

COURTESY THE PRADO

– Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas (ca. 1656), Prado, Madrid. “The peculiar sense of never being able to finish looking at this painting has always stayed with me. Every time I approach the painting, it’s as if I’m stepping outside of my reality and being pulled toward the pictorial space that Velázquez created.” —Dan Cameron, chief curator, Orange County Museum of Art

The Mona Lisa (1503–17) by Leonardo.

COURTESY THE LOUVRE

– Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa (1503–17), Louvre, Paris. “If we define greatness as having exercised the greatest hold over cultural imaginations across the world, there is only one answer: the Mona Lisa. I’m sorry to trigger a collective groan, but that’s how it is. Leonardo poured all his skill and all his philosophy of art and nature into it over a number of years. That’s a lot to pour in.” —Martin Kemp, emeritus professor of the history of art, University of Oxford

There are some questions in the art world that are not well received. Most of these have to do with money and rank. Asking how much an artwork costs or how important it is can seem a little crass and demeaning to the intensely personal experience of viewing high art.

James Oles, professor of art history at Wellesley College and a specialist in Latin American art, focusing on modern Mexican art and architecture, compared individual involvement with an artwork to a kind of knowledge that is as elusive as falling in love, and the idea of justifying or ranking such an effect as pointless.

“One might say that works of art that generate multiple and complicated interpretations from a variety of perspectives (often conflicting), and manage to do so over a long period of time to a wide variety of audiences . . . are perhaps somehow, well, more interesting than others, though with the caveat that sometimes minor or idiosyncratic works of art can be even more ‘important’ at a given moment,” Oles said. “But an engagement—emotional or intellectual—that would lead anyone to even consider saying or thinking any particular work of art is the ‘greatest’ is like their experience of falling in love: nice for them, but in actuality blinding, easily idealized, terribly individualized, rarely a model for the behavior of others, and ultimately rather meaningless in the grand scheme of things.”

And most emphatic was art historian Svetlana Alpers’s response: “I am sorry, but naming the greatest painting in the world is not a game I want to play. It has never occurred to me to be a question, and I am not going to consider it now.”

Even Gary Tinterow, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, who preferred to name his favorite, rather than the “greatest,” painting (Édouard Manet’s Young Lady in 1866) described his state in the face of the query as “kicking and screaming. I don’t believe it is a relevant question.” Lawrence Rinder likewise expressed reservations in his selection of Ad Reinhardt’s Abstract Painting No. 3, a favorite painting in the Berkeley Art Museum’s collection. “It is an interesting thought exercise,” he said. “While I don’t believe that there is a ‘greatest painting,’ pondering this question has had the benefit of causing me to reflect on many paintings that I know and love.”

Nearly a century ago, Huxley anticipated a similar kind of reaction when he dedicated his 1925 essay, “The Best Picture,” to the splendor of Piero’s Resurrection (1467–68). “The expression is ludicrous, of course,” he wrote. “Nothing is more futile than the occupation of those connoisseurs who spend their time compiling first and second elevens of the world’s best painters, eights and fours of musicians, fifteens of poets, all-star troupes of architects and so on. Nothing is so futile because there are a great many kinds of merit and an infinite variety of human beings. Is Fra Angelico a better artist than Rubens? Such questions, you insist, are meaningless. It is all a matter of personal taste. And up to a point this is true. But there does exist, none-the-less, an absolute standard of artistic merit.”

Jackson Pollock once proclaimed José Clemente Orozco’s giant mural of Prometheus at Pomona College in California, completed in 1930, “the greatest painting done in modern times.” Barnett Newman considered Matthias Grünewald’s painting of the Crucifixion in the Isenheim Altarpiece at Colmar “maybe the greatest painting in Europe.” And, in Marcel Proust’s opinion, Vermeer’s View of Delft (1660–61) was the world’s most beautiful painting. As Newman observed to ARTnews editor Thomas Hess in 1966, “The problem of ambition moves in all kinds of areas, but in the studio you do the greatest painting that has ever been made—not the greatest painting that you can make—the greatest painting that has ever been made. And to that extent the dialogue moves in relation to Michelangelo or Cézanne or whoever it is.”

But contemplating what makes a work “the greatest” is “very large and complicated,” said painter James Rosenquist, citing such possible choices as the prehistoric cave paintings, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Braque and Picasso’s Cubism, the French Impressionists’ treatment of color, Kandinsky and Malevich’s non-objective painting, and modern Americans Hans Hofmann and Joan Mitchell, “who never let extraneous images accidentally into their paintings.”

“In history, there have been many incredible ‘best’ paintings. And one is very lucky to learn from them,” said Rosenquist. “I tell young art students that some of the most famous paintings in some of the most famous museums are done with minerals mixed in oil and smeared on cloth with a hair from the back of a pig’s ear—which are fine Chinese bristle brushes. And some of the greatest drawings are merely done with burned wood drawn on parchment or some kind of paper.”

Today, critical voices strain to compete with an international press that is more likely to look to price or popularity as a statement of a work’s importance. When Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud(1969) sold for $142.4 million at Christie’s in November 2013 (overriding the previous record holder, Edvard Munch’s $120 million The Scream), New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote, “More than ever, the glittery auction-house/blue-chip gallery sphere is spinning out of control far above the regular workaday sphere where artists, dealers and everyone else struggle to get by. It is a kind of fiction that has almost nothing to do with anything real—not new art, museums or historical importance.”

Smith added that the triptych “might also be termed a portrait of a middlebrow artist by another middlebrow artist.” When an American Idol–like BBC poll selected J. M. W. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire (1839) as the greatest painting in Britain in 2005, the late critic Robert Hughes told a Scottish newspaper, “As for saying what is the greatest, the fastest, the thinnest, and all that stuff, is not what I am into. In my opinion there is nothing to which it could be relevant except a minor circulation-building exercise.”

According to Amy Meyers, director of the Yale Center for British Art, time and historical context aren’t always kind to the “greatest” label. In the later 18th century, Meyers says, Nicolas Poussin’sTestament of Eudamidas (1644–48), “was considered one of the greatest paintings in the world, its fame spread through the engravings of Jean Pesne and Marcenay de Ghuy. Then it was held up as an example of excellence for artists and imitated widely. Nowadays visitors to the National Gallery of Denmark can pass by this small painting without a second glance.

“In the same way,” Meyers continued, “Thomas Gainsborough was perhaps the best-known artist in the world in the early 20th century, when portraits like The Blue Boy reached the United States. A century on, if you stopped someone and asked them to list the names of great artists, Gainsborough’s name would scarcely ever be mentioned,” she pointed out. “Neither Poussin nor Gainsborough is a better or worse painter today than they were in 1760 or 1900, but our judgments and discriminations about the greatness of paintings and painters are mutable.”

While for artist Shirin Neshat, greatness in art means “transcending all differences, despite where an artist is from,” for some people, the definition of “greatness” itself is problematic. “If it means painting as painting, then Velázquez’s Las Meninas takes some beating,” according to Martin Kemp, emeritus professor of the history of art at the University of Oxford. “The Rembrandt self-portrait at Kenwood in London is in the same league. If we mean the most epoch-changing, we would look to Masaccio’sTrinity or Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. If we mean my all-time favorite, it would probably be Bellini’s Saint Francis in the Frick.”

Some paintings, such as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), have had tremendous impact in art history and are as famous for not being seen in the years following their creation as for their place in textbooks today. “From the mid-1930s to the late 1980s, Malevich’s Black Square, along with works by many other artists, went unseen and unaccounted for in the Soviet Union, and until the late ’50s were virtually unknown elsewhere,” said Kate Fowle, chief curator of the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow.

“What we (I) take for granted as the legacy contemporary Russian artists inherited was, for years, a void in itself,” she said. “The question is, how many potentially ‘greatest’ works have never been exposed to enough people to even stand the chance of being recognized as such?”

A certain criterion for the greatest painting in the world is the test of time, said Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim Museum. “Has the painting spoken across centuries, or if it’s modern, can you imagine that it could? Does it express the highest order of human thought its civilization developed, or perhaps, like Picasso’s Guernica, express its basest? Have the arbiters of later cultures regarded the work as a touchstone of universal humanity, assuming relativism hasn’t made such a claim irrelevant? And has the artistic virtuosity of its expressive powers been surpassed? Tens if not hundreds of pictures by artists around the world throughout history could qualify. What’s arbitrary, personal, and wonderful is which one you might select at any given moment in your life.”

Ultimately, the passage of time reveals the vulnerability of “greatness” itself. “Future generations undoubtedly will look back at our lists and disagree, just as we look back at earlier assessments of the greatness of works of art and are left surprised or bemused by how our forbears judged works of art and came to their assessments of artistic value,” said Meyers. “But that in itself is an illuminating insight into the taste and reasoning of an earlier generation, and a reminder to us that our value judgments are fallible and disclose much more about us than we might realize.”

Scientists have witnessed a black hole swallowing a star and ejecting a flare of matter moving at nearly the speed of light — a rare event that occurs when a star stumbles across a black hole’s gravitational well.

Artist’s rendering

Avaneesh Pandey
International Business Times

Black holes are known for their voracious appetites. These bodies — formed when a massive star collapses upon itself — have occasionally been described as the “vacuum cleaners” of the universe and are notorious for their tendency to wreak havoc on the usual laws of physics that govern the rest of the cosmos.

Now, for the first time ever, scientists have witnessed a black hole swallowing a star and ejecting a flare of matter moving at nearly the speed of light — a rare event that occurs when a star stumbles across a black hole’s gravitational well.

“It’s the first time we see everything from the stellar destruction followed by the launch of a conical outflow, also called a jet, and we watched it unfold over several months,” Sjoert van Velzen, a Hubble fellow at Johns Hopkins University, said, in a statement released Thursday. “Previous efforts to find evidence for these jets, including my own, were late to the game.”

Current theories suggest that when a black hole — an area of space-time so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape its gravitational influence — gobbles up an object, a fast-moving jet of plasma composed of elementary particles in a magnetic field can escape from near the black hole’s event horizon.

The feeding frenzy of the supermassive black hole in question — located 300 million light-years away — was first observed by a team at the Ohio State University last December. After they had ruled out the possibility that the light was from a pre-existing accretion disk — which forms when a black hole is sucking in matter from space — the researchers confirmed that the sudden increase of light from the region was due to a newly trapped star.

The observation, reported in the journal Science, confirms predictions made by current theories, according to the team of researchers, which includes scientists from the United States, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Australia.

“The destruction of a star by a black hole is beautifully complicated, and far from understood,” van Velzen said. “From our observations, we learn the streams of stellar debris can organize and make a jet rather quickly, which is valuable input for constructing a complete theory of these events.”

This artist’s rendering illustrates new findings about a star shredded by a black hole. When a star wanders too close to a black hole, intense tidal forces rip the star apart. In these events, called “tidal disruptions,” some of the stellar debris is flung outward at high speed while the rest falls toward the black hole. This causes a distinct X-ray flare that can last for a few years. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Swift Gamma-ray Burst Explorer, and ESA/NASA XMM-Newton collected different pieces of this astronomical puzzle in a tidal disruption event called ASASSN-14li, which was found in an optical search by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) in November 2014. The event occurred near a supermassive black hole estimated to weigh a few million times the mass of the sun in the center of PGC 043234, a galaxy that lies about 290 million light-years away. Astronomers hope to find more events like ASASSN-14li to test theoretical models about how black holes affect their environments.
During the tidal disruption event, filaments containing much of the star’s mass fall toward the black hole. Eventually these gaseous filaments merge into a smooth, hot disk glowing brightly in X-rays. As the disk forms, its central region heats up tremendously, which drives a flow of material, called a wind, away from the disk.

- See more at: http://www.the-open-mind.com/scientists-witness-black-hole-swallowing-star-for-first-time-ever/#sthash.lI89aK5X.KNppu10g.dpuf

Using Brain Plasticity To Get Smarter -- Self-Directed Neuroplasticity

Self-Directed Neuroplasticity

Your brain is constantly changing. It’s affected by everything that happens to you. Every action you take and even every thought you think changes your brain. Dr. Rudolph E. Tanzi is a professor of neurology at Harvard who discovered the first Alzheimer’s gene. He co-authored the book Super Brain: Unleashing the Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual Well-Being with Deepak Chopra. In it they put forth a mind-blowing concept that the brain is not a thing as much as it’s a process.

They go on to explain, “If you think of everyday experience as input for your brain, and your actions and thoughts as output, a feedback loop is formed. The old cliché about computer software — garbage in, garbage out — applies to all feedback loops. Toxic experiences shape the brain quite differently from healthy ones. This seems like common sense, but neuroscience has joined forces with genetics to reveal that right down to the level of DNA, the feedback loop that embraces mind and body is profoundly changed by the input processed by the brain.”

Tanzi and Chopra sum up the recent discoveries that make it possible for anyone to improve their brain:

• Your brain is constantly renewing itself.
• Your brain can heal its wounds from the past.
• Experience changes your brain every day.
• The input you give your brain causes it to form new neural pathways.
• The more positive the input, the better your brain will function.

That your brain will change is inevitable, but do you have any say in the matter? The answer is a resounding yes! You can leave the state of your brain to chance or you can put your brain’s plasticity to work you. The term self-directed neuroplasticity is used to describe the process of intentionally harnessing your brain’s malleability to get the results you want. Some have called this sculpting the brain. By giving your brain the right input, you can train it to be smarter and happier.

Using Brain Plasticity To Get Smarter

Surprisingly, it’s only been within the past ten years that scientists have come around to the idea that overall intelligence can be improved. Before then, it was believed that a person’s level of intelligence was set at birth and could not be changed by any means. In 2008, a groundbreaking study discovered that intelligence is fluid and can be increased with the proper stimulus. Since then, scientists have changed their fundamental view of human intelligence. Here are two fascinating landmark studies that support this new view. One shows that you can grow a larger brain, the other that you can increase your IQ.

Hippocampus Brain Anatomy Via: decade3d – anatomy online

To become a London cab driver, an applicant must pass “the Knowledge” — the most difficult geography test in the world. Prospective cabbies spend three to four years on what may be the ultimate brain exercise — memorizing London’s 320 main routes, 25,000 streets, and the location of over 20,000 landmarks. Scientists wanted to know what becoming a human atlas did to a brain. It was found that London cabbies grew a measurably larger hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for consolidating memories and spatial navigation. Interestingly, those who studied for the test but failed did not show the same increase in hippocampus size.

Many children are led to believe that they aren’t very smart. Sometimes this is done by well-meaning parents or teachers who are trying to motivate them into working harder at their studies. Siblings and peers can pick up where the adults left off. Other kids with parents who are trying to boost their child’s self-esteem are constantly told how smart and talented they are. Interestingly, this too can limit kids by making them think things like intelligence and other talents are fixed traits rather than something that can be developed.

When students are taught about brain plasticity and how their intelligence is not fixed, it makes a dramatic impact on their grades and their morale. It can even help kids raise their IQs. By simply understanding that they had the potential to get smarter and do better in school, they did. Clearly the power of brain plasticity is a concept that every school-age child should be taught.

Harnessing Neuroplasticity To Be Happier

Just as you are not stuck with a set level of intelligence, you aren’t stuck with a set level of happiness either. One of the most powerful ways to train your brain to be happier is to monitor and change your thoughts. The average person thinks 50,000 thoughts per day and up to 70 percent of them are predominantly negative. And this creates neural pathways that do not serve you well.

Rick Hanson, Ph.D. is a neuropsychologist, Senior Fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, and bestselling author of Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence. He describes the brain as being like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones. This negative bias is a survival mechanism that kept our distant ancestors out of danger but has become counterproductive in the modern world.

According to Hanson, you can train your brain to focus on the positive with these simple steps. First, look for and recognize those little bits of good wherever you find them. It doesn’t matter if it’s as small as a smile from your significant other, an enthusiastic greeting from a beloved pet or the satisfaction of crossing an item off your to-do list. Next, savor this positive experience. Visualize it in vivid detail, recalling how it made you feel since we remember things better when they are associated with an emotion.

Via: Ditty_about_summer | Shutterstock

Shawn Achor is considered a leading expert on happiness. He taught positive psychology at Harvard University and wrote the bestselling book The Happiness Advantage. According to Achor, “Training your brain to be positive is not so different from training your muscles at the gym. Recent research on neuroplasticity — the ability of the brain to change even in adulthood — reveals that as you develop new habits, you rewire the brain.”

He recommends doing one of these surprisingly simple activities daily for three weeks to significantly increase both optimism and life satisfaction.

• Jot down three things you’re grateful for.
• Write a positive message to someone.
• Meditate for two minutes.
• Exercise for ten minutes.
• Write down the most meaningful experience of the past 24 hours.

Researchers believe that ultimately neuroplasticity will be harnessed for clinical applicationssuch as treating anxiety disorders and depression, as well as age-related brain disorders.

Ways To Increase Brain Plasticity

Besides those mentioned above, there are other proven ways to increase brain plasticity. Supply your brain with nutrients that improve brain plasticity such as polyphenols, flavonols, and omega-3 essential fatty acids. Some online brain training programs claim to increase brain plasticity, but you don’t have to pay for a subscription to a brain training program. Any activity that stimulates your brain will do. Learning a new language, reading, playing chess or a musical instrument, gardening, arts and crafts, and doing home repairs stimulate the formation of new neural connections.

Neuroplasticity In Action

You’ve heard the expression, “It’s like riding a bike.” But I bet you didn’t know it was all about neuroplasticity! Usually a skill — like riding a bike — once learned is never completely forgotten. But you may need a short period of practice to kick your neurons back into gear.

Engineer Destin Sandlin is the creator of the educational science website Smarter Every Day. Like most of us, he learned to ride a bike as a child. In one experiment, he modified his bicycle with a pair of cogs to create a “backwards bike.” So when he turned the handlebars to the left, the wheel went to the right and vice versa. Sandlin thought he’d master this new way of riding in a few minutes, but that’s not what happened. His brain was so strongly wired, it took him 8 months of daily practice to unlearn the old way and learn the new way of riding his bike.

Interestingly, when he went back to riding a normal bicycle, he adjusted quickly since that neural pathway was still there. As you might expect, kids have more brain plasticity than adults and we lose brain plasticity with age. That’s why Sandlin’s six-year-old son was riding his backwards bike like a pro in just two weeks.

Enjoy this fun, real life example of brain plasticity in action:

MEDITATION AND ART ...

Meditation and Art

While “regular” art classes primary (if not only) interest is the end product (whether it be a painting, sculpture, composition or dance), Meditative Art classes place the inner state of the artist as the main focus. The process of creating is also given importance, and the creator is both an artist and a witness, attentively observing the process as it takes place.

‘Why do I create?’ and ‘what for?’ are important questions that anyone who creates should ask themselves. For ones who practice Meditative Art, these questions are only a starting point on the search for meaning. Deeply inquiring ‘from where does a creation comes from?’ and ‘who is creating?’ can lead one to a meditative state from which real art can be reached.

Letting go of old expectations and conditioning as well as loosening one’s attachments towards their personal creativity is an essential part of the preparation needed in order to create from a meditative state of mind. Only when we are free to create or to let creation flow through us can we actually be “truthful” in our art. In this sense Meditative art can be seen as a part of a spiritual path and also as the end result.

 

Meditative Art is a spiritual practice, it is not Art Therapy

Art therapy is defined by the British Association of Art Therapists as “a form of psychotherapy that uses art media as its primary mode of communication”. As all therapies, art therapy aspires to help. The patients express themselves with the use of different forms of arts to release and resolve emotional difficulties and heal old

Another term that can be confused with Meditative Art is the contemporary term “Intuitive art” which aims to let one create without being limited to social conception, yet has no connection to spirituality. traumas. Meditative Art on the other hand brings one to the present moment, makes them aware and attentive, peaceful and quiet, connecting them to their ‘higher self’ or a higher power.

Just a few words on materials

Meditative Art can be naturally applied with the use of natural materials; this is not obligatory, yet the connection is not only traditional but also simply makes sense. Through playing with earth, wood and other natural materials one can connect to the basic elements and their qualities. Learning from their wisdom be can connect through them to the source.

Meditative Art Retreats

Meditative Art has always been an integral part of spiritual search. This can be seen whether we look to the east or the west. While many of the old arts and their wisdom are sadly disappearing from our world, the essence that lies beneath them can never die. Meditative Art School was created to help bring this essence into today’s creativity.  We do so through our Meditative Art & yoga retreats that take place in especially inspiring locations around the world.

In all our programs we teach the theory and practice of  Meditative Art along with daily practice of yoga and meditation. We emphasis an exploring a wide range of natural materials and observe the way the materials affect us.