Claim your space. Start painting. Begin now. By Painting the Sacred Within you, you'll unlock a new rhythm of working intuitively to allow space for your own transformation. Inside these pages, you'll discover twelve areas of focus as you learn to see your world through paint and to experience deeper self-exploration. You will learn new ways of seeing, how to experiment with abstract techniques, how to work with natural elements, how to meditate with mandalas and much, much more. • Experiment with freeing and engaging techniques such as pouring paint, lettering with a brush and painting on unconventional surfaces. • Uncover the continuous thread that runs through your work as you develop art-making rituals and learn the importance of investing time in your creative dreams as you develop healthy studio habits. • In addition to more than 14 step-by-step demonstrations, you'll discover inspiring works from guest artists, learn helpful tips on self-care and find a plethora ideas for making creativity a part of your lifestyle. Begin a new practice today. Let Painting the Sacred Within ignite the creative spark inside you.

After a century of Rationalist scepticism and political upheaval, the nineteenth century awakened to a fierce battle between the forces of secularization and the crusaders of a Christian revival. From this battlefield arose an art movement that would become the torchbearer of a new religious art: Nazarenism. From its inception in the Lukasbund of 1809, this art was controversial. It nonetheless succeeded in becoming a lingua franca in religious circles throughout Europe, America, and the world at large. This is the first major study of the evolution, structure, and conceptual complexity of this archetypically nineteenth-century language of belief. The Nazarene quest for a modern religious idiom evolved around a return to pre-modern forms of biblical exegesis and the adaptation of traditional systems of iconography. Reflecting the era's historicist sensibility as much as the general revival of orthodoxy in the various Christian denominations, the Nazarenes responded with great acumen to pressing contemporary concerns. Consequently, the artists did not simply revive Christian iconography, but rather reconceptualized what it could do and say. This creativity and flexibility enabled them to intervene forcefully in key debates of post-revolutionary European society: the function of eroticism in a Christian life, the role of women and the social question, devotional practice and the nature of the Church, childhood education and bible study, and the burning issue of anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism. What makes Nazarene art essentially Romantic is the meditation on the conditions of art-making inscribed into their appropriation and reinvention of artistic tradition. Far from being a reactionary move, this self-reflexivity expresses the modernity of Nazarene art. This study explores Nazarenism in a series of detailed excavations of central works in the Nazarene corpus produced between 1808 and the 1860s. The result is a book about the possibility of religious meanin

Claim your space. Start painting. Begin now. By Painting the Sacred Within you, you'll unlock a new rhythm of working intuitively to allow space for your own transformation. Inside these pages, you'll discover twelve areas of focus as you learn to see your world through paint and to experience deeper self-exploration. You will learn new ways of seeing, how to experiment with abstract techniques, how to work with natural elements, how to meditate with mandalas and much, much more. • Experiment with freeing and engaging techniques such as pouring paint, lettering with a brush and painting on unconventional surfaces. • Uncover the continuous thread that runs through your work as you develop art-making rituals and learn the importance of investing time in your creative dreams as you develop healthy studio habits. • In addition to more than 14 step-by-step demonstrations, you'll discover inspiring works from guest artists, learn helpful tips on self-care and find a plethora ideas for making creativity a part of your lifestyle. Begin a new practice today. Let Painting the Sacred Within ignite the creative spark inside you.

An original account of the tortuous and revealing relationship between two seminal figures of modern painting, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin.

In the tradition of such successful books on creativity as Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and The Artist's Way, artist and teacher Heather Williams presents a step-by-step approach to personal development — and artistic satisfaction. Many people — including Heather Williams — were never encouraged to embrace their creative side, and this shutting down of part of their inner life can create conflict. This book is an invitation into each person's creative instincts and is designed to lead gently toward developing both artistic and spiritual qualities. The book is divided into three sections: Pencils & Perception (observing and drawing what you see in the physical world); Crayons & Consciousness (drawing the interior landscape of memories, emotions, dreams, and patterns); and Ink & Intuition (drawing on the intuitive wisdom within yourself). This book is not intended to make everyone a commercial artist, but it will help readers to see and be in their world more fully.

Break open this ancient contemplative practice of listening deeply for God's voice in sacred texts. Drawing on her own experience as a monk in the world, Christine Valters Paintner introduces the foundations for a practice of lectio divina. She closely examines each of the four movements of lectio divina as well as the rhythm they create when practiced as a process.

Pioneering work by the great modernist painter, considered by many to be the father of abstract art and a leader in the movement to free art from traditional bonds. 12 illustrations.

Gerardus van der Leeuw was one of the first to attempt a rapprochement between theology and the arts, and his influence continues to be felt in what is now a burgeoning field. Sacred and Profane is the fullest expression of his pursuit of a theological aesthetics, surveying religion's relationship to all the arts -- dance, drama, literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. This edition makes this seminal work, first published in Dutch in 1932, newly available. A new foreword by Diane Apostolos-Cappadona analyzes the continuing relevance of van der Leeuw's thought. Van der Leeuw's impassioned and brilliant investigation of the relationship between the holy and the beautiful is founded upon the conviction that for too long the religious have failed to seriously contemplate the beautiful, associating it as they do with the kingdom of sensuality and impermanence. Similarly it has been alien to literati and aesthetes to reflect upon the holy, for they choose to consider this physical world to be permanent, and therefore to be glorified through beauty alone. In truth, as van der Leeuw undertakes to show in Sacred and Profane Beauty, the holy has never been absent from the arts, and the arts have never been unresponsive to the holy. Whether one considers the Homeric epics, the dancing Sivas and Vedic poems, the sacred wall paintings of ancient Egypt, the primitive mask, or the range of sacred arts developed out of Latin and Byzantine Christianity, primordial creation in the arts was always directed toward the symbolization and interpretation of the holy. The fact that in our day this original connection is obscured and the artistic impulse is more generally regarded as wholly individualistic and autonomous does not contradict van der Leeuw's thesis; indeed, the breakdown of the unity of the holy and the arts is central to his thesis. Van der Leeuw was the rare thinker who combined profundity of insight, grace of style, and a willingness to take daring intellectual chances. In Sacred and Profane, he describes each of the arts in its original unity with the religious and then analyzes its historical disjunction and alienation. After a penetrating investigation of the structural elements within the arts which illumines a crucial dimension of the religious experience, van der Leeuw points toward the reemergence of an appropriate theological aesthetics on which a reunification of the arts could be founded.

This unique series of paintings takes the viewer on a graphic, visionary journey through the physical, metaphysical, and spiritual anatomy of the self. From anatomically correct rendering of the body systems, Grey moves to the spiritual/energetic systems with such images as "Universal Mind Lattice," envisioning the sacred and esoteric symbolism of the body and the forces that define its living field of energy. Includes essays on the significance of Grey's work by Ken Wilber, the eminent transpersonal psychologist, and by the noted New York art critic, Carlo McCormick.

Underlying the religious art of the Renaissance is a tension between the needs of the Church and the impulse to create great works. This beautifully illustrated book presents sacred images from the 15th and 16th centuries, leading up to two pivotal events in 1563. The Council of Trent, which signified the beginning of the Counter-Reformation, defined requirements that curtailed the freedom of painters and patrons in creating art for churches, while the founding of the Accademia del Desegno in Florence symbolically acknowledged that artists had achieved the status of creators not craftsmen. The author takes a fresh look at some of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance not typically associated with sacred imagery and shows how they navigated their way through the paradox of 'limited freedom' to forge a new kind of religious art. -- from Book Jacket