interviewed american artists

Sociologist Robert Wuthnow, in Creative Spirituality: The Way of the Artist (2001), interviewed American artists concerning their spirituality and its relationship to their art. Wuthnow's examples highlight themes of identity, meaning, and relationship to the cosmos. Many artists, states Wuthnow, have struggled deeply with who they are and with what is important in their lives. Moreover, one of the important contributions of artists is the ability to create narratives and images of wholeness in the face of undeniable brokenness. He states: "Spirituality seems more authentic to them because they have had to create their own ways of expressing it, whereas religion connotes the teachings of preachers and priests who may have never seriously questioned the tenets of their faith" (p. 7).

One artist said of the healing potential of art: "I think it offers an affirmation of life. It gives people a way to slow down and to become more in touch with themselves and with the deepest aspects of themselves and the mysteries of their life and the memories of the human race and the sacred space that we are in danger of losing. I think that's what art can actually provide, and it's not being covered in the media" (interview with Meredith Monk; Wuthnow, 2001, p. 194).

Sometimes art allows one to construct a new identity. Flo, for example, a Chinese American silkscreen artist, printmaker, and watercolorist, was devalued as a girl because of her gender. In her forties, after her children were in high school, she began taking art classes at a nearby junior college. She produced Oakland Chinatown Series, consisting of thirty-five paintings over an eight-year period. When Flo began to draw relatives from her photo album, she was flooded with suppressed painful memories. As the memories came back, however, she transformed them into a more positive image of her upbringing. One memory, for example, was of her father being shot when she was very young. Her reconstruction of it is Eye of the Rice: Yu Mai Gee Fon, translated as "there is raw rice to cook dinner." Composed of cloth and plastic rice sacks, tendrils embroidered on the rice sacks represent the family's tears. The work stands as a piece of identity for Flo because she was an infant at the time of her father's death (interview with Flo Wong; Wuthnow, 2001, pp. 96-9).

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Another theme Wuthnow investigates is spiritual exploration of the unknown and how artists bring creativity to this quest. He offers the example of Wendy, a bead artist (pp. 43-9). She describes a "quest experience" undertaken on her 21^st birthday, in which she drove to a point on the Continental Divide where she hoped to feel close to God. It was the Vietnam War era, and Wendy could not make sense of soldiers being asked to die. She had a realization that she would receive the answers she sought, but only if she put herself in a situation where they could come to her. Wendy chose the path of a bead artist, living in a log cabin in a remote canyon. Later she had an experience of death and rebirth, where she fell off a horse the day she conceived her first child. From then on she felt she was in the hands of a force larger than herself. Over the course of part of her life, Wendy felt restless; she moved, took different partners, and experimented with yoga, new therapies, spirit guides, and drumming. The reason for the intensity of her spiritual exploration was unclear until she uncovered a repressed memory of being molested by her father at age four - '"All of a sudden, the whole picture, the whole image became clear, because all these things that had happened to me, all these things I had drawn into my life, it all made sense'" (interview with Wendy Ellsworth; Wuthnow, 2001, p. 48).

In their personal struggles, Wuthnow found that many artists use language emphasizing therapy, healing, spiritual awareness, and especially recovery. The fact that personal development and artistic development are impossible to separate is one reason artists see a connection between their work and spirituality. As one musician put it: '"My spiritual journey and my musical journey are connected at the hip. In fact, my desire is to cause them to be synonymous. All of the things that I am doing musically, with no exceptions, are things that are about my spiritual journey and that relate directly to my spiritual journey. The two are different wings of the same experience. I'm able to do what I'm able to do artistically because of who I am in my spirit'" (interview with Warren Cooper; Wuthnow, 2001, p. 95).

Creativity often expresses one's relationship with the cosmos. One artist interviewed stated, "If you believe in the muse, it's coming from somewhere else, some other source, whether you want to call it God or spirit or something else" (interview with Jon Davis; Wuthnow, 2001, p. 104). Some artists have a mystical understanding of their art. For example, one artist believes in a spiritual and material reality beyond herself which interacts with her during the creative process, stating, "My work is about mystery. My work is not about revealing the mystery, but saying that 'Mystery is present here. Notice it!'" (interview with Nancy Chinn; Wuthnow, 2001, p. 32). Another artist explains that many songs come to her from dreams and meditation.

A playwright describes a mystical experience that occurred early in his career:

I flopped down face forward on the bed and my head exploded. It was as if my head became a giant glass globe and all of my thoughts and everything outside in the world, everything, was projected equally on this globe. Accompanying that was one of those feelings of total glory and happiness. How could there be

44 Creativity, Spirituality, and Mental Health

any problems? I mean, I could see all my problems there on this surface, and it was all perfect and I didn't have to worry about it. This lasted between five and ten minutes, this intense feeling. Then it started to fade. I concluded it was one of those experiences that so many people have and for better or for worse one calls it a moment of cosmic consciousness, (interview with Richard Foreman; Wuthnow,2001,p. 236)

His plays, in turn, challenge the audience to question cultural assumptions, aiming to effect social change through creating spaces where people can escape normal ways of thinking

In his interviews, Wuthnowfoundthatwriters,musicians, sculptors, and painters spoke of small experiences of transcendence that in turn became reasons for hope. Because it momentarily transcends time, the creative process offers an awareness of something other than the ordinary. As one artist put it: '"I think you have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to realize that when you work with a creation you are dealing with something that's bigger and wrapped in the cosmos'" (interview with Bob McGovern; Wuthnow, 2001, p. 263). Another artist stated: '"It's just a sense of being connected to something a lot bigger than you are, so that it's no longer about your own ego. The sense is that you're being slipped this stuff, that something that is not your ego is letting you have some material'" (interview with Greg Glazner; Wuthnow, 2001, p. 263). Another artist suggested: '"They're like moments of grace, where you suddenly hit something. Like a clap there's a resonance, there is just a timing that makes it come together, that then gives a sense of an energy that goes beyond one's self" (interview with Carla DeSola; Wuthnow, 2001, p. 263). Another artist put it: '"You and the work and the unfolding of the work are one. It's a very ego-less, un-self-conscious place to be'" (interview with Nancy Chinn; Wuthnow, 2001, p. 263). Wuthnow adds, "Experiences like these ... inspire artists to keep working, not because they provide answers to life's deepest questions, but because they suggest possibilities greater than those presently known. ... Like religious teachings about possibilities of spiritual rebirth of the second coming of Jesus, moments of transcendence keep hope alive" (p. 264).

Wuthnow's work helps us reflect on creativity in the contexts of self-exploration, finding life purpose, suffering, and cosmic connection. In terms of the categories posited by Viladesau, for the artists and musicians interviewed by Wuthnow aesthetic experience tended to serve as a source for theology as a locus of general religious experience, often associated with the sacred. Viladesau (1999) clarifies this as "an expression of human spiritual being that implicitly embodies transcendence" (p. 18). Pargament's notion of the sacred seems appropriate in this context as well, in his view that the sacred can be understood in a broad sense - in nature, relationships, etc. And as Wuthnow articulates, many contemporary American artists he interviewed tended to association religion with social convention, whereas most interviewed did not stay within the bounds of convention in their art.

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We now move to other contexts than an American one. Have artists, musicians, and scientists from other cultures and time periods described their creative expressions in a similar fashion to Wuthnow's interviewees? How does their work embody "spiritual seeing"? How do they negotiate the tension between self and the whole? We turn to several specific examples: twelfth-century German mystic Hildegard of Bingen, twentieth-century Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, and physicist Albert Einstein (who held German, Swiss, and American citizenships), again drawing from Viladesau's notion that human spiritual being embodies the realm of feeling, imagination, and the pursuit of beauty, particularly through the arts.