Contemplative Art

It’s Not What You Think

My teacher Thomas Keating felt that awakening to the contemplative dimension of life is possible in art as well as in science, nature and religion.

From the viewpoint of the artist what defines art as contemplative? In what way is their art, and our experience of it contemplative? I asked a generative AI about this. Here’s an edited version of our considerations.

1. It’s a form of seeing. When an artist is seeing from stillness and presence, their work tends to reveal simplicity, clarity, and a sense of “more-than-what’s-there,” It’s not “about” something — it reveals a way of seeing.

2. It’s a window rather than a statement. Contemplative art often feels like it opens a space instead of sending a message.

3. It often points beyond the personal. Not in a cold way — but in a way that feels impersonal in the best sense of the word, e.g. universal, archetypal.

4. Interior state matters. Thomas Merton said a painter can only paint what they have interiorly “received.”

5. The real point isn’t the artwork itself — it’s what it awakens in the viewer. Contemplative art isn’t an object. It’s a doorway. People often speak of being “stopped,” “stilled,” or “opened” by it.

From the recipient’s viewpoint, with an open and receptive mind one might experience the same qualities as experienced by the artist. Here is a painting I recently discovered by the Russian Nicholas Roerich. He titled it, Mother of the World (1924).

I was strongly attracted to it - a “doorway” into calmness, silence, peace and mystery. Might this had been Roerich’s experience as he received and painted? I was especially drawn to the veil that covers her eyes - for me the painting’s essence. It pulled me inward not only to the painting but also into myself.

I wonder why the veil? Was it transmitting a way of being unknown to the rational mind but nonetheless real? The answer, a veiled silence. What might others experience when gazing at The Mother of the World.