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the Frater's Mark
It was Francis Bacon who gave us the truism: "The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery." But we can't forget two other sentiments that fill out the "Paganized" concept of art: the words of Jackson Pollock - "Every good painter paints what he is." - and Thomas Eakins - "The big artist...keeps an eye on nature and steals her tools." One of man's most primal creative urges is to produce art - look at the cave drawings at Lascaux or the sculptures of Willendorf or the birth and death and countless rebirths of the Green Man and Sheela-na-Gig - as art is a form of manifested magick, a touching of the divine, an expression in a fertile, imaginative way, of the workings, both obvious and subtle, of the various wavelengths of the lifeforce that ties all together. Symbols take form, sigils assimilate meaning, thoughts emerge in a medium that is accessible by all - all written language, including mathematics, is art as much as every painting hanging in the Louvre and every sepulcher in the cemetery. The width of life, the breadth of death and every passionate element in-between, abstract, realistic or fantastic, can be expressed through art - nothing more fully realizes the Qabalistic axiom that three things are needed for magickal change: force (the will to produce art), form (choosing the proper medium of art) and consciousness (the defining intellectual/spirtual aspects of art). And with art, as in High Magick (and, arguably, quantum physics), both the artist and those who gaze upon his or her art are changed in the process. The artist illuminates the world; the magickal mysteries intensify. It is a wondrous, freeing conundrum, a delightful virtue of the human spiritual condition.
And the best kind of art is the art that makes us think, that we have to look at once to take in its beauty and then look at again, frequently in more than one way, to fully comprehend its core message, if that's even possible in a completest sense. Artists like Dali and Moreau with his occult palate, and Klimt with his themes in geometric gilt and Bocklin and von Stuck and Fuseli and Schwabe and Goya with their honest realism in the face of the psyche's dark corners and Blake and Hitchcock with their mystical incitements and Nielsen and Rackham with their gift for true myth and fancy. And many artists, young and old and a few that have passed into the Summerland before their work's value was wholly realized, carry on this tradition in a Pagan sense. Below are a few of the most noteworthy with a handful of bonus sites for your enjoyment. My closing words are from Van Gogh: "It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to; the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures."
Susan Seddon-Boulet
The Goddess Paintings
The Zodiac Paintings and some of Her Shaman Paintings
Spirals - The Art of Deborah Holman
Art Magick - "Your Source of Visual Intoxication!" - A cornucopia of Waterhouse, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Frampton, Leighton, Crane - the list goes on and on. This site is truly amazing.
Magickal Moon - An excellent selection of new Pagan artists and sites that feature works old, new, esoteric, pragmatic, saturnine, celestial, et al.
A. O. Spare - A superb selection from the father of sigil magick, including two of his sketchbooks, "The Focus of Life" and "The Book of Satyrs" complete and the article "Automatic Drawing" with it's original illustrations
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