It’s odd how ideas come to you. This bit of the discussion fell into place looking at ducks on the Leeds-Liverpool canal. Make of that what you will.
I don’t think that matters are helped by the term “spiritual artist” (instead of “religious” or “Christian” artist). In fact, I find it less acceptable, for several reasons. It is ambiguous, for a start. Does “spiritual” refer to the art, or the artist? Would the description “spiritual” be justified in my case because of something about my art, or something about me? If the word “spiritual” applied to me means that I am a person with a refined or developed sense of the spiritual, then it would certainly not be justified, for reasons that I hope will become apparent in due course. If, on the other hand, “spiritual” refers to some characteristic of my art, then it is not clear to me just what it is that might justify using the word, so that I could be called a “spiritual artist”.
It is often said that art in general is spiritual, but if that is so (and I’m not sure that it is: see below) to single out me as a “spiritual artist” would be redundant.
I don’t like the epithet “spiritual”, in this context, for another reason. It seems to hark back to an old, pre-Christian, Greek idea, associated in particular, I believe, with Plato. This maintains that human beings are composed of two elements, the body and the spirit. The ideal form of a human being is the spirit, and this spirit finds itself unfortunately tangled up with a set of messy, accidental, earthy characteristics. The spirit is higher, purer, eternal and altogether more worthy than the body, which is our lower nature. This is the corruptible, temporary and relatively worthless case in which the spirit is unfortunately compelled to dwell.
Although this way of thinking has been taken very often into Christianity, I don’t think that it is actually necessary to the Christian faith. Perhaps more about that later.
Meanwhile, however, it sits very uncomfortably with my experience as an artist. There is a view of art as an essentially spiritual activity, so that it might appear that the body of the artist is merely “channelling” the spirit in some sense. Art happens, in this view, when the spiritual bit of our humanity somehow manages to break through and shake itself relatively free of our lower nature. Artistic “talent” is seen as a kind of hyper-endowment of spirit, so that the normal body is no longer capable of containing it and muzzling it. Artistic creativity is, on the contrary, a profoundly and necessarily corporeal, sensory activity. (Apart from anything else, it is always hard work. I get immensely irritated by people who say, when they discover that I’m am artist, “How nice! It must be very relaxing.” Grrrrr!) It doesn’t make sense to me at all, as an artist, to counterpose the bodily and the spiritual.
I do use the term “spiritual”, but in the sense that it refers to the totality of a person. But that is hardly helpful when one is trying to identify an artist. So let’s get that one out of the way. No: I don’t look at myself as a specifically “spiritual” artist.
What, then?