Art as Prayer

by Lauren Rader

Sometimes, when I’m painting, I notice that I am in a deep spiritual place. The movement of my strokes are in rhythm with the piece, my body is moving with the painting. My psyche is fully, but quietly engaged. It seems my soul itself has entered a state of bliss. It feels to me like praying.

Focusing on the dual concepts of art as prayer (or reverence), and the making of art as a way of praying, became the working concept for a project for the art classes I teach called ‘Releasing the Creative Powers Within’™.

My students come from a variety of religious and spiritual backgrounds, so we began by discussing our relationships to prayer. Sometimes, pressures to conform to conventional beliefs leave us estranged from our own spirituality. But in working with prayer in art, we are freed from what others think, and left with our own deep personal reflection. As for me, I am not a religious person, but I am a spiritual one. Art and prayer are entwined, exclusive of any kind of God, but I find it deep and satisfying.

Before beginning our own work we look at images of ritual prayer objects from a variety of faiths — Hindu prayer boxes; Tibetan Prayer Wheels; Jewish Mezuzzuhs; a Christian Chalice; Prayer carpets from the faith of Islam; Hindu, Buddhist and Eastern Orthodox prayer beads and ropes. They validate and inspire.

Finally, the art making. Laid out for the taking are a wealth of materials: wooden and cardboard boxes in various shapes and sizes; fabrics; hand-made papers; wire; clay; charms. Soulful music gently shifts us into the realm of reverence. We go at the materials with a quiet sense of joy.

The mood of working around the concept of reverence is itself a prayerful one. When we make art, we become the art we are making — it’s kind of a circle — we work on the art and the art works on us. Surprises occur — a box that is filled with jewels begins to spill out in an overflow. A lump of clay becomes a woman in prayer.

For Jaime, a mom who’s world has been turned upside down by the serious illness of her child, the idea of working around prayer is a challenging one. Her heretofore solid beliefs have been shaken to her core. Jaime eyes a wooden box and brings it to her workspace. But a little while later she laments that all she has done so far is paint it brown, over and over again — three times in fact — and, as she laughingly shares, it was brown in the first place!

Frustrated, she wonders aloud how she can find her way in. She gets up, surveys the materials and finds herself drawn to 3 cinnamon sticks. She places them on the top of her box. It feels right. She’s on her way. Jaime wraps the sticks in metallic threads, and adds smooth stones, wire work and copper to her box. She works with a sense of intent and sureness. Now, even from across the room, I can feel her lightness. The next day she writes to me “I completed my box this morning and am in love with it”. The prayer is in the work and the work is full of prayer.

Here is her box. You can feel the release and the joy.

We went further in our reflections on prayer to reflect on our hopes and wishes for the bigger world at large in our next projects. We took a look at the amazing Tibetan prayer flags, found hanging anywhere and everywhere in Tibet, from nomadic tents in the desert to crisscrossing mountaintops. These traditional flags do not carry prayers to a God per se, but instead are believed to carry their hopes as the wind passes over them, taking them to all corners of the earth.

For our ‘prayer flags’ we had cloth, stencils, paint, yarn, and lots of other materials available. We wrote about the changes we’d like to see in the world, then drawing a symbol next to each one. The symbols could be used in our flags if we wanted. Here are some of our prayer flags:

Finally, one last project around art as prayer. When all else fails: try a magic wand.