Art History & Theory

Theory, history and philosophy of Sacred Art from prehistory to the present.

Latest Addition posted November 12, 2023

Red K Elders Interview

Daniel Mirante

Red K Elders has honoured us with her time and energy to give an interview into the nature of her skillful, potent and aesthetic imagery that invokes powerful principle archetypes, energies and entities of pan-European and Mediterranean mythologies. We hope dear reader you will enjoy this conversation which seeks to explore deep into the practice of this remarkable artist.

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An Introduction to Ernst Fuchs

Ernst Fuchs was an extraordinarily talented and multifaceted Austrian artist born on February 13, 1930. He was a master of several mediums including painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture, and he also ventured into architecture, stage designing, poetry, and singing. Fuchs was a pivotal figure in the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, a movement he co-founded. His legacy places him as one of the pivotal founders of contemporary visionary art and one of the great preservers and reinvigorators of the timeless legacy of sacred art.


Added on September 9, 2023

 

The Subcreation Theory of J.R.R. Tolkien

A discussion delving deep into J.R.R Tolkiens’ personal philosophy of the creative process- ‘subcreation’ and how it was informed by his spirituality.


Added on February 1, 2023

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Goddess of the Jewelled Web – The Transmission of the Transpersonal in Visionary Art

Art striving for an existential veracity or ‘truth’ will be put upon a difficult and confusing road, forking and branching pathways; between on one hand positivist and nominalist systems tending toward rationality (as in ‘ratio’, to measure), and on the other extreme something akin to pure aesthetics, decor, and the enjoyment of a sensoric object. What we wish to seek here is a deeper meaning for the Arts which put Sacred Art upon a respectable and integral foundation.


Added on September 6, 2021

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Yearning, Sorrow & Desire – The Capriccio of Monsu Desiderio and Descendents

Ruins hold an enigma for artists concerned with the psycho-archeology of culture. Capricci is a yearning for the archaic, it is also a kind of solace for the broken-hearted who feel they are born to times where the ruins are not physical, but symbolic.


Added on July 20, 2021

 

Thomas Cole’s The Course Of Empire (in his own words)

Thomas Cole’s importance and influence as an American artist exploded during the mid‐​1830s and his career flourished in the early 1840s. He deeply influenced his immediate peers and successive generations of American artists. He transformed the landscape genre from a reflective art to a medium of expressing historical, social, and political theory.


Added on July 18, 2021

 

Psychedelia & Visionary Art

This essay investigates the poetics of visionary art as a result of interactions between local cultures and non-ordinary states of consciousness. We seek, through brief examples, to draw a parallel between images produced in the past, images produced by Amazonian tribes, and the production of contemporary artists and to point out series of
meaningful coincidences between them.


Added on April 6, 2021

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Remaking Cultural Sense – The Symbolist World of Peladan

Symbolism is a forerunner of contemporary visionary art. It prefigures the transformation from classical and traditional premodern forms into a more dynamic, idiosyncratic personal vision. It is with great pleasure that Era Of Visions can share this original interview with Sasha Chaitow, who generously shared her expertise. Sasha is a contemporary scholar of the Symbolist Movement, who has focussed her research on the enigmatic, influential figure known as Peladan.


Added on March 13, 2021

 

Psychedelic-Visionary Art: Possible Kitch Incursions?

This paper aims to make a brief reflection on kitsch and psychedelic-visionary artistic production. The words psychedelic-visionary here are being used together representing the same concept.


Added on January 30, 2021

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Peresvet, Oslyabya, Divine Gloom

The key to understanding the symbolism of the painting’s composition is found in the interpretations of the “Mystical Theology” of Saint Dionysius the Areopagite. As you maybe aware, the most Luminous Darkness, of the Divine Gloom is a theological term from the Orthodox Apophatic theology, which is based on the” negative” way of perception on it’s way of the search for the Ultimate truth through the denial of everything that which is not It.


Added on January 23, 2021

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Gustave Moreau’s “Archeological Allegory”

Against the supposed claims of such work to historical authenticity, Moreau formulated a principle of “archeological allegory,” which entailed the use of archeological source material in highly eccentric, deliberately anachronistic ways in his compositions.


Added on December 7, 2020

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H. R. Giger and the Zeitgeist of the Twentieth Century

A penetrating and groundbreaking analysis of the biomechanical, transhuman, mystical and perinatal imagery in the artistic oeuvre of Han Rudi Giger.


Added on November 21, 2020

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Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal

A seminal text introducing the terms Imaginal and Mundus Imaginalis, and their distinction from the merely imaginary or utopian.


Added on November 12, 2020

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To See a World: Art and the I of the Beholder

Like huge successive waves crashing ashore, worldviews succeed one another, and the avant-garde, at its best, were the great surfers of these waves. And now that the postmodem wave is washing on the shore of its own demise, what new waves are forthcoming? What new worldviews surge from the ocean of the soul to announce a new perception?


Added on October 31, 2020

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On Visionary Art

The Visionary lineage predates religion, and has informed sacred art across the millennia. The Visionary artist is the eternal poet – ‘ein verschollener Stil’ is the grammar through which they speak. The lineage from these founding fathers is subtle but true. From the shaman’s etchings, this artistic spirit continues into the carvings of the ancients.


Added on October 19, 2020

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Principles and Criteria of Art

Man by his theomorphism is at the same time a work of art and also an artist; a work of art because he is an “image”, and an artist because this image is that of the Divine Artist.


Added on May 17, 2020

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The Universality of Sacred Art

It must be borne in mind that a sacred symbol is not merely a conventional sign; it manifests its archetype by virtue of a certain ontological law. As Ananda Coomaraswamy has observed, a sacred symbol is, in a sense, that which it expresses. For this very reason, traditional symbolism is never devoid of beauty.


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The New Eye – Visionary Art and Tradition

The historical lineage of visionary artists masks a deeper and more commanding claim that sets the genre apart from the marvelous idiosyncrasies of outsider art. The claim is that the visionary artist gives personal expression to a transpersonal dimension, a cosmic plane that uncovers the nature that lies beyond naturalism, and that reveals, not an individual imagination, but an imaginal world, a mundus imaginalis.


Added on April 19, 2020

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The Man With The Golden Coin

Oleg Korolev, magical realism painter, takes us on a journey through the past 150 years of art history and development, exploring the tensions between modernism and the traditional and sacred.


Added on November 2, 2019

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