Artists & spirituality

Yesterday I spent a profitable half-hour at the Marcus Campbell art bookshop where I found catalogues about Michael Cullimore, Bella Brisel P. J. Crook, Lynn Dennison, and Folake Shoga, all artists with an interest in spirituality.

Clive Adams was one of those who hosted the exhibition 'I am awake in the universe', of which I purchased the catalogue yesterday. He writes that, "Michael Cullimore is belatedly becoming recognised as one of our most significant contemporary artists; a man of passion and intellect in the tradition of such visionaries as William Blake and David Jones." John Russell Taylor, writing in The Saturday Times, has noted that 'Cullimore has always had an odd and individual way of looking at things; he is a homegrown Symbolist, excited by the way that signs and portents and unexpected allusions seem to be half hidden in every shape of hill and valley, and finds magic and mystery in the most commonplace objects.....'

Born in Jerusalem, Bella Brisel studied art in Tel Aviv and Paris. She participated in various salons, biennales and group shows in France and other countries and had one-woman exhibitions in Paris, London, New York, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Osaka, Lausanne, and Lille. She is known for her her mystical human figures of mothers and children, intertwined and interconnected.

In Reclaiming the Madonna P.J. Crook writes that many of her paintings have a religious subtext giving the example of 'The Apprentice' where she is looking at "both craftsmen who have worked for me and Christ as creator." Lynn Dennison writes that: "I use religious imagery to celebrate and explain my life. In my larger paintings I often use a large central image, usually of myself, surrounded by tokens of my family and friends, in the style of a religious icon." Folake Shoga writes that as "a sometime convert to Catholicism", she is "more familiar with the imagery of it than the dogma." She writes about the poetry of the Ave Maria being "informed by an appreciation of the physical power of female reproductive capacity ..."

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Carleen Anderson - Mama Said.