14 Dec 2013
Winking in Art
Russian artists in the early 20th century turned to the West to absorb the latest trends happening in Paris. That’s the conventional story. Yet, little known, at the same time they were also turning eastwards towards Siberia and Russia’s ori
15 Nov 2013
Can All in Art be One?
If new visitors to EPPH wonder how landscapes, still-lifes, portraits and scenes of battle can all have a single theme, think not whether the wide variety of art can really be a single subject but whether the proposed subject, a view of the soul
12 Nov 2013
Where on earth is the Kingdom of Heaven?
Occasionally, while studying art, I achieve a breakthrough quite unlike my normally slow and incremental progress. One of those moments was discovering that key words and phrases in the Bible and other esoteric texts intentionally mislead, allow
14 Oct 2013
The Error of Art History
Yesterday I wrote about how some errors make the world interesting and beautiful. This one does not.
Read the Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who rarely saw great art, and you will learn about it on every page because the truths
13 Oct 2013
Higgs Boson and Mistakes
So, not long after the discovery of the Higgs boson and half a century after they predicted its existence, Higgs and Englert win the Nobel Prize in Physics. I don't often relate to advances in science but this one's a biggie. Last year, on news
09 Oct 2013 | 1 Comments
Artist Crucified in his Studio
No-one you know thinks of themself as Christ which may be why most people find it so impossible to believe that artists do. My continual harping on this theme can sound like madness. One new reader, clearly dedicated to her Church, complained vo
25 Jul 2013
Is Kanye West a God?
Kanye West has a new song out, "I Am a God." Very few people can imagine Kanye West as a God. I can. EPPH has been arguing for years that important artists consider themselves God. This is not just, I believe, for delusions of grandeur (though n
26 Jun 2013 | 2 Comments
How Inner Christianity has changed in 40 years…
Carl McColman whose blog I have recommended before has just posted a video of a very interesting discussion about the development and growing popularity in recent years of Inner Christianity or what they call in the video "Contemplative Christia
11 May 2013
Emerson on Mind
When I started out I soon realized that every true work of art fulfilled the Renaissance saying that titles this site. EPPH, in short. Now, in more recent years, I have come to recognize that every artwork, like every church and temple from the
20 Apr 2013
Do you know what it means to come home?
Think differently. The old ways are often dull and didactic. Take, for instance, paintings and prints that seem to illustrate Bible stories. Why treat them as a narrative when mystical Christians, among whom must be counted many great Western ar
03 Apr 2013 | 3 Comments
Art as a Spiritual Guidebook
Some readers may wonder - not many, I hope - how and why I describe so many different figures in art, from the Middle Ages to Picasso, as yet another representation of the artist. It can seem repetitive and boring, even simplistic. Yet it is a b
20 Mar 2013 | 2 Comments
How Degas drew a top hat…
Art is so pregnant that even in a "simple" sketch like Degas' Edouard Manet at the Races (c. 1865) there is always something more. I thought I had drained the drawing when I finished writing about it yesterday (see entry). And, then, this m
16 Jan 2013 | 2 Comments
Sotheby’s Head Turner
Two years ago, shortly after I began this website, Christie's sold one of the most important Old Master paintings to come on the market for years: Poussin's Ordination from the collection of the Duke of Rutland. The auction house helped by Pouss
04 Nov 2012
Art and the Human Mind
Rumi was a mystical poet born in what is now Afghanistan in 1207 and died in 1273. The world has learnt little since about being human that Rumi did not already know and his ancestors long before him. Technology and science may be new and
29 Oct 2012 | 1 Comments
Andy Warhol: The Only Way Out is In!
Here for those familiar with the site is a late print by Andy Warhol. It provides the quotation of the week: "The only way out is in!"
10 Oct 2012 | 1 Comments
Art, Generalization and Sight
One of the keys to understanding art is generalization because many of the most creative artists donate their ideas not to contemporaries or to those in the generation afterwards, who might not even understand, but to other great artists centuri
20 Sep 2012
Mondrian’s Esoteric Interests
The spiritual and esoteric knowledge passed down in Western art from one generation to the next seems to remain constant regardless of which spiritual path the artist is interested in. There are dozens of possibilities, some more likely in one a
28 Aug 2012
Microbes & Man: The Essence of Art
Who we are, or rather who each artist was, is crucial to our understanding of art in ways that the literature on art rarely, if ever, addresses. Yet once the concept every painter paints himself is seen as central to understanding the artist&rsq
05 Jul 2012
Higgs boson and the Arts
The Higgs boson may have been found. The news today is circling the globe faster than the speed of light, attracting elementary fascination. Everyone has their own twist on its significance to them even those, like me, whose knowledge of science
31 May 2012
Francis Bacon on Portraits and Crosses
I’ve just been reading a series of essays on Francis Bacon and have come across two quotes that I must pass on. A young doctoral student had some long conversations with Bacon in 1975 in which Bacon was saying that when he looks at a great pai
03 May 2012
Art’s Tradition of Secrecy
Great poets are great poets because they have reached heights of spiritual understanding inaccessible to the crowd. The starting-point depends on the individual; some are born prophetic, others somewhere along the way. Those who begin at the bot
21 Apr 2012 | 2 Comments
Rembrandt and His Crucifixion (1631)
I can be very blind. Some time ago I added an analysis of Rembrandt’s Crucifixion in which I showed that Rembrandt had portrayed himself as Christ not out of delusions of grandeur but based on Christianity’s most fundamental principles
06 Mar 2012
Quotation of the Week 6
Plotinus' advice on how to see God is equally, or you might think even more, true about art:
‘For one must come to the sight with a seeing power made akin and like to what is seen. No eye
09 Feb 2012
The Artist as Creative God
The idea within esoteric Christianity that God is our innermost self, the universal self that we all share, has inspired many Western artists over the centuries to depict themselves as God in the process of creation. The ceiling of the Sistine C
30 Dec 2011
Carpaccio’s Dragon’s Blood
Carpaccio’s remarkable series of wall decorations on the saga of St. George in a small Venetian scuola captured my attention twelve years ago, at the start of my own quixotic quest to convince the art world that the subject of true art is
16 Dec 2011
Importance of Interpretation
People use this site to help develop their ability to interpret works of art and thereby increase their aesthetic satisfaction. To look at art without trying to interpret it leaves you looking at a pretty picture, little more. Certainly the brus
05 Dec 2011
Urinary Colors
Perhaps Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, a photo of a crucifix in a bottle of his own urine, is not so unusual after all. I’ve just learnt that the red dyes used for high-status textiles in the Middle Ages (ecclesiastical, regal etc.)&n
04 Dec 2011
Interpretation and Art
Gnosticism was a word coined in the seventeenth century to encompass those early Christian traditions that did not take Jesus’ words at face value and were often deemed heretical by the establishment Church. Many early Christians searched
21 Nov 2011
Is this someone’s idea of a joke?
Today I’m posting a cartoon from 2008 which I find quite surprising. The artist clearly felt that an esoteric idea we talk a lot about here - that God is not in heaven but in our minds - is widely enough known that he could make a joke abo
03 Oct 2011
Being in the Image and Text
In many religious images on this site I have shown how the artist both illustrates their effort to unite with God and their own difficulties in creating the image itself. Paul Jay, a literary critic, found something similar in St. Augustine Conf
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