Art

Religious Art Without Either

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My own experiments in surrealist art and how art connects with spirituality have graced a few of these pages. Until I started doing my own art I hadn’t given much consideration to art and spirituality – as most of my interest was written work and meditations. Some art inspired me and I did find “project plan” type diagrams like The Six Realms useful, but I hadn’t thought of it until my own work.

But as I started doing art I started viscerally appreciating the power of art and spirituality. I appreciated my own inspirations much better, as I got them. There’s something powerful about art, bridging all those gaps between feelings and ideas, going where words cannot. The hyperdetailed art of the Six Realms of Buddhism, awe-inspiring pictures of gods, hilarious art of the Eight Immortals – all of those can be rationally analyzed and felt.

Just as spirituality connects things together so does art. No wonder they go together – and are really inseparable.

Which is what brings me to religiously kitschy art. You know the kind, the stuff that is standard, pandering, sometimes pseudo-realistic, and where the message is extremely obvious. The kind of stuff that Queen Coke Francis mocked in one of her videos (also she’s just hilarious and here makeup is on point).

Kitschy religious art kind of fascinates me. It feels dead to me. It’s message is obvious, sometimes in the title or spelled out. The look is often cartoony but without that “edge” where the style brings a benefit of inspiration or feeling, or so realistic it might have well been a photo. The kind of stuff AI churns out because so many people churned it out. I mean I’m talking still work, but I suppose it applies to media like TV.

I always wondered why people would enjoy this art because there’s nothing there. There’s no inspiration to it, nothing to fire you up or inspire you. There’s nothing stylized, no edge to the art to catch on your mind and make you think. It’s just so simple . . .

. . . and then I realized that’s the point.


Kitschy religious art is not about helping you feel or get inspired or go deeper.. It’s about reinforcing what you’re supposed to feel and what others want you to think and feel. In most cases I think about signaling, showing who you are and what you think, it’s not there to help you you think anything deeper.

Which is the point.

In fact, this”art” has to be short of any detail, any extra, any edge. If you take any liberties, get a bit stylish, etc. you risk inspiring people. Anything playful, any attempts to be really artsy risks getting people to feel something, to speculate, to feel something. Kitschy religious art has to avoid any risk because for all you know it might actually do something for you. No wonder so much of it is simple.

Of course this leads me to wonder how kitsch can be used to conceal inspiration or how one might inspire people to put a bit more into their kitsch that may produce deeper thoughts . . .

–Xenofact

Art And Spirituality

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Last column I wrote about how my experiments with art parodying spiritual bullshit and grifty scams had been intriguing.  I understood how art was part of human spirituality,  how it our love of beauty and form and such was a way to powerfully communicate deep experiences.  This made me realize it was time to explore something I’ve been trying to put into words about art and spirituality – my parodic work helped me talk serious stuff, go figure.

Simply put, I think art is inseparable from spirituality as art is the bridge that connects us to the Universe, the Tao, The Big Picture, because it connects to our thoughts and emotions.

The universe is vast and complex, our world is complex, our lives complex – even one person is complex. We’re here trying to understand reality, move within it, live within it – but it’s so big. This is why I like the term “The Tao,” which is essentially “the source of all this and no we can’t really speak of it.”

I’m honest on my biases. But let me go on.

Now we humans, we may be small, but we are aware of how huge everything is. We model the universe, we understand it, we analyze it. To work with it, with each other, to survive, grow, explore, or even just goof off, we have to find ways to handle this great Giant Allness. Philosophy and religion and spirituality are ways to organize and naviate this world and live inside it. Obviously some philosophies and religions don’t work out that well, but you get the idea – a bad plan is still a plan.

How do you connect us to our philosophies and meditations and spells and the greater universe? Well, humans have art. Art is where thought and emotion and sensation all come together, where a single picture or image can lead us to the bigness out there. Art is connection

Art is the bridge between us and The Big Picture, the way we line everything up to really think and feel and experience the greater world. From lovely philosophical writings to complex spiritual charts, awe-inspiring gods and gorgeous meditation hangings, those symmetries and poetries help us connect.  Those synergies of emotion and word and sensation come together and we get something larger than us in a way we can handle.

Art both focuses us and helps us get bigger.

In fact, isn’t most of religion and spirituality really art in the end? Temples and diagrams, pithy advice books and statues of the gods? It’s trying to synthesize infinity and vastness in some way you can work with it, get it, think it, and feel it.

The vast powers of the world are easily understood and appreciated and interacted with in the form of a god. You want to understand the states of existence, but the diagram of the Six Realms makes it easier (and hey, six is a manageable number). We drape art over the universe to make it both comprehensible – and to take us soaring into realms greater than ourselves.

Art, that love of form and color and combination, is the perfect tool to connect us to the universe in all its vast living potential.

I think I managed to sum up my feelings. I’m sure I’ll have more to say, but at least I said it – dare I say, made some art of it.

-Xenofact

The Map Isn’t The Territory But It Is Art

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For those of you familiar with my art work, you know I love surrealism and I love mashup work. Re-purposing art, finding combinations, and following my inspiration to create strange yet somehow insightful work. There’s a spiritual element to it as I’ve written about before, this kind of art seems to open a connection to something deeper, to part of the real me.

One of the things I’ve gotten into lately (early 2025) is creating “spiritual maps” using my surrealist mashup approach. You know those kind of things, attempts to portray cosmology or ethics or meditation as some kind of chart, or map, or other visual aid? We’ve all seen them, ranging from breathtaking creation to confusing charts that leave us feeling less enlightened (or possibly ripped off).

Well, I make parodies of them, with ideas of “Reincarnation Shards” or the “Primordial Historical Omniworld.” Complex diagrams (using repurposed art) and strange terminology that look like what you’d expect, but are mostly nonsense.

There’s something compelling about these “Spiritual Maps.” Creating my own surreal, parodic ones is both creatively stimulating, but compelling. I have multiple books on religion and alchemy, some of which (like Taschen’s Alchemy and Mysticism) are JUST metaphysical diagrams – and those are incredible to look through. Humans like taking the ineffable and putting it into lines and colors and shapes – even if our goal is to just sell some crappy book on the mystical.

(Honestly, some spiritual grifters are probably at least having FUN when they create their bullshit).

And while doing my work, I have come to understand something about the human mind. We humans do love visual portrayals of things. We love the symmetry and the detail, we love the use of colors and shapes. When that thing is spiritual, there’s something even more to it, that sense of a piece of art that takes us to something bigger.

In the classic “The Tao That Can Be Spoken Isn’t The True Tao” I know we can’t portray the truth on maps. Maps are just that, they’re not the territory, they’re not reality. A map is at best a guide or an inspiration – but those art important. More importantly, they’re inspiring when they’re ART.

A spiritual map that’s a few lines might not be inspiring (I Ching aside). But when a spiritual map is artistic, if it has those colors and lines and extras and details that inspire, then it’s exceptionally powerful. Art, in it’s forms, is critical to spirituality as it helps us connect thought, emotions, and the universe together. A good spiritual map that is also art can be amazingly effective – as long as we don’t take it too seriously.

When I make these parody maps I find it compelling even when I know it’s nonsense. I get why they can be addictive and compelling.

It’s funny, having started doing some surreal parody of ridiculous and graffiti spirituality, I find myself having these deep insights. The maps matter to us as long as we “grasp them little,” and I can see how powerful they are – all while basically messing around.

Art and spirituality aren’t far apart, no matter the kind. Which I may address next column.

-Xenofact