Painting and spiritual integration

On goal in life, where we find our security and our life´s meaning, our spiritual tradition and what we pursue within it, all this has an effect on how we are integrated.

Life is a process of trying to find security and meaning. Mostly we take refuge in things that cause suffering, though we all look for happiness.

Painting has always – starting from childhood – has a part in all the things I have taken refuge in. My desires, my worldview, my goals – also the ones I have hidden from myself – have all been part of this taking refuge in painting and have driven it forward.

On the road towards integration, painting has made a release from a separate self possible through merging, but only for a moment. This integration is on a superficial level and turns into a compulsion, an enforced journey that leads me deeper and deeper into subconscious worlds. It attracts conflicting forces, energies I cannot control, let alone integrate in any depth.

Now I am also certain that if painting is connected with selfish aspirations, with a desire for fame and power, greed and craving, anger and hate, it is possible for it lead into great depths and brilliant paintings – but the activated forces will also destroy the painter.

Luckily one does not always succeed in what one craves and wants. There is failure, loss, suffering. These make possible a moment of insight, an insight about oneself. They give a chance to stop and to act creatively.

It has slowly begun to dawn on me that painting, while it is central to my aspirations, must contain an opening through which I can look deeper into the unknown. In this opening resides the spiritual ideal and through this opening flow ethics and spiritual practice. This unknown I want to integrate myself with. This spiritual integration I want to practise in my painting.

In practice, this means painting in a way that makes me face my conflicting sides. I become familiar with them and direct them towards one spiritual goal. I make my whole life into a mandala in which spiritual commitment is at the centre ans I channel everything in my life toward that goal. In this way painting also becomes positively integrating. It becomes a road to individuality.

The activated forces are not destructive anymore, they are helpful. There are many spiritual practices. If they are genuine, they lead towards spiritual integration. I personally do not know whether I will ever reach my ideal, nor do I know when I shall paint my last painting. But I know that I want to bring my ideal and my painting together.

I try not to forget my moments of insight and I try to carry on painting. Because painting and where it has brought me has given the Good a chance to express itself to me personally. And with this I must stay.

Henry Wuorila-Stenberg

Contribution to a panel discussion at Valamo, 29th November 1997
translated by Jukka Nuutilainen and Pirkko-Liisa Key