The Power of Shamanic Art

 

My friend Denita is an artist, teacher, and psychologist who specializes in helping others access their deep creativity.  She wrote this article for  AY Atelier Art  and Art 4 All People, and gave me permission to reprint her article here.  You can have a look at her  art as well  here.   All  artworks in this article are copyright Denita Benyshek.

Shamans were the first
Einsteins, bicyclists, and blue ribbon apple pie bakers. 

Shamans receive their calling from blackberries and
commune with disembodied spirits through apples.

Shamans journey to the spirit world and bring back moon rocks, 

postcards of the Eiffel Tower, and empty bottles of tequila. 

Shamans work for the benefit of their communities,
plug in their electric guitars and collect the garbage.  

During times of disbelief or persecution,
shamans secretly do their work standing
in lines, in banks, in grocery stores,
along the branches of family trees. 

When you are waiting for your turn at the high dive,
there is always a shaman somewhere in line behind you, 

beating a drum,
beating a drum.

Denita M. Benyshek,   © March 1, 2010

Art: http://www.denitabenyshek.com

The Transformative Power of Shamanic Art 

by Denita Benyshek, PhD

Several years ago, I participated in a shamanic drum ceremony given by the anthropologist, Dr. Ruth-Inge Heinze. Her powerful, sustained drumming gave me a vivid, astounding, and meaningful series of visions. The progression of the visions and the symbolic conent of the visions were similar to what I experienced during artistic creativity. As I learned more about the calling, training, initiation, and practices of shamans, I recognized more and more similarities to my own artistic way of being. In shamanism, I found a model of how and why I make art.
Although I am formally trained as an artist (with both a BFA and an MFA in painting), I was so fascinated by the multiple relationships between artists and shamans, including the intent to heal, that I pursued a graduate certificate in the psychology of creativity, a masters degree in marriage and family therapy, and then a doctoral degree in humanistic and transpersonal psychology.

What is a Shamanic Artist?

My research (Benyshek, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c, 2013d) demonstrated how contemporary artists serve as shamans. Shamanic artists are socially designated spiritual practitioners who voluntarily regulate their attention for the purpose of obtaining information generally unavailable to their community, which is used for the benefit of communities and individual members of those communities.  All of these properties must be fulfilled for an artist to fully qualify as a shaman.

Artists might have some, but not all, of the shamanic properties. These artists can be thought of as having family resemblances to shamans. Like sisters who resemble their mother in certain ways, some artists are similar to, and also different than, shamans.

There are many different ways in which artists fulfill shamanic properties, such as dreams, prayer, ritual, purported psi experiences including divination and relationships with spirits, interaction with the Zeitgeist, genetic influences, neurological functions,  personality types, androgyny, learning to see, mastering craft, a symbolic kind of dismemberment and disintegration that is followed by reintegration and rebirth, relationships with nature, alternate states of consciousness, intent to heal, and much more! If you want additional information about artists and shamans, you may read some of my publications online.

For myself, formally studying artists as shamans confirmed my way of creating art and provided meaningful support. The model of shamanism “understood” how my psi experiences and dreams relate to my artistic creativity, how many ways of being and many realms and different times and memories and insights and immediacies are integrated into one work of art. In my paintings, poems, and performances, I represent a kind of visual/mythic/symbolic stream of consciousness, those seemingly disparate elements that are intimately associated in the imagination. I realized that I could perform my work, whether making art or conducting research, as a spiritual practice for the purpose of providing beauty, knowledge, meaning, and healing.

The Benefits of Art: 
Have You Taken Your Dose of Art Today?

Contemporary artists are most likely to fulfill the shamanic property related to providing benefits to their communities. These benefits are found in statements made by many artists as well as studies on the benefits provided by the arts. Art can provide for psychological, social, physiological, and/or spiritual needs of individuals and communities.
There are many studies showing positive effects result from art engagement.

The visual arts can provide topics for conversation that strengthen relationships and form community (see Wikström, Theorell, and Sandström, 1992). Novels like Black Beauty (Sewell, 1907), Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe, 1852), and The Heroic Slave (Douglass, 1853/1975) contributed to major social changes. Artists today work to create beauty amidst despair, provide spiritual experiences to a materialistic society, build bridges between different ethnicities, help folks form deeper relationships with their own souls, and much more.

An artwork can provide a screen onto which an individual can project internal conflicts or emotions, safely experiencing dissociated emotions in an externalized form, for a limited time, within a beautiful container. Ecstatic catharsis can result, with greater insight resulting, and then these insights can be intergrated into an individual’s sense of self.

Listening to music resulted in surgical patients needing less anesthesia (Ayoub, Rizk, Yaacoub, Gaal, & Kain, 2005), reduced pain, anxiety, depression (Guétin et al., 2011), lowered heart rate and blood pressure in cardiology patients (Bradt, 2009), decreased anxiety from pressures to excel in gifted students (Cadwallader & Campbell, 2007),  positively effected intelligence, mental health, and immunity (Avanzini et al., 2006), and improved fluency, ease of movement, and levels of antibodies, while also decreasing levels of stress hormones in people with Parkinson disease (Enk, 2008).

When surgeons listen to their favorite music during surgery, their surgical skills improve. For two weeks, seniors listened to music from their youth. At the end of that time, they stood straighter, grew in height, were happier, and had improved physical signs of health. Amazing!
At a certain neurological level, the brains of people reading novels respond to stories as though the readers were really, physically part of the story. In the mind of the reader, fiction becomes reality. Is this a form of magic?

During receipt of benefits from spiritual, healing art, art audiences are partly functioning as shamanistic (shamanlike) communities. A contemporary audience might not label individual artists as shamans. Nonetheless, when an art audience receives benefits from a work of art, the work’s artist is implicitly designated as a shaman.

When an individual is engaged with art (as an artist, member of the audience, or collector), art can evoke memories, make new connections, heighten awareness, discharge repressed emotions, halt patterns of repression, lead to self-discovery, create empathy with individuals or cultures, remind society of social ills needing attention, and lead to individual and societal healing.


Audience members utilize their own creative processes during art engagement. The efficacy of shamanic art is quite dependent upon the talents (inborn) and skills (learned and developed) of individual art audience members. I believe that audience members and collectors will benefit even more from art as they learn how to invite, engage, undergo, and accept the transformative benefits offered by art.

The Role of Art Collectors

Art collectors play a critical role in the artist-artwork-audience-society system, providing a type of social support and acceptance to shamanic, healing artists that is unavailable elsewhere. Collectors give themselves opportunities to develop deeper  ongoing relationships with works of art, through repeated encounters and a prolonged, appreciative gaze. The artist has thrown the ball. The collector catches the ball. Both roles are important!

I’ve always found it fascinating that whenever I meet someone who owns my art, we are immediately elated and enjoy a deep sense of connection. It is a special relationship that continues no matter how far apart we are. Collectors purchase art that is personally expressive of who they are. Thus, my collectors and I have some quality, experience, memory, dream, some phenomena in common. Somewhere in the Venn diagram of spirituality, our souls overlap and unite.

Surrounding one’s self with art can strengthen one’s self knowledge and contribute to self actualization. Buying art is an unabashed act of personal strength, expressing individuality and freedom: This is what I like. This is what I choose to live with every day. This is who I am!

                                   

Sources of Inspiration, Doorways to Soul

If I find myself mentally thinking of some tune, I begin whistling or singing that tune, to bring it further out into the physical, sensate world. Moving my body with the tune strengthens the kind and level of integration with self. Sometimes such movements feed ideas for my works of art.  In my studio, I listen to music to establish mood, sustain creative flow, and facilitate entry into light creative trance. Listening to Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro over and over and over supported me in making art that was profoundly personal, feminine, honest, strong, and caring. I also learned all of their songs and can sing every word of their lyrics, copying the singer’s inflections and expressions. But, when I play piano and sing Joni Mitchell’s songs, or sing Laura Nyro a cappella as a birthday gift for a friend, I offer my own interpretations and the songs are transformed into different shapes and colors.

When I was at the Ucross Art Foundation in Wyoming, I decided to paint spontaneously. Yet, while working on the oil painting, Woman and Man: The Human Animal, I realized I had dreamt about this painting – and my studio at the Ucross Foundation – months before I arrived. In the realm of dreams, I already knew what the art studio looked like.

In the graphite drawing, Prelude to Confluence, multiple sources of inspiration are present: wilderness and culture, male and female, growth and harvest, dream and fulfillment. Shamanically, I am bringing together phenomena considered opposite. In my drawing, the opposites dance in a conjunctio oppositorum, making love and creating beauty.   The large collage, Sonata in Joy Major, was created in response to works made by other artists that were dark, desultory, destructive, aggressive, or victimized. I wanted to make a work of art that was enlivened by color, movement, nature, that would give viewers a sense of joy. The watercolor Thanks Giving is a quiet and mystical celebration of the natural qualities of fecundity, pregnancy, possibility, birth, growth, and fruition. The Sacred Ladder of Light, engraved and collaged glass with embroidery, celebrates the spiritual, creative power of women.

My paintings can be seen as acts of celebration, wisdom, insight, and healing self-expression that are also intended to move and heal viewers, communities, and society, even relationships with nature. Many works, such as the drawing Beginning of a Long Journey, depict the journey of individuation or stages in the hero’s journey.

Invitation

I invite you to slow down and linger, gaze meditatively at my artwork. You can  discover your source of inspiration within the reality of my artwork. Enter through the painted door, cross the collaged threshold into a living realm of beauty, meaning, knowledge, experience, and reality of self, where you can meet your self and embrace your soul.

Many blessings,

Dr. Denita M. Benyshek
January 19, 2013, Snoqualmie Valley,
Washington

Biography

Dr. Denita Benyshek is a professional visionary artist, an internationally recognized researcher on contemporary artists as shamans, and a psychologist who provides psychotherapy and coaching services to artists and creative individuals. The artist-researcher-healer’s education includes a BFA and MFA in painting, training in dance and theatre, study at Pilchuck Glass School, a graduate certificate in the psychology of creativity, an MA in psychology – marriage and family therapy, and a Ph.D. in humanistic and transpersonal psychology.  
Dr. Benyshek’s conference presentations integrate scholarship, visual art, poetry, dance, and theatre. Articles, chapters, and PowerPoint presentations by Dr. Benyshek can be read and downloaded online.  

A recent study (Cardeña, Iribas-Rudin, & Reijman, 2012) entitled “Art and Psi,” published in The Journal of Parapsychology, described some of Dr. Benyshek’s precognitive and remote viewing experiences as part of the discussion about artists and paranormal phenomena.

  © 2013, Denita Benyshek

Psychotherapy:http://www.denitabenyshekphd.com

Research: http://saybrook.academia.edu/DenitaBenyshekPhDMFA

Art: http://www.denitabenyshek.com
References:

Avanzini, G., Besta, C., Lopez, L., Litta, E., Koelsch, S., & Majno, M. (Eds.). (2006). The neurosciences and music II: From perception to performance (Vol. II). New York, NY: New York Academy of Sciences.
Ayoub, C. M., Rizk, L. B., Yaacoub, C. I., Gaal, D., & Kain, Z. N. (2005). Music and ambient operating room noise in patients undergoing spinal anesthesia. Anesthesia and analgesia, 5, 1316-1319.
Benyshek, D. (2013a). An archival exploration comparing contemporary artists and shamans. PhD, Saybrook University, San Francisco, CA.
Benyshek, D. (2013b). Art audience as shamanic community: How art meets psychological, social, and spiritual needs (Wang, Trans.). In G. Shuyun, W. Weibo & Q. Fang (Eds.), Modern artists and shamanism (Vol. II of Encyclopedia of shamanism). Beijing: 商務印書館 (The Commercial Press). Retrieved from Art Audience as Shamanic Community: How Art Meets Psychological Needs.
Benyshek, D. (2013c). An Overview of Western Ideas regarding the Artist as Shaman (Wang, Trans.). In G. Shuyun, W. Weibo & Q. Fang (Eds.), Modern artists and shamanism (Vol. II of Encyclopedia of shamanism). Beijing: 商務印書館 (The Commercial Press).
Benyshek, D. (2013d). The artist as shaman. ReVision, a Journal of Consciousness and Transformation, 32(2), 54-60.
Bradt, J. A. (2009). Music for stress and anxiety reduction in coronary heart disease patients Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (Vol. 2). New York, NY: John Wiley.
Cadwallader, S., & Campbell, J. (2007). Gifted students beat the blues with heavy metal. Coventry, England: University of Warwick.
Cardeña , E., Iribas-Rudin, A., & Reijman, S. (2012). Art and psi. Journal of Parapsychology, 76(1), 3-23.
Douglass, F. H. (1879). The heroic slave. In J. Griffiths (Ed.), Autographs for freedom. Boston, MA: John P. Jewett
Enk, R., Franzke, P., Offermanns, K., Hohenadel, M., & Koelsch, S. (2008). Music and the immune system. Paper presented at the meeting of the 14th World Congress of Psychophysiology – The Olympics of the Brain, St. Petersburg, Russia. Retrieved  from http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de
Guétin, S., Giniès, P., Siou, D. K., Picot, M. C., Pommié, C., Guldner, E., . . . Touchon, J. (2011). The effects of music intervention in the management of chronic pain: A single-blind, randomized, controlled trial. Clinical Journal of Pain. Retrieved from http://www.prohealth.com/ibs/library
Sewell, A. (1922). Black Beauty: The autobiography of a horse. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, & Company.
Stowe, H. B. (1852). Uncle Tom’s cabin or life among the lowly (Vol. I & II). Boston, MA: John P. Jewett & Company.
Wikström, B.-M., Theorell, T., & Sandström, S. (1992). Psychophysiological effects of stimulation with pictures of works of art in old age. International Journal of Psychosomatics, 39(4), 68-75.

"The Treason of the Artist" - Reflections on Beauty in Art

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pendants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual,  only evil interesting.  This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”  

Ursula Le Guin  “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.”

One of the things I do is review  art sites for residencies, for which I apply and usually pay a hefty application fee as well.  At a prestigious art center in North Carolina I saw a listing recently.  As part of their application process they posed a  question for potential residents to answer, presumably setting the  ground for "discourse" for artists to pursue  in the course of their time there as they educate, create,  inspire and pollinate the local community (which is generally the idea of a resident artist). 

Here's the question:

 “This artist-in-residence will address whether the concept of beauty gets lost in the issues-based or medium-focused practice of contemporary art.  Does beauty still  have a place in creative expression? Is the contemporary definition of beauty different from classical beauty?

Is beauty relevant? Who cares?“

In Tom Wolfe's famous  critique of contemporary art of the 70's  The  Painted Word  he  argued that art was become literature, more a media creation of art critics than the artists themselves, who were (and still are) generally floundering about at the edges of society seeking any kind of identity, even one invented for them by critics.  (In the 80's, after graduate school, I went all over the country interviewing artists myself, trying to understand what the early  or spiritual roots of art might be.)  

In his introduction, Wolfe wrote that  he began his book by  settling into a Sunday morning with the  New York times like sinking into a familiar warm bath.  Then he encountered a paragraph in the Arts section that shocked him awake -  as he put it, a "satori flash". 

Such was my reaction to this question.  

“Does beauty still have a place in creative expression?”  

Let’s have that one again:

  “Does beauty still have a place in creative expression.”  (and by extension, since it is the opposite of "beauty",  the questioner assumes that   “ugly” evidently does have a place in creative expression.) 

And there it was again, the same reality-turned-on-its-ears aesthetic that inspired me to  run into the  woods and around the country after finishing graduate school.  The same artspeak hyper-intellectual  "what was that?" that still causes me to avoid Art In America and anything with a "Biennial" after the title as if I could catch the measles.   But this time I think I will face my fear head on.

"They argue that what audiences deserve from any sensitive visionary is an assault on the senses that will degrade,  humiliate, and finally awaken the supreme aesthetic experience offered to the Western world through art - namely guilt.  But guilt is exactly the out we must not cop to if we are to survive."

Pierre Delattre, Beauty and the Aesthetics of Survival

night blooming Cereus

What then is  Beauty?  Thomas Aquinas saw beauty as having three properties:  integrity, proportion, and last, "the clarity and radiance of being." 

The clarity and radiance of the life force, of nature, and of the human spirit participating within that brilliance.  

That which inspires us to preserve, protect, those moments that we remember.  Beauty thus can be understood to mean so many experiences that arise from the "radiance of Being" - grace,  serenity,  empathy, color, symmetry, tenderness, the imaginative synapse that can occur between lines of a poem, joining the poet and reader in a dimension of the imagination.  The awe of a storm clad sky advancing across the prairie, the bell-like call of a morning lark, the profound pathos of an exhasusted mother's face at childbirth, the wonder of a night-blooming Cereus opening at dusk, the brilliant play of color captured  by a John Singer Sargeant, or the moving symbolic imagery of a Frieda Kahlo.

 John Singer Sargeant

If not beauty, what is "relevant" to "creative expression"?   If we eliminate beauty from creativity, what are we  left with that is not "beautiful" but somehow more important? 

Politics. Guilt leading to despair and being called "realism".    Art that occurs by accident, made without intention.  Expressions and cries of pain (but never ecstasy).  Art that grieves and rages and shocks. 

In fact, in a world that seems to be endlessly absorbed with a kind of adolescent rebellion complex, "shock" seems to be de rigour. 

I am not saying that these aspects of creativity are not valid or should be censored.  But I am saying that there is a prejudice to beauty in our world  that is almost an anti-aesthetic.  An aesthetic that  celebrates the qualities that are in opposition to "beauty" leaves the viewer with    violent, nihilistic,  meaningless, dark, stinking, shocking, ridiculing, inhumane,  disgusting, intentionally incomprehensible.........and so on.

In 1987, when I finished my MFA, the word "beautiful"   was a embarrassing  concept in the art world, a word that those in the fine arts world of academia avoided as  cliched, reactionary, irrelevant. Apparently it still is.    Students were taught to emulate their teachers in achieving artistic statements and bodies of work  that held  "depth".

In graduate school I remember one student who entered the MFA program a talented  realist painter.  By the time she had her MFA show, her work was large white and black canvases, blank except for a few gestural marks and an occasional word, buried in the field of the canvas such that it could not actually be read, just suggested.   Certainly, I guess it could be said, her new work left a whole lot more to the imagination.  Another student spent the entire program in the morgue, drawing corpses, some in the process of dissection.  And another finished the program with huge wall pieces that were composed of the bones and dried skins of dead animals (horses in particular) that she found in the desert.

I am not saying that these works were without value, or  power,  because they were hard to look at, disturbing, or seemingly incomprehensible without their written  narratives (which also can sometimes seem incomprehensible).  But I am saying (and 30 years later I still feel politically incorrect in doing so) that these choices of works and subjects by young people beginning their careers reflects an aesthetic they were encouraged to pursue over others.  

I was busy painting Goddesses, and no one knew what to make of me.   Somehow I squeaked through the program, finding at least one feminist art historian who liked them.

I remember my own "ah ha" during a painting critique.  Up for discussion was the work of two students, both equally competent painters.  This was the height of New Age, and one body of work was about ecstatic visions the artist was having, visions of flying, being infused with light, and heart imagery.  The other body of work was painted in dark colors, and was full of disturbing sexual imagery -  vagina dentata, and  a tree with bloody dismembered penises.  

Virtually all the class, and particularly the teacher, found the later work "powerful".  And virtually all the class, as well as the teacher, found the former body of work "illustration" and "sci-fi".  (In the fine  art world, to call a painting  "illustration" is perhaps one of the highest insults.)  Since I loved the first artists paintings, I wanted to know why no one else seemed to think they could be taken seriously.  Was it the colors, style, technique?  No, and no.  Finally, it turned out that it was the content that could not be taken seriously.  

In other words,  we could believe in the truth of pain, and psychological and erotic dismemberment, but ecstasy belonged to fantasy.  

That set me to wondering about many things, and set me on a course to discover other, perhaps earlier, purposes of art and the creative process.  It was my privilege, in the late 1980's, to share conversations about art, spirituality, and cultural transformation with some extraordinary artists, travelling across the country to meet many of them.   I realize  now I was really trying to understand my own reasons for making art. 

But that's another story.

Below is a traditional Navajo  prayer  I sometimes read as a way of understanding how to "walk" in the world.  The Navajo celebrate, with the  turning directions, the  continual motion and transformation of life.  From the "house of Dawn" to the "house of Twilight" we can choose to realize beauty all around us, and their  understanding of "beauty" means all that is good, beneficial, worthy of gratitude.

"In the house made of dawn
in the house made of evening twilight,
in beauty may I walk
with beauty above me,
with beauty below me,
with beauty beside me 
I walk with beauty all around me
With beauty it is finished."

.......Navajo (Din`e)

Navajo Sand Painting by Lee