From the Art Monastery Project:
Our world has been shaped and enriched for millennia by what we could call “artmonks”: passionate people who reflect deeply about what they can give to the world and use their full creative inspiration and dedication to manifest this insight in the world, regardless of prevailing activities and obsessions of their historical time, place, and station.
An artmonk is someone who lives at the intersection of three worlds:
Few of the artmonks I’ve written about so far fall smack in the center of this lovely venn diagram, but they’re all close. You could also call a monk who makes art an artmonk, or an artist who lives a contemplative life, or an artist who works from a place of compassion, or a contemplative person whose activism is merely standing up for their art, enduring whatever it takes to pursue their creative passion.
Here’s my growing list of artmonks and people who express well the spirit of the artmonk:
- Theophane the Monk
- Jim Woodring
- Sister Corita Kent
- Ranier Maria Rilke
- Gary Snyder
- Sunn 0)))
- Emily Dickinson
- Marcel Proust
- Charles Baudelaire
- Sanford Meisner
- Christine Valters Paintner
- Michael Kenna
- Leonard Cohen
- David Lynch
James Arthur “Art” Monk(As far as I know, the hall-of-fame wide receiver for the Washington Redskins is not an artmonk, as such.)
Can you name any more? Email me at nathan@artmonastery.org. Also check out the “artmonks” category for blog posts of this vein.
