Alchemist Vessel

About the title: the alchemist vessel, that's just me. I'm into esoterics and inner development, read a lot on the subject, but making art is still my favorite way to work with these things. To me, art is a form of alchemy.

Funny enough, I found that working with inner development was not at all fashionable in art school (in the late 80's). Times did change since then, but I do understand why it was so. Art was just coming loose from tradition, to make way for individual development. When you go a path like that, it's necessary to start as a non-believer. One has to work with one's own raw material. When accepting ideas about higher worlds or inner development, that raw material starts to hurt and one might be less creative for a while (it happened to me too). 

There was also Darwinist ideology that had a big influence in the art world. Abstract expressionism - the painter as the sublime genious animal. Objectivity being only possible as a passive material given ('only matter is real'). Stuff like that.  People who were naieve enough to paint elfs in art school were evicted from school for that, without proper explanation of reason. Formally, there were no rules and all was allowed, but as soon as spirituality became a topic, all doors would shut in your face. Thank goodness somehow this power is broken. 

Still there was a good thing about this attitude, for me it was a necessary phase. How else would one become ready to really create one's own moral codes? Only when there's no moral code anymore, you have to make your own. Artists who create their own moral code from scratch, almost always make good work, or at least work that is of real use to other human beings (and artists). There are a lot of artists that I don't particularly like, but that are valuable to me because they're consequent and show exactly where their ideas lead them. This is a contribution to artistic alchemy as well, even though transformation is not always succesful. 


I've seen so many connections between art and alchemy, that I don't know where to start. As inside, as outside: a painting really is a mirror of the body and soul (check here for more on that). Form, color and gesture really are a language one can speak in, and relate very directly about what's going on inside. Color to me is a carrier of consciousness, moving between warmth and light (here more on color).
As above, as below: when a person really shows things as honest and precise as possible, while making an artwork, it's bound to touch and resonate with universal truth. 


Before, the alchemist vessel was a bronze cauldron, where the process took place in matter. Alchemy used to be about transforming material substances (and trying to evolve with that, while conducting the process). But since a few decades, inner alchemy can be based on working with warmth as well. We are the cauldron, and our lower nature is being processed.
Creativity, along with social behaviour, is the key to all inner development. I didn't know at first that one can be creative in all professional fields, so I chose to become an artist.  But alchemy is in all these places where people are creative - science, raising kids or trying to channge society for the better. It's also in tv-shows where people try to improve themselves (psychologically etc). 
To work alone in a studio, making art, may be one of the least suitable ways to actually do that. By the time I found out about that, it was too late. And that suits me, because I love what I do. But that's another story.