The history of art is, at the same time, the history of religion. If we go into his study, we will notice that the spirituality of the human being is undeniably linked to his capacity for artistic creation since prehistoric times.

In fact, according to American artist David Berkowitz Chicago, art has been used in various religions for different reasons. In many of them, it has served as a transmitter of certain spiritual concepts, or even non-conceptual states of consciousness. As an interesting fact, Plato mentions in The Republic the power that art has to exalt specific mental states in people. After that statement, he takes advantage to explain that, due to this power, artists should be expelled from the republic, by giving them this quality of art the power to evoke the animal passions of man, capable of distancing us from the virtue of civilization.

However, it is also Plato who mentions another power that art has, which is to be able to generate the most subtle and virtuous emotions in the human being. It is, in this ultimate sense, that art can also be understood as a meditation practice. In fact, it is just in this way that diverse cultures have approached it throughout the centuries.

This time, the Chicago-based artist David Berkowitz will give a brief approach to how art can be understood and approached as a form of meditation.

As the naïve art painter David Berkowitz Chicago describes, for a meditation to take effect and transform our mental continuum with positive emotions, it must be practiced regularly. More importantly, in a meditation like one that seeks to grow our capacity to love, it is important to actually evoke love during meditation.

By making art, when it is done for pleasure and with love, you are doing something very similar to holding a love meditation for a period of time. As several artists who have worked for some time have experienced, this work does indeed permeate the mind over the years. In the case of art, emotion is not generated mentally, but is generated through external activity, its development and the internal impact that all this has.

In a way, art is a meditation that depends on external instruments. Sometimes those elements do not need to be more than a pencil and a paper, sometimes not even that. How many of us feel joy, happiness, and even completely marvel while we are creating art? Likewise, how many of us have completely forgotten about time for hours during the act of creation? Of course, it can also be the case that we feel infinitely frustrated while creating art. It may be that what we are looking for does not arrive and that then our act of artistic creation becomes an evocation of emotions of suffering.