Art As Medicine: A Living Manifesto

During the summer of 2022, I began a deeper contemplation of the type of artistic path that inspired me. Having previously approached my art in a less codified and more intuitive way, I decided to create a manifesto which I could refer back to when I needed to re-calibrate my approach. At times, rereading it seems unnecessarily serious and heavy, while at others, I feel a visceral alignment to a greater force.

Alejandro Jodorowski made a very memorable statement in the documentary JODOROWSKI'S DUNE (2014), that “Art IS the drug.” Hearing it made me recognize it as a self-evident truth, one which has become part of my ethos.

The Living Manifesto

As the shamanic archetype continues to awaken in the psyche of those who hear its call, it also stirs inside the artist.

The artist who accepts the mission of aiding in the collective soul retrieval, must look deep within and explore the landscape of the personal and transpersonal self. Clearing the inner lens of misperception, honouring the muse and honing one's tool of expression — one's craft.

By visiting forbidden and forgotten worlds, those of sorrow and triumph — worlds of glory and corruption, of the ancestral and celestial realms — the artist masters and liberates the forces that have hitherto exerted their influence from behind the veil.

In a time when the creeping automation of consciousness makes its assault on all that's beautiful, the artist can choose to offer a generative vision born of hard earned experience. The artist as shaman shears through the crust of artifice, and offers ideas, perceptions, and definitions, which renew our approach to each other and to life itself.

From that place beyond imposed thought-forms and inherited cultural definitions, the shamanic artist dives deep to meet the pre-verbal, to wrestle with demons and dance with angels — to be guided by the muses. To rescue the treasure captured by the weeds of the personal and collective unconscious — and bring it back as a gift, as an offering to the Earth tribe that finds itself in dire need of a redeeming vision.

The reward for this adventure is not the empty validation of the unconscious masses, or the relics of fake prestige and material rags offered by Empire. The reward is the invigorating transformation of the Self into a vessel of the ALL.

The shamanic artist dances with the light and dark, and from them weaves insights in a language that contributes to the evolution of the culture.

We honour all creation when we dance with its mystery and aid in the harmonizing of its many dissonant facets. It's within our heart, within the altar of our being that we alchemize the fragments of a dying culture, and offer a vision of the New.