Meditative painting (or drawing meditation) is a meditative art technique which trains your attention and awareness, putting your mind in a trance or calm and stable state of mind before working with the art materials.
Meditative Art is used in complementary spiritual practices such as Yoga, Mind fullness and other meditation techniques.
The combination of spirituality and arts have been traditionally used in many different spiritual paths as they support each other and can be very well combined.
Some examples are:
Drawing Sacred circles as Indian Mandalas, Yantras and Chakras, Tibetian thangka paintings, drawings and sculptures, Chinese or TAO calligraphy, Shamanistic art made on leather, drums, clothes, Celtic arts; sculptures, knots and embroidery, Catholic sculptures, wall and ceiling paintings, Japanese silk paintings and block printing and the traditional Indian painting of Devas and Devis and holy images as practised in Atelier Pranava.
All these expressions of Meditative Art are significantly different from one another, they all serve as spiritual practices or related to cultural backgrounds which make each and every one of them an integral part of the religion or spiritual path from which they came from.
It’s of course not always necessary to follow a spiritual path to practise meditative art. Practising arts is already a meditative expression on its own as the strong directed attention and making process is highly intuitive of the artist. Making an abstract painting, drawing or sculpture can be as much meditative for the practitioner as involving in spiritual arts.
As in regular art practises the interest and focus is mainly on the end product whether it is a painting, sculpture, composition or dance.
Is the end product beautiful, modern, new, related to which traditional artist, well done etc?
Meditative Art places the inner state of the artist and the creating process as more important.
The creator is both an artist and a witness of its own artistic process and is observing this process as it takes places.