Gaia's Art Podcast

Artist Mark Henson says he believes that art can have the ability to catalyze positive social and cultural changes. In addition to stimulating our visual cortex, Art has the amazing magical power to evoke profound emotional intensity as well as to provoke intellectual thinking.
His aspiration as an artist is to create compelling images of beauty and power that serve to promote our Conscious Evolution as human beings, and to show us how to live in a peaceful world. To this end he presents images exploring themes of Awakening Consciousness, Divine Sexuality, Political Realities and Living in Harmony with Nature. 

Michael Schwartz is an art historian, art critic, philosopher and author who earned his doctorate at Columbia University and presently teaches at  Augusta University in the Department of Art and Design. He is co-founding executive officer of the Comparative and Continental Philosophy Circle which is an international professional organization with both a peer-reviewed journal and book series.

Michael has curated and commented on over 50 online integral art galleries at IntegralLife.com. He has publishes work on the topics of art history, art criticism, art education, continental philosophy, comparative spirituality, critical social theory, integral theory, critical realism, comparative metatheory. He is currently co-authoring Dancing with Sophia –the first professional academic volume on integral as philosophy. The book is coming out autumn 2019.

I really appreciate Michael's sensitivity toward the true, the good and the beautiful and how he uses the lens of integral philosophy to explore the processes of art creating, art exhibiting, art viewing, art experiencing as a whole. He integrates elegantly art history, social critic, philosophy and spirituality to invite us to profoundly expand and deepen our experience of the aesthetic.

In this episode I am sure you will love Michael's evident passion for the subject of integral art. I  liked the art that he recommends to us at the end of the interview... particularly his view on the TV series Mad Men! He explains how some pieces of art 'are not necessarily exploring the highest developmental stages that are available to us, not ignoring shadow and narrating the changing lives of people in a specific historical context. Mad Men gives us a sense that even an advertising commercial can be an expression of genuine connective post modern love!' 

In this conversation we talked about the value of flow states, how to bring them into our lives and nurture them, the parallels between practicing mindfulness and art making, art viewing and art experiencing.

Har-Prakash is an accomplished artist and a mindfulness teacher. He is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and his artwork has been exhibited across Canada and in the United States, Ireland and England. His artistic practice is multi-disciplinary including photography, painting, printmaking and performance.

His work is fuelled equally by neuroscience, nature, beauty, human intimacy and behaviour, the world’s mystical traditions and the inner science of sensory investigation through three decades of personal meditation practice.

Har-Prakash has a deep love for the meditation processes of various traditions, including the contemplative Christian, Hindu, Sikh, Sufi and Buddhist and scientific perspectives.

The first reason why I started this podcast adventure is because I was having so many precious exchanges with art colleagues that I wanted to share them with the world.

I recently contacted Har-Prakash with a question about creativity and mindfulness and I loved his response so I decided to bring the conversation to the mic and share it with others.

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Gordon is one of these people that I feel is very well rounded and highly developed as a human being and that is clearly transmitted through his organic paintings.

Gordon and I know each other's via the group of integral artists from www.integrallife.org. This is the site of well-respected American philosopher Ken Wilber. Although I am not calling this podcast 'Integral Art Podcast' I feel that the core theme is entirely informed by integral thought. Listening to this episode will give you insights about why I feel this philosophy can transform our way of seeing life and ultimately assist us on the journey of growing up and waking up.

Jennifer Baird's paintings are a testimony of how art has the ability of transmitting specific states of consciousness. I admire the depth I feel from her decades of meditation practice, the emotional freedom she clearly has gained in choosing a simple life deeply connected to nature, and her tireless dedication to creativity and art. The combination of all the aspects of her life shows up in the ‘The Enchantment Aesthetic’ of her paintings.