Spirit Taking Form: Making a Spiritual Practice of Making Art

By Nancy J. Azara

Anyone can make art. Finding one's spiritual center can come of making art. Making art can come of finding one's spiritual center. Nancy Azara has been teaching the making of art, artmaking as a spiritual practice, and other spiritual practices for thirty-five years. She has developed a system that combines her lifelong spiritual practice with techniques designed to help anyone get and stay in touch with their own inner artistic souls. Spirit Taking Form is a practical book. It offers lists of materials to work with and exercises and meditation techniques to help everyone bring out their inner voice. It includes specific meditations for healing the inner critic, cultivating imagination, and finding one's artistic heart. Its meditations and exercises can be done many times, and each time they can bring the reader new and richer experiences and deeper insights. Throughout the book Azara shares her own story and the inspirations that have made her a successful artist. Using an old Sicilian folk tale taught to her by her grandfather, she has always sought to look at life with one eye open out to the world and the other closed, or turned inward. It is this skill more than any other that she seeks to engender in the reader through exercises such as "The Visual Diary." Learning and teaching about art from a place of spirit calls us to a challenge, a challenge to look at something very familiar, yet distant and remote. Spirit Taking Form offers insight into artistic expression and how it can be applied to life as a catalyst for growth, change, and expression.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590030168
• ISBN13: 9781590030165
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: Red Wheel
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 7.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful

This is a wonderful book for artist and non artist alike. You do not need to have experience with meditation to follow the guidelines in this book. It has been a delightful experience to follow the exercises here. I would recommend it for anyone who wants to enjoy a thoughtful art making experience.

Nancy Azara's artistry

In her book, Making a Spiritual Practice of Making Art, Nancy Azara writes about her own approach to art making that incorporates meditation and intention. The beautiful prose could be a book of poems. . . but its utility for artmaking is the absolute strength of her writing. One of the significant struggles for me as an artist is to volley each day between doubt and confidence in my work. Through Ms. Azara's book, I realized that there is also an artistry to trusting myself and my own experience. I have learned through her book and feel that it has helped me to make art with greater risk and richness. I recommend this book for everyone.

Spirit Taking Form: Making a Spiritual Practice of Making Ar

As the Executive Director of Women's Studio Center I find this book to be a great boon to artists and those thinking about becoming an artist. It has elements of "The Artists Way" with more substance and some biographical details.Nancy Azara was the Director of the New York Feminist Art Institute, a wonderful women's art organization that closed in 1990. She taught a class "Visual Diaries" which included elements of consciousness raising and art or creating an "artists book". I think her ideas and exercises come from this class.It's a wonderful creative motivator !

Mind, Art and Soul

This book gave me an insight into the creative process that I had never experienced before. It was just as Gloria Steinem said "...how to meditate our way into our imaginations & to give our thoughts & feelings visible form" this book gave me a new found way to discovering my self and the artwork I produce. Thank you so much Nancy, I really appreciate what your book has done for me and hope that others find it as rejuvenating to the soul as I did.

Wonderful...worthy!

Filled with artistic endeavors and meditations to get creative juices flowing. Healing in that it affirms that all creative process is worthy...not just the technical modems of art instructors, designers etc. The symbols that come forth during our artistic expressions, even the simplest ones, are coming from the deepest parts of our soul...the author hopes that we'll "come to view our inner selves as if watching a film", to see our own personal images and to be able to transform them into art we can appreciate. Worth a read, a study, there are lots of reflective stories that I found very inspiring, quotes from other students, artists...I found the exercises very propelling and I am all for moving forward, even small increments make progress...