Art and the spiritual

On the 6th November Colm Brophy SJ led ten spiritual directors in a Galway workshop on art. His first objective was to free them from any perfectionism, or sense of inferiority about drawing. Starting with their signatures, he got them to own what was unique to them From drawing simple things like a sun or a moon he moved them to the more personal, to express a feeling in colour and draw an incident from childhood. The workshop aimed to release in the learners a simple, carefree and uninhibited use of oil pastel crayons to express emotions before or after a session of spiritual direction. It opened up a simple but powerful means of self-expression and healing. Colm, whose own watercolour of a summer garden is pictured here (see more), began and ended with that enigmatic line from John 8.7 “Jesus bent down and started writing on the ground with his finger.”