
There can be little doubt that artists like Bradley, Adelman, and other are at the forefront of a cultural movement that embraces the use of what were once thought of as esoteric techniques for enhancing their creative lives. Yet Bradley thinks they are part of something even bigger.
"I think there's a neo-spiritual art movement happening," (Bradley) says. "At a certain point the truth is a bigger subject than pop culture. With meditation, you find your inner peace, your inner truth, your centered truth, and then you find the world, and the world finds its center. That's a noble pursuit for art these days."
There is a painting on the wall of my studio, a work by a young American artist named Slater Bradley. I've learned a few things about Bradley over the past year, but I first encountered this painting in a state of perfect innocence, when I saw it hanging in a gallery in Lisbon, where I was teaching at a writers' conference. I was accompanying another writer, who wanted to see the work of a photographer she liked, and we were both struck by an exhibition of Bradley's canvases in the gallery's main space. The paintings were large, some broken into geometrical shapes, gold and silver and black, some simple fields of a single color. They contained an elaborate symbolism, a mix of astrology and Eastern metaphysics, which immediately aroused my skepticism and still has yet to catch my interest. But the paintings were beautiful, and one of them, the smallest, grabbed hold of me in a way I've felt only a few times in my life. It's a block of blue on a surface mounted on a white mat, the whole enclosed in a brass frame. From across the gallery, a warehouselike space with cement floors and white walls, lit through a strip of high windows by Lisbon's extraordinary summer sun, it looked like undifferentiated color, a weirdly textured and captivating blue. Then the room darkened dramatically–a cloud passed in fron of the sun–and the painting transformed: it brightened and became luminous, an effect I have become familiar with but not accustomed to, and which I have no way of explaining. The painting communicated a sense of stillness infused with vibrancy–a quality I find in much of the art I love, something I've characterized elsewhere as being like "a flame submerged in glass." It's a stillness that reminds me that stasis was also the Greek word for sedition, for that decidedly unplacid political stalemate that can erupt in civil war. (continued)