Really interesting thoughts from artist Matthew Burrows MBE who argues that art and spiritual life share a fundamental similarity: both are hard to define, resistant to tidy explanation, and best understood through lived experience rather than theory.

He describes recognising in spiritual writing the same qualities that shape his studio practice — discipline, attention, repetition, and a commitment to the ordinary. Over decades, mystical traditions have given him a language to understand painting beyond surface meaning or academic interpretation.

While art is often discussed in terms of what it represents or how it functions socially, he suggests this misses the deeper, spiritual dimensions of making: the questions artists repeatedly confront through practice — fear, ego, awareness, transcendence — and the way art shapes who they become.

Definitely worth a read.