Art and Spirituality: What Painting Taught Me About the Unseen

The oldest paintings in the world are not in museums. They are in caves in southern France and northern Spain, Lascaux, Altamira, Chauvet, drawn by human hands somewhere between fifteen thousand and thirty thousand years ago. Bison, horses, aurochs, deer. Painted in ochre and charcoal and manganese by people who had no written language, no cities, no concept of art as we understand it. And yet they painted.

For a long time, archaeologists called these images hunting magic, practical records, visual aids for the chase. But the more you look at them, the less that explanation holds. These are images made with care, made in darkness, made deep inside the earth where no one would see them by daylight. Images that feel, even now, like they were made for something beyond the visible world. The earliest art humans ever made was not decoration. It was a way of reaching toward the divine.

I grew up in a family where painting was simply part of life. My mother painted. My grandfather painted, professionally, and also for himself, the way some people pray privately and publicly both. Art was not something we went to see. It was something that happened in the house, at the table, in the quiet hours. I absorbed it the way children absorb language: not by studying it, but by being inside it so long it became part of how I thought. I am self-taught, which means I learned by looking and by doing, not by being told. There is something about that path, the absence of formal instruction, that keeps you closer to the original impulse. You are not learning rules. You are learning to listen.

There are moments in a life that divide everything into before and after. For me, one of them happened when I was sixteen years old, in the middle of the night. I woke from a dream with a vivid image in my mind, three figures, masked, unlike anything I had ever seen. The image had a presence to it. A weight. It felt less like something I had imagined and more like something that had arrived. I felt compelled, pressured is the right word, to draw them. Not because I wanted to. Because I had to.

I drew the three figures. I brought them out of the dream and onto paper. And when I was done, I sat with what I had made and felt something I still find difficult to describe: the sense that my hand had been used as a portal. That whatever energy those figures carried had moved through me to get here. That I had not made them so much as received them. I was young. I did not have the language for what had happened. I was unsettled by it, not because the figures were dark, though they had a darkness to them, but because of how real the transmission had felt. How little of it had been mine.

Years later, reading about the shamanic traditions that many archaeologists now believe shaped those cave paintings, I recognised something. The figures painted at Lascaux were not painted by artists in the modern sense, individuals expressing a personal vision. They were painted by people who understood themselves as intermediaries. Channels. The image did not originate with them. It came through them, from somewhere else, and their job was to bring it into the visible world with as much fidelity as they could manage. The mandala traditions of Tibetan Buddhism work the same way. The monk who creates a sand mandala is not designing it, he is making visible something that already exists in a dimension beyond the ordinary.

When I stand in front of a great painting now, I am not asking: what did the artist mean? I am asking: what came through? Millais lying in the cold Surrey grass for four months, painting every reed and wildflower with obsessive precision. Caravaggio painting saints who looked like peasants, with dirty feet and broken nails, because he believed the divine lived in the actual and not the ideal. Rothko, who said he was not interested in colour or form but in expressing basic human emotions, tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and who wept when he heard that people wept in front of his paintings. These are not people who were making decorative objects. They were people who believed that painting was a form of contact.

Every artwork has a story. Some of those stories are about the artist. Some are about the time and place. And some, the ones that stay with you, the ones that change something in you when you stand in front of them, are about something that moves through all of us, and has always moved through all of us, and was moving through the people in those caves long before anyone thought to call it art.