Is all art on some level magickal? What gives artists their inspiration? Are there ways to access mysterious divine realms and use them to inform your art? We ponder these exciting themes.

There's something to be said for all art being magickal. After all what is that undefined quality that makes an unmade bed Tracy Emin sleeps in 'art' while your bed or mine are just unmade beds? It has to do with how you look at or use objects to express a view on the experience of life. It is a visual dialogue between the artist and the viewer. This raises the interesting question of whether the observer makes the art what it is or whether it is an independent thing apart? Would it still function as art if no-one but the artist were to see the work? Is it incumbent on art to engage with a viewer as its raison d'Être? You may ask what does this have to do with magickal art but it is actually central to the whole idea of magickal art. Many people use magickal art to access realms that are normally closed in everyday mundane life. So the art serves a dual purpose - firstly for the artist who visits those inspirational planes in creating the art and then secondly for the observer, who gets to see what the artist has brought back and interpreted from the experience. This is at least theoretically the case with art produced using methods such as trance or ritual magick to get to a heightened state of awareness before the act of creation. This is not the same as art done on magickal themes, but without any particular magickal aspect to the production. So for example there are many artists out there that use magickal realms as inspiration for creating artwork (the worst of these being in the 'unicorn kissing a dragon by a lake inhabited by water nymphs' vein), but are not necessarily using magick to create the art. Such art can still inspire viewers to have unusual sensory experiences but there is a question of whether such art can strictly be termed 'magickal' or 'occult'. There is a further question to this: if a person experiences a change in mood or a bolt of inspiration upon seeing an artwork by a 'normal' artist, does that make the art of that artist 'magickal' in nature?

Austin Osman Spare
A classic example of how magickal or occult art has been taken away from mainstream art and put into some sort of ghetto is the case of Austin Osman Spare (1888?-1956). Alongwith William Blake, Spare is one of the most famous occult artists to date. However, he did not begin life as an artist connected with the occult. He was something of a child prodigy, exhibiting at the Royal Academy at the age of 14. According to Michael Staley, prominent member of the Typhonian OTO and editor of Starfire, Spare is collected by many art collectors who have no interest at all in the occult but who admire the quality of, in particular, his drawings. In fact Staley believes that the reason Spare's work began to be ignored by the establishment in his own lifetime was due to his increasing involvement in the occult and occult themes.

How did Spare create his pieces and why do they have such magickal significance?

"Spare seems to have done very little ritual work," explains Staley. "He was very, very briefly associated with Aleister Crowley but he seems to have had a personal dislike of Crowley and split from Crowley soon afterwards. He did not undertake anything formal [in occult practice terms] after that. I think he would have said that he was in communion with the ghost or spirit world all the time anyway. One of his drawing techniques he termed automatism. He would allow the pencil to flow wherever it will and when shapes emerged, he accentuated these shapes. He knew how to put himself into a trance, how to render himself approachable to his spirit guides."

The help and presence of these guides meant that Spare never felt he had to actually do a specific ritual to get closer to magickal realms for inspiration.

Spare has also been closely associated with the emergence of chaos magick but as Staley points out, the movement began in the late 60s and 70s as an "attempt to dispense with ritual and Spare was taken as an inspiration" because he championed freedom from ritual with his own writings and art. While the sigil techniques (symbols that were created to invoke certain desires and make them reality) that Spare created are used within chaos magick, it would be incorrect to call Spare a chaos magickian. Staley speaks of his main magickal resource thus:"Underlying a lot of it is something a little bit like Jung's collective unconscious. You, ie. the visible, the manifested world, human beings, are a relatively shallow or surface outcropping upon almost a sea of interrelations. For instance his theory of atavistic resurgence was that by means of symbols, very, very old primal memories could actually be dredged up from what we might call the mind or the collective unconscious and they could be experienced again in a flash now."

This is exciting stuff for it would mean that all of human experience and thought is accessible by means of the visual. What are the practical uses of such art or meditating upon magickal art (seeing as nothing today is ever done for its own sake alone!). Joel Biroco, occult artist and publisher of Kaos, often uses sigils incorporated into his artwork. His zobop passport series for example incorporates several sigils. ('A zobop is a sorcerer belonging to a secret society in Haiti . [A zobop passport] allowed the bearer to roam freely day or night without being molested.')

"It was a protective thing," says Biroco. "When I did it, I knew what it was but I don't know what it is any more. As it's a zobop, it's for protection. In sigil magick people know what it is and try to forget but when I do them it is so quick that I trust my mind to come up with a desire that I just forget even as I'm doing it. So something emerges with power but I've forgotten what it was about." I ask if his desires are primarily material. "No, but I do have material desires - I'm not one of these flaky, all spirit types!"

Strange experiences
Biroco appears not to differentiate between the magick of his everyday life and that of his art, in fact they sometimes merge in the strangest of ways! On his zobop passport is a picture of Papa Legba (a Vodou deity) and his vever (sigil used in ritual evoking of that particular deity).

"I did a linocut of Papa Legba's vever and this is back when I had my printing press. I printed 150 copies onto card and it took me about three hours to do them. The TV was on in the background and I wasn't watching. I was doing this and then I suddenly sat down and thought 'why have I just done that?' And then, straight away, on the TV this voice says "someone looking for Papa Legba? Yeah?" and it was the film Crossroads, where the guy goes to meet Papa Legba! I didn't know what this film was and just as I thought why have I just printed these and that happened. I find with him you get these quick results, you know. He's a bit of trickster figure and I like trickster figures."

So sometimes the magickal experience does not inform the art but is evoked by the art? It would be easy to get involved in a 'chicken and egg' argument about the relationship between the magickal experience andthe artwork but it is worth remembering that only the experience of linear time makes us slaves to this notion of what came first. Michael Staley's comment regarding Jung's Collective Unconscious becomes all the more pertinent. The main purpose of magickal art being to expand spiritual knowledge and not to attempt to confine it to a set of movements in the way that the art establishment prefers to view art.

This is not to say that occult artists have not been influenced by what was happening in the wider profession at the time that they were producing their art, more that the expression supersedes the means. As Staley so eloquently says of Spare: "I personally think he was more interested in what you might call cosmic consciousness or awareness. He wouldn't say he was aiming for liberation - he would see himself as being liberated - if you're aiming, it implies you haven't got there. Being a highly skilled artist, he would have had an interest in his profession and developments such as surrealism for example."

If artists such as Spare, Biroco and, for that matter, a whole host of others such as Andrew Chumbley, Gavin Semple or Stafford Stone are being seen by curators and art critics as in a different category to their contemporaries in modern art world, then is magick itself being sidelined as a subject? Is it too embarassing to name inspiration as 'magickal'? Many writers and artists speak of being guided by an invisible hand, while the work is in progress and of moulding that raw inspiration with something akin to superconsciousness. Could it be that accepting a magickal source for your work detracts from your input into it? Jackson Pollock was said to go into 'a trance' as he rhythmically produced his abstract canvases and yet his work is extremely controlled. It may be that there is a marriage that exists between the artist's skill and the inspiration that informs it, allowing the art to be at once the work of the artist and that of magick.

Divination
Another of the main purposes of magickal art have been to divine the future or to access Divine knowledge in order to resolve problems. For example mandalas were used by Tantric Hindus and Buddhists to access a higher connection to Godhead. These cosmic designs are still used today to focus the mind and flex psychic muscles so that you become more open to the reservoir of knowledge within you. A Taoist technique, Biroco tells me shamans would use, involves cutting your tongue and making a mark on a piece of paper and then using that either as a talisman or to divine matters. This is still art but it is art with a magickal purpose.

Geoff Francis, an artist who has gained inspiration from Eastern techniques such as mandalas, has created modern paintings that serve the same purpose. He is enthusiatic about the benefits of such artwork. "People often say they feel a sense of calm looking at some of my paintings and that to me, is a gift." Francis has created interactive computer slide shows that use his images set to meditation music, thus enhancing further the ability for viewers to tune into a higher consciousness. This is again created with a purpose in mind, to help the viewer feel relaxed and to create a sense of connection.

The painting to the right by Joel Biroco began life as a mandala but the process of doing the painting meant that something else emerged and changed the whole feel of the painting. How does this happen?

"I begin with the ritual that is any artist's ritual of taping down all four edges of the paper. Then I completely wet the paper and you can tell that the minute you put the paint on the paper, how far the paint will spread. You can tell this by the reflection of the water on the paper. Anyone who does watercolours gets used to that. I'm looking for something to happen. There might be an idea flashing through my mind. They're done quite quickly, which is something I learnt from Dawu Tang, a Chinese calligraphy teacher. There are two separate, dynamic parts of the painting which dance around with each other. It's hard to explain, different parts interacting and bringing something out that's mirroring my mind at the time."

Is this mirroring something in his mind or is it something more collective? "It's me dipping into this big stream running through everything," he replies. "What I hope will emerge is something to do with that stream, where I am at that moment. The chaotic, primal energy in them."

Primal art
From cave paintings to the temple drawings of ancient Egypt to the shamanic warli tribal techniques of the Indian subcontinent, humans have used art to tell stories, to record their lives and most importantly, to show that there is more to life than mere survival. When we look back at these images, the feelings that arise are not merely testament to the skill of the artist but to a recognition of a common human experience. Joy, love, pain, anger, jealousy, all the emotions that can be understood as being human can be accessed by viewing artwork that speaks to you. The sculptures of Henry Moore make me feel sad for no particular reason I can pinpoint but I also find them beautiful beyond words. And herein lies the answer, art - any art, magickal or otherwise - is to be experienced and felt and cannot be experienced through words alone. This is why it is so unfortunate that the mainstream art establishment is unwilling to do retrospectives of occult or magickal art. There are a few of Spare's paintings in the V&A but not on display and there are currently no permanent public exhibitions of Spare's art. The other artists mentioned here occasionally do exhibitions of their paintings and the work is for sale. Only through supporting the art of magickians such as these will we see magickal art as a form enjoying a vibrant revival. Polemical? Absolutely, for the mainstream media have ensured artists such as Damien Hirst will always have the public's eye and ear but with this extraordinary branch of art being ignored, it is left to the esoteric community to champion the work of occult pioneers and bring it to a wider audience.

Why bother to explain the charms of magickal art to an audience that will not understand or may willfully misunderstand? Joel Biroco's explanation for why he creates his paintings is answer enough: "I'm doing them because I know in that process, I can take a kind of picture that can't be got at any other way." Well put.