Meinrad Craighead

PRAYING WITH IMAGES

A documentary about Meinrad is in production.

An hour-long documentary, which is planned as the first in a series on Craighead's work, will offer an introduction to the lifelong pilgrimage of Meinrad Craighead and her mystical encounters with the Divine Feminine. As she explains the dreams and shamanic journeys that have often been the inspiration for her art, viewers will be introduced images of the Divine Mother that have appeared around the globe throughout human history. Subsequent programs focusing on the Black Madonna and on Craighead's lifelong fascination with animals as the sacred emissaries of divine messages will be introduced in this initial program.

meinradproject.org for more info

Announcing the Publication of:

Meinrad Craighead
Crow Mother and the Dog God:
A Retrospective

Order Directly from
Pomegranate Art Books
800-227-1428

Autographed copies of this book are available from the artist. $90 including S&H. (505)344-7109

...This retrospective attempts to convey the enormous body of work that Meinrad Craighead has given to the world over the past forty years. Essays by Rosemary Davies, a writer who first met Meinrad at Stanbrook ; Virginia Beane Rutter, a Jungian analyst and the author of Embracing Persephone; and Eugenia Parry, an art historian and author of numerous books and essays...

read more about the book

A passage from "Soul Sisters,
The Five Sacred Qualities of a Woman's Soul"
by Pythia Peay

Years before the Goddess movement got underway, artist Meinrad Craighead first encountered "God the Mother" as a child. Lying with her dog beneath blue hydrangea bushes in her grandmother's garden in North Little Rock, Arkansas, she had heard "a rush of water" deep within her. "I listened to the sound of the water inside and I understood; 'this is God.' "Thus, it is no surprise that she now lives and paints near the Rio Grande River, the watery guide she describes as the "natural, metaphysical, archetypal symbol which has ruled my life."

Located on the valley floor between the Rio Grande and the pyramidic mountains of Albuquerque, New Mexico, Craighead has designed and built a studio that is a sanctuary for beauty and the creative spirit. Enclosed within the protective circumference of an old grove of cottonwood trees, it is a simple, light space, warmed by a wood burning stove. Dogs sleep in corners, and a profusion of geraniums blooms in the ceiling high windows. A work table stands in the center of the room. Here Craighead, like a medieval craftsman, paints image after image of God the Mother. In paintings such as "Tree Mother" and "Changing Woman", the body of a woman and the body of earth are woven through symbol and image, into lush, tapestrylike icons that celebrate the immanence of the Mother God in creation.

Once a cloistered religious, Craighead brings a contemplative focus to her life as an artist. Her day begins outside with a walk along the riverbank, or before her altar where she builds a fire in the belly of a gourd shaped vessel, gathering in the energy of nature so it will be with her as she works. Moving inside, she then makes a ritual circumambulation of the altars she has placed around her studio, each one honoring a sacred direction. Dusty with the cornmeal that she sprinkles on her animal fetishes and cluttered with stones, pots, postcards from friends and photographs -- of the Black Madonna, Carl Jung, Thomas Merton, and family members -- these "living" altars reflect the rich mythlogy of Craighead's life, the creative cauldron out of which her work emerges. They are paradigmatic of one of the most powerful statements in her book The Mother's Songs: "I am born connected. I am born remembering."

This sense of connection began for Craighead in the close bond shared with her mother, grandmother, and sisters, and intimacy that extends back through her foremothers. "She passes on to me the meaning of religion because she links me to our origin in God the Mother," Craighead once wrote of her mother. This intuitive grounding in the Divine Feminine flourished within her, like a seed in fertile soil, throughout a childhood and young aldulthood imbued with rich images from the Catholic liturgy.

Raised in Chicago, Craighead attended Catholic schools from elementary school through college. After graduating with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1960, she taught in the art department at the University of Albuquerque. Two years later, she left to teach in Florence -- and remained abroad for the next twenty-one years. While in Europe, her veneration for God the Mother led Craighead to Spain, where she lived at Montserrat, the mountaintop monastery near Barcelona famous for its shrine to the Black Madonna. Then at age thirty, following a deep yearning to live a contemplative life, she left her life (there) and entered the 17th century Benedictine monastery Stanbrook Abbey in England. After fourteen years, moving once again on the strength of an interior understanding, she left the monastery. "I knew by then that this was exactly what I was supposed to do, and I did it. I had nowhere to go; I had to be supported by friends. But I have always had the sublime uunderstanding that God was going to take care of me."

And in fact, almost immmediately, Craighead recieved a generous grant from the Arts Council of Great Britain, allowing her to continue painting for several years before returning to New Mexico. Out of this period evolved her work with images of the Divine Feminine. These images, along with her own prose commentary, have been published in books such as The Mother's Songs; Images of God the Mother, and The Litany of the Great River. Currently, she is at work on a retrospective of her life work. According to Craighead, her main source of inspiration comes from a desire to give thanks for the wonder and beauty of creation. "When you wonder, you give thanks, and giving thanks is a ritual. Ritual is the need to do beautiful actions with beautiful things in order to say 'thank you' for this divine beauty we all share. My own upbringing in the Catholic Church gave me a great love of ritual." Indeed, while she does not consider herself to be "a catholic artist", the tradition has nonetheless nurtured her. "Anyone who has grown up in the womb of the Catholic Church is given a very early understanding of the sanctity of the Great Mother in Mary, the Mother of God. In the history of art, she takes over where the early images of the Great Mother were pushed aside." Craighead points out the way the Church, over the centuries, has used the energy of the Divine Feminine symbolically. "The Church is called the Mother, the womb, the source." The image of the Black Madonna, in particular, has inspired her both inwardly, and in the images she paints. "I recognize in her the face of the abyss, which is infinite, beautiful darkness, without an edge. To me, it's a sign of truth, a sign of abundance, a sign of mystery. It's a sign of light shining in the darkness. "

Craighead's creative process, as she describes it, is an act of worship that arises out of seeing and giving expression to the divine beauty around her. She doesn't have visions; her visions are in her paintings. Indeed artists, she says, are like "see-ers" who "see" for the rest of us, and bring back a great treasure. "As an artist, I'm the first to see the treasure which has never existed before. But the treasure is never for yourself. You are just the agent to recieve it and bring it back." The creative process, she says, is endlessly regenerative.... an artist is a transformer; transformation is what our work is about. It's the work in the cauldron; you throw in anything and it all comes together as something delicious. It's like there's centrifugal force in us, and everything that comes in each day is spun around. Most is flung off, but the rich stuff drops right down to the bottom. You know what a compost heap is like; it seethes, makes noises, stinks, bubbles, and emits gasses. All of that is transformation. So when your imagination gets in there, it's growing in the most incredible, rich earth. No wonder the images come out; they've been trapped in there. The work of the spirit is in each of us. All we've got to do is just do it. That is the incarnation, that is making the invisible visible."

(Pgs, 92-93, Soul Sisters: The Five Sacred Qualities of a Woman's Soul, Pythia Peay, Jeremy P. Tarcher / Putnam Publishing c 2002, www.penguinputnam.com used with writers permission.

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