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                [Art] is going to deepen our awareness of the things that matter.  It’s going to make us— to refer to what we said earlier—more a person of integrity, more true to my own essence, then I would have been without this encounter.  It’s like meeting a great genius, just talking, even being in the presence of such a person.  You feel enriched, enlightened; you’re more than you were before you had that encounter.  Well, that’s what paintings are offering us: encounters; encounters with greatness.

                [Spiritual art] will take us further than you knew you believed.  It will take you into uncharted realms.  The spiritual power is this ability to lift us out of the confines of our ego, out of the traps that many people are in.  Their relationships, their jobs, their worries, mortgages…health.  And, there they go ‘round in the cage, and art opens a door.  It takes you into something bigger than yourself, something immensely exhilarating and refreshing, so when you come back into your cage, you know that’s not all there is to life.

                You know, Kenneth Clark used to say, whenever he got deeply depressed, he’d go and look at something, some great work of art, and there it was, sailing through the centuries (he didn’t use these words, these are my words).  Untouched by all of our littleness and our anxieties, and we’re taken into that, not as an escape, but as a way to coming back into our anxieties more able to put them into perspective.  Art is a great means of getting perspective on all that worrying, depressing, constricting, in your life.

Quote from Sister Wendy Beckett, Carmelite nun and self-taught art appreciator, from her Conversations with Bill Moyers, Part 5, in 1997.  Retrieved from YouTube on June 5, 2009, from