Art: a thin place
I have stood in front of paintings that stopped me completely. Not because they were technically impressive or visually striking — though they may have been — but because something in them reached past the surface and touched something I didn't have words for. A stillness. A presence. The sense that the room had changed.
I think most people have had this experience, even if they've never tried to name it.
The Celtic Christian tradition has a name for it: the thin place. A location, a moment, an encounter — where the distance between the human and the holy collapses. Where the veil between heaven and earth grows thin enough that something of God presses through. Gandhi, in a different tradition entirely, described a similar experience: an unseen power that pervades everything, felt but not seen, that transcends the senses. The poet Sharlande Sledge captured it this way:
"Thin places," the Celts call this space, Both seen and unseen, Where the door between the world And the next is cracked open for a moment And the light is not all on the other side. God shaped space. Holy.
These places are not rare mountaintops or dramatic moments alone. They are anywhere — a walk through the woods, a particular quality of light, a piece of music heard at the right moment, a painting encountered in a quiet room — where we are given pause to wonder at what lies beyond the ordinary. Where the longings we carry but rarely speak — for connection, for peace, for love — find something that answers them.
I believe art can be a thin place. Not every piece of art, and not always — but at its best, art does what thin places do. It witnesses the fracture of the world and holds open a door toward something better. It carries both the person who made it and the person standing in front of it into a shared experience that goes past language. Joseph Brodsky wrote that art is a form of resistance to the imperfections of reality — an attempt to create an alternative that moves toward a conceivable perfection. I understand that. My work is made in that spirit: not to document the world as it is, but to point toward the world as God intends it.
Abstraction serves this particularly well. Without the anchor of representation — without a recognizable face or landscape to settle on — the viewer is freed to receive the work more purely. The exchange becomes emotional rather than intellectual. The non-representational surface becomes a kind of open space where the Divine can move. It is here, I believe, that the thin place emerges in painting: in the gap between what the eye sees and what the soul recognizes.
This is what I desire for everything I make. Not that people will walk away with answers, but that they will walk away refreshed — carrying, even briefly, the sense that heaven is closer to earth than it usually feels. That the veil is thin. That God is present. That the light is not all on the other side.
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Resources: Sharlande Sledge, "Thin Places." Mahatma Gandhi, Spiritual Message to the World, 1931. Joseph Brodsky. Photo: Ryan McDonald, studio, November 2021.
