A few years ago I wrote a post on spiritually moving great art. Since then I have kept a Google Doc where I keep copies of good art that I find, so I thought it was time for a part II. Don’t worry, this isn’t another excuse to be a shill for the glorious AI revolution where people demonstrably can’t tell the difference between AI and non-AI creative products and the artist community goes the way of blacksmithery. (Okay, trolling over.) As far as I know all of this art is made by people with warm flesh and beating hearts.

As a warning, my artistic tastes aren’t super avant-garde, and some would consider them kitsche, but I’m not sure I buy the premise that the more avant garde stuff is a doorway to some higher realm or deeper insight if you spend the time or are naturally artsy and cool enough to get it.

The Angelus by Jean-François Millet. Moving depiction of the simple faith of Catholic peasants dutifully reciting their daily prayers.

Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) by Salvador Dali

Like many youth of a certain age I had a phase where I read whatever I could get my hands on about the fourth dimension, and even got to state in the science fair for some speculative math about four dimensional geometry (which I later discovered had already been postulated a billion years ago, but it was good enough for a junior high school science fair in 2000s Utah).

Anyway, for those of you who did not go through a youthful obsession with four dimensional space, in the same way that a cube can be unfolded into a two dimensional space, the hypercube net is what a four-dimensional cube would look like unfolded into three dimensions, and it looks like a cross, so Dali found a way to connect the religious and mathematically transcendent. The idea of connecting the religious to high-level physical and mathematical reality is intriguing to me, as sort of a way to tie all ultimate reality together (or to “circumscribe all truth into one whole” as it were). The infinite space and tiles in the background gives it an added layer of, I don’t know what the word would be for it, abstraction?

Freedom of Worship, Saying Grace, Walking to Church, Golden Rule, Lift Up Thine Eyes by Norman Rockwell.

Similar to The Angelus above, Rockwell’s depicts a simple faith of a bygone era, plus I enjoy romanticized art. (I actually enjoy Soviet Realism art from this same time period, but obviously those don’t have the religious overtones). It appears that Lift Up Thine Eyes is in the BYU Museum of Art. 

Anything from the Church Art Competition. The every-three-years International Church Art competition never fails to impress.

And yes, as a proper Mormon I like The Christus, Del Parson’s Christ in the Red Robe and He is Risen, and Harry Anderson’s Church-commissioned paintings.

The Jewish Cemetery, by Jacob van Ruisdael.

An allegorical landscape painting suggesting ideas of hope and death.

Esther and Mordecai, by Arent de Gelder

The intense personalities and emotions in this depiction of a story we love so much we gave our oldest son the odd-for-a-gentile middle name of Mordecai.

The Endless Knot, a symbol of eternity used in various religions.

Mother to Mother by Katie Garner

Katie Garner is an Utah artist who does a lot of pieces about motherhood.

Simeon the Godreceiver by Alexei Yegorov

Also loved this story of unassuming faith and devotion so much we named a son after him.

The Abbey in the Oak Wood by Caspar David Friedrich

Okay, not inspiring, but decaying religious structures of formerly vibrant, dynamic institutions (like the ones littering the East Coast) strike a particular note of deep pathos for me.

James C. Christensen religious works. There are a lot of these. His book Passage By Faith: Exploring the Inspirational Art has a nice collection of them.

Nativity by Brian Kershisnik

A favorite of my wife’s; she likes to envision all births as being accompanied by a similar phalanx of angels.