Who is meinrad craighead

Donna Campbell Georgann Eubanks. Top credits Director Donna Campbell. See more at IMDbPro. Trailer Meinrad Craighead: Praying with Images. Photos Add Image. Storyline Edit. A new documentary about artist and teacher, Meinrad Craighead: Praying with Images tells the story of Craigheads artistic and spiritual pilgrimage which began in her native Arkansas, where her greatest influences were the Catholic Church, the natural environment, and her grandmother who encouraged her to draw and paint.

The documentary includes nearly of Craigheads paintings, shown in beautiful detail. Viewers will see images that have flowed from her dreams and visions of the Divine Feminine over the last 50 years, experience her moving images and stories of the devastating bosque fire, and travel with her on a recent pilgrimage to visit her beloved Black Madonna of Montserrat in Spain. If I didnt paint, Craighead says, I wouldnt know where I am in the world.

Her truly original art spans time and distance and tradition to combine imagery from Catholicism, Native American shamanism, and ancient mythology.

Add to the mix her own dreams and mystic visions and the result is a unique synthesis of energy, color, and connectedness. We have engaged professionals to edit the tapes into viewable segments.

With these presentations, we benefit from her extensive travels and knowledge of the Divine Feminine. It is thrilling to hear Meinrad speaking again—describing her own work and exploring the Feminine Divine throughout history. I hope that after watching these first segments you will want to see more.

You can ensure that there will be more by making a gift to the Meinrad Craighead Project. You made it possible for us to make the Meinrad Craighead: Praying with Images documentary.

Christened Charlene, she was the first of three sisters born to a Catholic family in Arkansas. Growing up there and in Chicago during the Depression, she made do with sidewalks and scraps of paper, sketching incidents from the plots of radio serials.

By the time I was a teenager I spent hours drawing every day. Her Catholic upbringing, she said, nourished her imagination through its ritual and ceremonies, its candles, incense, psalms and litanies. It was an ideal way to grow as an artist. Yet her first real religious experience, at the age of 7, was not in the church but in nature, with her dog, she said. She had retreated from the heat of a summer day to the shade of some hydrangea bushes. Soon after this I came upon a photo in a book of a statue of a woman.

This discovery brought a sense of well-being and gratitude, which has never diminished. She believed in her because she had experienced her, she said. We hid together inside the structures of institutional Catholicism. Through half a lifetime of Catholic liturgies, during school years, in my professional work as an educator, for 14 years in a monastery, she lived at my inmost center, the groundsill of my spirituality.

Rather than threatening her certainty that the woman was, for her, the truer image of divine Spirit, the Catholic church offered reflections of the feminine deity in Mary as the Great Mother. As a teen, Craighead fell under the spell of Dorothy Day, she said, even writing to her an impassioned letter asking how she could join up with the Catholic Worker to feed the hungry. In , Craighead received a scholarship to study art at the University of Wisconsin.

After teaching for two years in Albuquerque, she took a year off to study and then teach art in Florence, Italy. She returned to the United States 21 years later. In , she entered Benedictine Stanbrook Abbey in England, where for the next 14 years she continued her work, publishing her first book, The Sign of the Tree , and becoming the subject of a number of television documentaries.

I loved monastic living and, at 44 years old, it would be hard to start a new life but I had to trust my calling. It was only after I left that I began to understand that I was supposed to concentrate on images of God the Mother.

Eventually she erupted directly into my imagery. In she returned to the United States to set up her studio in New Mexico, where she still lives and works, devoting herself to imaging God as feminine. The ancient world had strong goddesses -- Isis, Tiamat, Cybele, Demeter. Though the Christian Godhead lacks a strong female aspect, Craighead believes that anyone who has grown up in the womb of the Catholic church is given an early understanding of the sanctity of the Great Mother in Mary, the Mother of God.

Craighead points out the way the church over the centuries has used the energy of the divine feminine symbolically. Hunt have explored the role of the divine feminine in the history of religion and introduced multigendered language to describe God.

Ecofeminists in particular assert that the degradation of nature is related to the oppression of women in our culture, which goes hand in hand with the dearth of female images of the divine. Subjects in her work range from the visions of Catholic mystic St. Hildegard of Bingen, to images of the Rio Grande, scenes from the psalms and the Song of Songs, figures from Greek and Norse mythology, Native American animal and divine spirits, wise grandmothers, angels clicking castanets, otherworldly beings.

There are also women giving birth in a variety of ways, self-portraits, menstrual blood, icon-like scenes featuring dogs, crows, flickers, coyotes, magpies, turtles and owls.

Beside the feminine divine, animals are a key element in her art. They are other, manifestly magic, splendid in their beauty, terrifying in their physical power, dangerous, yet giving.