Transpersonal art is not magic, it's the creative imagination, the "new" modernism, one of the disciplines considered by Boucovolas (1999), in a listing describing how transpersonal psychology may relate to other areas of transpersonal study.  Graham Wallas (1926) identified the creative process as occurring in four stages: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. He explains further, the most important stage of the creative process--incubation--occurs in the unconscious. Verification is where the solution arrives in the unconscious and becomes manifest to the conscious awareness. 

It is well known that paints and pigments can be approached as ritual objects, magical energetic substances to help create a space for manifestation. Painting or the ownership of them can be a meditative ritual, a ritual of affirmation and manifestation. With transpersonal art and in life, there is space and opportunity at every phase for invention, as with life no part of the art creation should be merely rushing from A to Z without appreciating the journey in its fullness along the way because every moment is complete in itself.  

What is the purpose of Design Psychology? 

The purpose of Design Psychology is to create environments that reflect the individual or group as well as encourage positive change. Spiritual considerations and psychology are now the principal design tools used to create aesthetically and functionally beautiful places, emotionally  and socially fulfilling spaces, because all significant events in life reflect a deeper sense of purpose, meaning and direction in this, the human experience!  

Transpersonal art will continue as a growing trend among academics; because it focuses on self-realization and design psychology, it will be the tool used increasingly to create inspiring places. 

What is Transpersonal Art therapy? 

A growing trend among academics is Transpersonal art therapy, which focuses on self-realization, dealing less with curing and more with healing. Curing without healing is a triumph; healing which may entail curing is a necessity.  The mind and body is more than just an extremely complex machine. We are also spiritual beings learning from life, searching for meaning in birth, death, and all that precedes and follows our life cycle.  The psycho-spiritual traditions of the world's cultures offer us the potential for new models of health and well-being. Comparative studies of spiritual and religious systems and transpersonal anthropology are an important part of  Transpersonal art therapy, because all significant events in life reflect a deeper sense of purpose, meaning and direction and the spiritual or transpersonal dimension of the human experience!

How does it work? 

"We recognized the role of imagination and ritual that is shared between contemporary psychotherapies and all ancient traditions. It was also evident that the arts are the bridging existential phenomena that unite ritual, imagination and dream-world in a way that no other activity can do." -Paulo Knill (p50 in Foundations of Expressive Arts Therapy).

Design Psychologists take clients through a series of carefully developed exercises which help them look inward for a place if inspiration. Usually done as part of the programming process, these exercises bring to the fore a vast personal store of experience and emotions that contribute to a client's vision of ideal place.

Transpersonal psychology approaches to health, social sciences and practical arts.

Transpersonal psychology is sometimes confused with parapsychology, a mistake made due to the overlapping and unconventional research interests of both fields; parapsychology would however tend to focus more in its subject matter on the "psychic" and transpersonal psychology the "spiritual" (relatively crude though these categorizations are, it is still a useful distinction in this context). While parapsychology leans more towards traditional scientific epistemology (laboratory experiments, statistics, research on cognitive states), transpersonal psychology tends to be more closely related to the epistemology of the humanities and the hermeneutic disciplines (humanism, existentialism, phenomenology, anthropology), although it has always included contributions involving experimental and statistical research.

Transpersonal psychology is also sometimes confused with the New Age. Although the transpersonal perspective grew out of the human potential movement, a movement that many commentators associate with a broad conception of the New Age, it is still problematic to place transpersonal psychology within such a framework. Transpersonal psychology is an academic discipline, not a religious or spiritual movement, and many of the field's leading authors, among those Sovatsky (1998) and Rowan (1993), have addressed problematic aspects of New Age hermeneutics. Transpersonal Art is one of the disciplines considered by Boucovolas (1999), in listing how transpersonal psychology may relate to other areas of transpersonal study.

In writing about transpersonal art, Boucovolas begins by noting how, according to Breccia and also to the definitions employed by the International Transpersonal Association in 1971, transpersonal art may be understood as art work which draws upon important themes beyond the individual self, such as the transpersonal consciousness. This makes transpersonal art criticism germane to mystical approaches to creativity. Transpersonal art criticism, as Boucovolas notes, can be considered that which claims conventional art criticism has been too committed to stressing rational dimensions of art and has subsequently said little on art's spiritual dimensions, or as that which holds art work has a meaning beyond the individual person.

Transpersonal perspectives are also being applied to such diverse fields as psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, sociology, pharmacology, cross-cultural studies (Scotton, Chinen and Battista, 1996; Davis, 2003) and social work (Cowley & Derezotes, 1994). Currently, transpersonal psychology, especially the schools of Jungian and Archetypal psychology, is integrated, at least to some extent, into many psychology departments in American and European Universities. Transpersonal therapies are also included in many therapeutic practices.