Paul Heussenstamm

Paul Heussenstamm is a painter of mandalas and sacred images who teaches painting as a form of meditation. He grew up in a family of artists, the son of two painters who met while studying art, and came to painting full time only in his late thirties, when the mandala became the centre of his work. Since then he has made more than two thousand paintings drawing on Buddhist, Hindu and Christian imagery, from Sri Yantras and chakra designs to trees of life, and his pictures hang in the homes of a number of well-known spiritual authors. He works from a studio in Laguna Beach, California, where the paintings are signed only on the back, in the spirit of art as something that passes through the artist.

His workshops, which he calls Art as a Spiritual Path, are small groups of six to twelve people, and no painting experience is needed. Participants usually begin with coloured pencils to loosen up, then move to acrylics to make a personal mandala or yantra over several days, treating the process as a way of listening inwardly. He teaches at his own studio and home, at Esalen, on regular painting retreats on Maui, and on trips to Asia and Europe.