Painting + Prayer with Emily McIlroy
About the Episode
Is art the same thing as prayer? What does it mean to be mystical? Is it possible to have immense doubt and still be a person of “faith”? Is getting on your knees the only way to talk to God? And, who and what are “God,” even?
In this conversation, I talk with Emily McIlroy about the intersections of Painting + Prayer. As you’ll hear us discuss, “prayer” can simply mean a posture or a way of being. Or maybe even a way of living inside of a question. One without resolution—something that just is, but that we are in active dialogue with, in our work and our relationships, and everything else.
Episode Details
About Emily (she/her)
Emily McIlroy was born and raised in Norman, Oklahoma with her twin brother, Ross. She received her BA in Studio Art from the University of Arizona in 2005 and her MFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa in 2011. She served many years as an instructor and art educator for the Honolulu Museum of Art School and the Hawai'i State Art Museum, and currently teaches in the Drawing and Painting Program at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. When she’s not teaching or in her studio, Emily enjoys reading, writing, and walking and swimming her way through various terrestrial and aquatic wildernesses. She lives and works in Honolulu’s Pālolo Valley with her very vocal Siamese cat, Gormaen.
Emily's large-scale works on paper explore forces and life forms of the natural world as metaphors for human experiences of love, loss, grief, and wonder. Emerging from a repetitive process of rendering and erasure, the creation of her pieces parallels an endless pursuit of reconciling past with present, duration with impermanence, the visible with the invisible. Looking simultaneously both outward and inward, she seeks to connect the realm of wilderness—its beauty, violence, power, and fragility—with our own internal territories.
Emily's work has most recently been exhibited at Dairy Arts Center (Boulder, CO), Emerson Center for the Arts and Culture (Bozeman, MT), Thelma Sadoff Center for the Arts (Fond du Lac, WI), Fitton Center for Creative Arts (Hamilton, OH), and the Honolulu Museum of Art (Honolulu, HI). She has previously been Artist-in-Residence at Glacier National Park (West Glacier, MT) and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts (Saratoga, WY). She is a 2022 recipient of the Marianne Oberg Foundation for Spiritual Art Grant.
What We Discuss
How Emily and I came to know each other.
Emily talks about her body of work, The Lilies, as prayers.
Art as the whetstone of consciousness.
Sources Mentioned
The Lilies How They Grow at the Dairy Arts Center
Love + Death with Dr. Andreas Weber, This Plus That Podcast
Conquest of Mind by Eknath Easwaran (the book that Emily’s dad gave her)
Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger
Episode Transcript
Coming soon, hopefully! Would you be willing to help? Email me at brandi@thisplusthat.com!
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Credits
Podcast management and production by The Podcast Babes. All of my music is provided by the in-house musicians at Slip.stream.
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