The Creative Occult:
An Art Seance with the Five
At the Art Seance, the artist is a medium. The spirit world is the muse…
Originally, a séance was ‘a sitting’ among friends, a social gathering that didn’t revolve around ghosts until the Spiritualist movement of the 19th century. Spiritualism is the study of the unseen, and around the turn of the century, its practices attracted mystics, scholars, artists, and others who wanted to engage in spirit communication through mediumship. For some people, Spiritualism was a philosophy; for others, it was a sacred practice.
The spirit world has long been a muse for creative souls, including the poet William Butler Yeats and Tarot artist Pamela Coleman Smith. The writer Sylvia Plath used Ouija to inspire her pen, while the mystic William Blake recorded his clairvoyant visions via automatic drawing rituals. In Hilma af Klint’s art collective, the Five, five women infused their creative process with a range of Spiritualist methods, which inspired over 100 finished paintings.
For Hilma and the Five, art-making was ritualistic, a ritual to map the unseen.
Starting on August 14th, join Pointy Hat Press co-founders Caitlyn Barone and Kristin Lisenby for a three-week experiment and workshop in intuitive art-making and creative mediumship. Together, participants will gather around the virtual candle for a collective psychic experiment using art as a doorway into the creative unconscious.
This series blends artistic process, occult philosophy, and generative conversation and prompts to inspire your creative life. Each class invites artists of all levels to divine with their unconscious material through collective and spontaneous art-making methods. And (because self-expression is for everyone), no experience is necessary; just bring a blank page, a curious heart, and the desire to venture beyond the physical veil.
The Creative Occult:
An Art Seance with the Five
INSTRUCTORS
Kristin Lisenby is a storyteller based in the Azores Islands. She is the author of Little Witch Books and co-founder of Pointy Hat Press, an online community exploring mediumship and mysticism through a modern lens. Kristin teaches a monthly creative writing program called the Crossroads, and co-hosts Magick & Alchemy (now in its sixth season!), a Tamed Wild podcast about mythology and witchcraft.
Caitlyn Barone is a New York-based educator, mother, and Art Witch. A lover of flowers and folklore since childhood, Caitlyn believes that nature and mysticism inspire creative expression in a way that feels organic, playful, and of course, a bit witchy. She is the co-creator and illustrator behind the Little Witch Series, as well as the co-founder and creative director of Pointy Hat Press, a publishing house dedicated to magickal stories and the humans who love them.
Pointy Hat Press
Kristin and Caitlyn founded Pointy Hat Press in 2021. What began as a small publishing house for reimagined fairy tales and folklore has become a community fueled by the wyrd and wondrous. Together, Kristin and Caitlyn share whimsical articles and art, and host seasonal workshops that explore nostalgia, sacred collaboration, and the creative occult.
This workshop is for you if…
You want to deepen or reignite your relationship with the creative process.
You want to partake in a collective psychic experiment.
You loved to paint/draw/write as a kid but have lost touch with your artistic side.
You’re curious about the work and methods of Hilma af Klint.
You’re interested in the relationship between art, imagination, and the occult.
Your muses are ghosts, witches, and wyrd women.
You want to merge your psychic gifts with your creative process.
You feel called to make more personal and meaningful work.
You want to collaborate with the unseen.
Our Schedule:
Friday, August 14th, 6pm EST: Art-Making is Mediumship: Hilma af Klint & the Five
Hilma af Klint wasn’t always sure how to interpret her paintings. As an artist and medium who used her creativity to map the spirit world, she insisted that making art wasn’t a pastime or hobby, but a “gateway to another dimension, a realm beyond the visible. Every brushstroke is an invocation, a conversation with the unknown."
Publicly, Hilma specialized in landscapes and botanical drawings, but privately, she was a student of the occult. In collaboration with four friends and fellow artists, Hilma used a combination of seance, trance, channeled drawing, scrying, and other Spiritualist methods to create a score of mystical paintings and detailed communications with the spirit world.
Hilma’s group, known as “The Five,” treated inspiration as an altered state, an invitation to channel wisdom from the unseen. To initiate us into the Creative Occult, we’ll explore the occult methods of the Five, inspiration as a form of mediumship, and séance as a creative catalyst.
Friday, August 21st, 6pm EST: Welcome to the Art Seance: Channeling the Creative Spirit
Originally, séances were social gatherings, casual “sittings” amongst friends that didn’t include the spirit world. However, when Spiritualism began spreading throughout the western world in the mid-19th century, the mundane séance turned mystical.
As a movement and philosophy, Spiritualism aimed to prove the existence of an afterlife and bridge the gap between the living and the dead. Practitioners claimed that unseen entities mingled with the living, and therefore, séances were psychic experiments. Using their combined psychic abilities, people gathered in darkened rooms to record visions and inspired transmissions received through trance mediumship, scrying, planchette drawing, channeled writing, or another method originally used by mediums to speak with the dead.
For our second gathering of the Creative Occult, we’ll gather for an art seance inspired by Hilma and the Five! In this collective psychic experiment, participants will divine a message from the spirit world aided by the Spiritualist-inspired art-making method of their choosing.
Friday, August 28th, 6pm EST: Creative Mediumship: Mapping the Unseen
The creative process is a revolving door into worlds unseen and unconscious. No finished masterpieces lurk in the shadows, just winding trails of books, tarot cards, and synchronicities.For some artists, ‘unconscious’ isn’t solely a state of mind and the realm of things unknown, it’s a mystical place to be explored. Carl Jung popularized the theory of the Unconscious in the 20th century, but the ancients have been visiting this realm through dreams, art, and ritual for centuries. The thing is–our ancestors didn’t call this astral meeting place the Unconscious, they called it the spirit world.According to the 19th-century artist Hilma af Klint and her art coven, the Five, the spirit world was responsible for some of their most famous creations, including The Ten Largest. Hilma insisted art-making was a form of map-making, so when the Five parted ways after a decade of collaboration, she continued painting the spirit world, eventually amassing over 1300 paintings, dozens of detailed notebooks, automatic drawings, a book manuscript, and much, much more.
For the final meeting of the Creative Occult, participants will alchemize their inner world into something tangible–a map of the creative unconscious.
Exchange:
A single payment of $222
The cost of $222 for the three-week program includes three 90-minute classes, three PDFs with informational articles and prompts, and a Slack Community & Coven to connect with Kristin, Caitlyn, and participants of The Creative Occult.
We prioritize making our offerings accessible. If you require assistance, please send us a message explaining your situation, and we can work together to find a solution. Payment plans are available.
FAQ:
DO I NEED TO ATTEND ALL WORKSHOPS LIVE?
No! This program is intended to support any schedule. Workshops can be listened to via the recordings in our shared Google Drive.
DO I HAVE ACCESS TO ALL MATERIALS FOREVER?
The Slack Channel will end with the program (2 weeks after closing), however, the prompts, exercises, and PDFs from the workshops are yours to keep forever.
WHAT EXPERIENCE DO I NEED TO HAVE BEFORE JOINING?
No experience needed! Just a love of art and magic required.
