Liberate Your Inner Artist
At the Art Monastery, we guide heart-centered creatives to dissolve blocks, merge art with spiritual practice, and cultivate a joyful, fearless expression that feels authentically yours.
Are you an Artmonk?
Do your fingers itch to create?
Do you suspect your art-making could be a spiritual practice — sacred, even — but you don’t want to get all up on your high horse about it?
Do you dream that your work could be of service in some way? To proliferate joy, connection, and insight?
Welcome.
You’re an Artmonk and you’ve found your people.
Your Path to Creative Awakening
Artist Unleashed Bundle (free)
A bundle of resources designed to help you dissolve creative blocks, deepen your art practice, and connect with your inner muse. Yours for free!
3 Keys to Total Creative Freedom Workshop
Join a global community of women and gender queer artists, creators, and makers for the Art Monastery's most popular workshop ever. You'll walk away with your creativity ablaze!
Awakening Creativity Program
A transformative program that supports women & non-binary folx to overcome creative blocks, unleash flow, and make the art you were born to make.
Meet Suiko McCall: Artist, Teacher, Visionary
Suiko Betsy McCall is the heart behind the Art Monastery. As an artist, teacher, and former monk, Suiko merges creativity and spiritual practice to help others reconnect with their authentic voice.
Her approach blends the discipline of monastic life with the freedom of artistic exploration, empowering creatives to see their art as sacred and their lives as works of art.
Full Moon May 12, 2025
The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
—Audre Lorde
At times maybe you know yourself a beautiful weirdo
Sometimes it may feel like an ineptness or being planted roots up in toxic soil
I know I am a queer willow tree
living in a middle aged human body
At least sometimes I know, like springtime when I come on all flirtatious
& flamboyant with buds swelling as I hydraulic pump fresh fluid from subsoil
I am in love with the chill of winter & the soaking rains & the unctuous sounds
of clay mucking & just want to make catkins to declare what words cannot.
And I’m surrounded in lush difference
Leaves moldering, wild babies of all species swelling in fur bellies or burnt umber shells or moist oval opalescent membranes reflecting rainbow prisms.
This world is out of this world with vibrancy & phase shifts
It does not fix us even as it roots & homes us, gives us everything we need
This world sings us each a song of becoming & belonging
(sung) Come, come, whoever you are, wherever are you are, come!
Queer the song with long breath or short,
with chirrups, thumps, groans, moans, hiccups, bellows, yawns, growls
This is a mixtape universe being crafted as we dream ourselves out of spirit matter
This we know: spirit matters
It is essential, but it doesn’t essentialize us
Queer your vision by closing, squinting, zooming, widening, opening
Queer your touch by licking, bouncing, clapping, stroking, shaking, flapping
Queer your ears by circling the dial to the more-than-human station, to the music between others’ words, listen to your own listening
as it makes up what the future may sound like
I am in love with spring & with being unsettled by how novel chlorophyll cells appear
Who is GREEN anyway?
The sun becomes me & I unfurl in appreciation
There is no place more weird than this being, this being,
this silly-serious song of being
Out of nowhere, for no bad reason, I was born to be this way:
limbs dipped in air sugar spun like wild radish seed
corkscrewing into the synchronous soil of wherever
Hell bent on some shade of purple variation
Hot cold beautiful weird, anyone everywhere is natural, whole, evolving, perfect
For praise of the sacred in each of us,
every heavenly zit of life ready to burst in season
I cooked up this pollen, I produced these leaves, I bent down & rose up again
Near the stream of life-giving water & was made by you
By virtue of your aliveness I too can behave wildly, in the beautiful weird
So: all praise the lack of cops & gatekeepers in the origin of the world
Let’s eliminate them from our co-created spaces
All praise the delicious delirious continuum as natural as rain
All praise neuroqueer heresies that creatively flip the straitjacket narrative forever
& in deep regard, may we all flop down & grow radically free together.
Our psyche, our soma, flowering congruence, joyful, somber
Sharing breath, making sacred anew, aloha
Aloha to you & you & you.
Stay inspired with our Moonletters
Receive original poems and paintings around each New and Full Moon, designed to inspire your creative journey and deepen your connection to art, intuition, and rhythms of the earth.
Curious to explore past Moonletters? Browse the Archive and soak up the inspiration.
What Artmonks Are Saying
Our programs have transformed the lives of countless creatives. Hear directly from our Artmonks about their journey.
"The Artmonk Challenge did for me exactly what I had hoped it would -- helped me establish a daily art practice. I cannot tell you how grateful I am! I have a ridiculously hard time establishing routines of any sort, definitely my biggest challenge. But making a small goal (art 5-10 minutes every day), and having the accountability of that 100 Day Challenge, worked for me."
"Thank you for your work in creating this entrance into art. I am 74 and have never had any art instruction. Whatever the quality of my art may or may not be, I feel like I’m coming home."
"Very creative and deeply spiritual organization. The folks who run it are devoted to it and live their lives in accordance with it."
“I’ve been taking Suiko’s retreats and programs since 2016. Suiko’s natural grace, ease, and wisdom have always nurtured me. My desire to connect with art, meditation, and such like minded people is essential to my well being.”
"Suiko has the incredibly rare ability to translate the creative process into usable, understandable pieces of information. I don’t even know how that’s actually possible — but she does it."
"Suiko offers substantial value through the playfulness she brings to everything she does and says, as well as her love of art and creative thinking... She is non-traditional and that is EXTREMELY appealing because it gives me (and others) room to play and explore myself (thoughts, feelings, ideas, desires) freely without fear of scolding."