Maybe it was the larger-than-life Holstein cow sculpture protruding from the building's facade that made this particular ice cream shop the perfect place to talk with artist and mural maker Alex Cook.

Both artist and shop radiate a love of whimsy, of wholesomeness, childlikeness, and pure fun. And this artist and shop owner apparently share a conviction that art is not only for the public, it's also needed in public spaces to sweeeten and elevate a community's spiritual life. But it's that latter need that separates an artist's aims from even socially conscious ice cream vending. To Alex Cook, the elevating power of art—its capacity to touch and heal the heart—is the core reason for putting paint on brick walls. What happens to those who see the murals is more than a happy side-effect or a means of ego gratification for the artist.

Cook lives and paints in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston. JP, as locals call the neighborhood, revolves around Centre Street and its several blocks of quirky shops and foodie haven cafes—more one-of-a-kind than franchise businesses. It's also a diverse section of the city where Hispanic Pentecostal churches coexist with condo conversions.

The ice cream shop where Alex and I talk is diagonally across Centre from the corner building that now sports an untitled mural, which Cook describes as a "woman asleep on the city with birds flying out of her thoughts." Most viewers would agree that the woman in question must be thinking/dreaming beautiful, liberating thoughts.

"What led me to pursue art," Cook explains, "is a passionate love for beauty—the power that beauty has to make life worthwhile in an instant. Beauty ... just feels so good that you know why you're alive. And having experienced it very frequently over many years, it was very easy for me to see the value of beauty and to feel like art was a calling—that I had the skills, the eye, and the heart for it."

Cook finds that art as a profession means a lot of hard work in pursuit of things beautiful and their transforming effects on viewers. He's often confronted the question, Is the practice of art worth the work and the spiritual dedication required? "The answer that has always come," he says, "is, 'Yes, it's absolutely worth it.' And [those demands have] forced me to stand more on a spiritual foundation rather than a financial foundation, or a foundation that comes from the support of society.

"I feel it's an existential fact that if I am pursuing good with all my heart, soul, and mind, then I can't be separated from the good that I'm working for; and my needs will be fulfilled in one way or another. It often boils down to this: If I want creation and expression and beauty, I simply have to go for it, and let the chips fall where they may. But because I know that God supports good in every aspect [of our lives], I can expect the chips to fall in an orderly, compassionate, kind way."

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The idea that God supports every expression of good, Cook sees as spiritually lawful, a point that's amplified throughout the book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. The book's emphasis on God as the creative Principle, he says, helped free him from fears of personal responsibility as a mural project guide and teacher. "Every one of us comes complete to a task with God-given creativity, intelligence, and discipline. We share God's love, we don't create it."

What about the struggles that are associated with being in a creative career—loneliness, poverty, alienation? Cook finds encouragement in both contemporary and historical examples of people who've had "a soulful passion" about their calling. In pursuing those callings, and in trusting the divine Soul that impelled the urge to create or teach or lead, Cook's models and mentors have found their needs supplied—adequate food or funds, supportive friends, and the satisfation that comes from doing something that benefits others down the line.

For Cook, the Bible is also a major source of inspiration. "There are countless examples of people who were asked to leave what they knew and go into something they didn't know. I think that speaks volumes about my artistic experience."

I mention the Biblical patriarch Abraham, because God asked him to launch out into the world without knowing where he was headed. Cook likens that demand to go to a new place to the creative process. "I can't force new images to come. And I can't keep making the same old images, because that's degrading. I have to be willing to let the new thing come. This year, it happened to be creating a program for kids, instead of making paintings. As my idea of art gets bigger, it becomes my whole life. Maybe the next brushstorke that I'm going to make is to become a banker, or a lecturer. Maybe that's the most powerful, convincing, emphatic, beautiful stroke that I can make, and that's my new set of images." We all benefit, says Cook, from the "willingness to go to a new place."

But a banker? It's being willing to follow the divine Mind's lead that matters, Cook feels. Besides, this summer's mural project showed him that "art is not just the painting." Several years ago, he began to see "the necessity of not thinking of just the mural as the art, but of the whole process as the art. The art is ... the whole phenomenon. It's the social interactions, getting the permission to paint the walls, getting the funding, everything. And inasmuch as I can think of the whole process as art, I know that I will be more confident, that I'll enjoy it more, and I know that it will be done more artfully. Instead of just touching the people who see the paintings, it will touch the building owner, too.

"The change that I hope to bring out is a more open neighborhood, a neighborhood where people feel appreciated, where conversation [among neighbors and visitors] is normal instead of abnormal.

"Art," he reasons, "is not just about visual images but about people connecting—about warmth and kindness and compassion and things, which sometimes feel very lacking in our public spaces."

Cook and several young artists-in-training completed two other murals in Boston neighborhoods this summer. One he describes as an "Italian landscape including vignettes of motherhood, working together, play, and journeying," and the third celebrates the landscape and culture of Puerto Rico.

Speaking about the impact of mural-making on his trainees, Cook notes "how important it is for people to be engaged in anything that is interesting to them—to be really engaged in something that makes them feel like, 'Wow! I'm not a throwaway. I'm not subject to the luck of the draw. There is something that makes sense.' I could see that the fact that my kids had something to come to and do every day—something that wasn't watching television, wasn't just hanging out, but which was relatively structured and had a creative outcome, and was going to push them to some new place—was incredibly precious."

As the project got underway, Cook says he saw that "my function was much less as a painter and much more as sort of a meta-painter." Making sure the art itself came out well was the easy part. The bigger challenge lay in creating the kind of mental and spiritual environment that would result in more inclusive blessings.

"When I'm painting and there are people going by, I love to be gregarious and answer every question. I come down off my ladder and make sure that I know their names, ask them what they do, so that it really can become not just 'a painting,' but a glowing event" that continues long after the brushes have been cleaned and stored.

As a public artist, Cook is sensitive to his audience, and especially to those who believe they don't know how to respond to art. "In college, my friends would tell me how cool it was that I was an artist, but they didn't get it at all. They felt intimidated by [my art]. Art is not something that you should have to know about, in order to get.

"It does take imagination to be a viewer; to read poetry, to see movies, and to get out of them all that you can. Often you have to be as adventurous in looking at art as artists are when they're making art. But I would say to anybody who's looking at pictures—don't let anybody intimidate you into thinking that you have to 'study up,' because art is all about your heart, your feelings. If you don't like what you see, fine. Find something you do like." Art, he concludes, is a language of all humanity.

Cook describes the process of making art as "largely improvisational, from actually making the painting with my hands to the way the images come over a series of months. It's really a process of listening and watching and living in the environment of the art ... with God being the one creative force. I feel that the most successful art that I can make—the most poetic, beautiful statements—will come when I am sensitive to the ideas which strike me the most beautifully, and I consider [those ideas] to be the voice of God. In fact, it was the experiences of picture-making and beauty that originally convinced me that there is a God."

Cook sees gratitude for the beauty of God's creation as a higher kind of curative balm. "The times when I truly feel grateful, the world is beautiful to me and nothing is wrong. It's impossible to express beauty without being grateful for it. My hope is that as other people appreciate what I've done, or what my students have done, they also are grateful. And that gratitude has the power to erase its opposites—complaint or pain or frustration."

(For a closer look at Alex Cook's mural projects and other artworks, visit his website: www.stonebalancer.com.)