Category Archives: beauty

the gathering above

“The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding; and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly, as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying any attention to the sky.”

Quoted here is a section from Flannery O’Connor’s 1^st novel “Wise Blood”, in which the writer uses her weird characters as darkish foils to prod the reader into considering timeless things. O’Connor was a brilliant and lonely critic of secularism’s vacuity; she considered modernism naïve. And like Jesus, her harshest stories called out religious emptiness. How would she be illustrating the bigger story for us now? O’Connor would be a good one to read if fiction is a way into your heart, for our world is changing and we need to get a grip on what it is that is truly mooring us.

You wont find what anchor’s your soul in the material world. How can I make such an assertion? I’ve lived enough life; I’ve read the best “good book”; and I know how it ends. If non-fiction is a better way in for you, this is time tested. Meanwhile the National Geographic arrived this week. It is expensively produced, in a ying/yang edition titled “How We Saved the World”, or from back to front “How We Lost the Planet”. Take your pick; they’re giving us only two options. One would think such an organization committed to the earth would offer a few words of acknowledgement to earth’s Maker. But no. And, they admit: they don’t know the future. Only the One who hears prayer does.

The image I post today fits right along with O’Connor’s description, as she teases the imagination higher. Here’s another look-up for you. I’ve had the texture and the hues on this oil panel for some months, but I could not resolve the whole satisfactorily. Then suddenly I realized I needed to give it a window beyond the morass of the now. Voila!

looking up

It’s a surprising turn around, and something you can do. Given the news on the ground, we need to keep lifting our eyes. Here’s one way I was reminded:

This past Friday, after an early morning meeting, I decided to hit the Kroger to get a jump-start on other things that needed doing. At 7am, the Kroger has decided to only rely on their self check-out kiosks, so I gamely ran my many items through the scanner, only to find it continually malfunctioning. Groan. The clerk who came to help was having trouble too, for the system kept shutting down. I hated it. (Note to self: don’t go to the Kroger again this early. Next note to self: don’t take your frustration out on this poor worker who didn’t cause this problem). 40 minutes later, groceries redeemed, I left the store with a frown.

But then, in the morning light, I looked up and saw this most fabulous sky. It was getting ready to storm. I stood there transfixed and fumbled for my phone to snap some shots right in the middle of the parking lot.

Seeing this changed my frown, and my entire mood. It was like a mini redemption after the struggle to bag some stuff. In the background of our days, the frantic 24 hour news cycle keeps us all on edge anyway. I’m resorting to music more and more. And I think often now of Jesus’ words “But when these things begin to take place, straighten up and lift up your heads…”

I have since last week made three small oils of that sky. Here is one of them. The imitation is only flattery. The pixels in my phone aren’t even adequate. You need to look up to find your own real thing.

face to Face

“We’re living thru a period in which we’re de-facing things…” said Oxford Philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, “we no longer see the light of the soul shining in things”. In many of his writings, Scruton argued that as cultural materialists, we’re no longer valuing ourselves (and therefore others) at the core because we don’t look face to face. “What core?” says the careless atheist. Scruton, recently deceased this month, would have countered that the immaterial part of each of us is the real lasting story. What is entirely unique in each face is a reflection of a deeper substance: the soul–which is self-conscious, multi faceted, freely distinct and making decisions even to the end of physical life. Scruton also posited that we never become real with ourselves, or known until we face another right in front of us. And further, he surmised that when one comes before the face of God, without a barrier between, that we become finally ‘in touch’ in the deepest of ways. The face is the front forward of the being, and to hide from another’s face is to devalue that one.

His words made me think of this painting. This was accomplished by an artist friend using various dilutions of coffee and crayon. The fugitive media she selected to describe her mother is itself a poignant counterpoint to the lasting depth she expresses! This was a real woman, caught in the heaviness of later life, before she passed away. Every line and wrinkle is only a marking of the deeper whole behind the skin. And because the artist faced her mom, honestly and directly, it is easy to imagine how she loved her.

This drawing may be one of the more beautiful things I have ever seen. The faces of my babies were certainly most beautiful in their purity, but this face shows the struggle of time. There is something accomplished here in the drawing that stops me. Scruton described it as: “The arrest of the self by the confrontation of beauty, the significance of tragedy…we’re taken up by it”

My work, and my skill sets are entirely different than what this artist accomplished. But Scruton’s words challenge me about elucidating some way into beauty, combined with the truth of tragedy in a way that takes others up also. It’s a matter of facing the Face.

program

When entering any performance, one is typically handed a program. The value of what is detailed on that page gives context to the progression about to be played out. Amongst myriads of possibilities, someone made selections for what you’re about to see. There’s notation about the beginning and how it will end, there are ascriptions and interludes. Your understanding is enhanced with guidance from any program.

In certain masterworks of art there is what is called a “program of images”. This is where an artist makes selections, presenting several images together to create a narrative whole. Viewing that collection takes time, for what the artist offers the viewer is a deliberate opportunity into his broad intention. Not many artists do this; those few who have (like Giotto’s fresco progression in the Scrovegni chapel, or Brunelleschi’s gates of Paradise in Florence) are offering the viewer a sublime visual performance. And examining those collections reveal the scope the artist had to have to make such deliberate choices.

Recently I was guided into the blue hued space in the eastern apse of St. Stephan’s Church in Mainz, Germany where a cycle of images is on display. Marc Chagall sketched out and directed the pattern of images for these huge stained glass verticals when he was 91 years old! He even hand painted a number of the glass pieces. I took in the expanse with wonder. I could pick out bits and clues, and finally I bought the program book written by the former Monsignor Klaus Mayer, who consulted with Chagall in his studio on this grand project.

Chagall grew up in Belorussia into a hardworking Orthodox Jewish home, where the Sabbath was a treasured joy. Treasure and Joy could be called distinctive signatures in this man’s entire oeuvre. The artist lived and managed to work through the Russian Revolution, the sorrow of exile, then the Nazi horrors, the emigration community in NYC, and finally the reconstruction of Europe. He remained true to his unique voice through all this upheaval. He studied in Israel and though he was no longer a practicing Jew, he was an earnest Bible student all his life. “Ever since early childhood, I have been captivated by the Bible. It has always seemed to me and still seems today the greatest source of poetry of all time.”

His words are made all the more real in the images he selected for the viewer in these windows. The overriding theme in his program is the covenants of God, or those binding agreements that God has given all mankind. The Sabbath is just one of them.

The depth of his understanding took my breath away in that space, then in further reading into his motivation. Consider just this: a Jew celebrating the universal rooted from the biblical text, directs a program of images for a Christian church which had been bombed by the war. This is the only example of Chagall’s work we have in any church in Germany. I felt like I was on Holy ground, consecrated by much, much suffering and highlighted with studied biblical light.

I am prompted to add this plug: the book I wrote, Markers, is also a program (though granted of a much minor sort). However, like Chagall’s images, my selected chapters, with images, are prompted by the text. I’ve simplified big ideas, not as a theologian, but as another Bible reader looking at the whole. The synthesis is mine, but the themes are big picture universal. I offer it as another guide into the same grand story that captivated Chagall and so many others.

facets

Gem cutters get close. They begin with raw material: rough rock-bits from the earth. They’ve been trained in sensing how to recognize potential, what signs to note from the faintest of glimmers. Not everything picked up holds promise, but in the working of the stuff sometimes there is reward. And then they cut. They don’t leave it alone either. They cut again. For it is in the facets where the value multiplies. The light dances, the shadows bend revealing color, and then someone’s breath gasps for the catching of something…

Have you ever noticed how folks sometimes put their hands to their mouths when being overwhelmed? Is it because we just know our outer expression will be paltry in the face of something much grander, or scarier, or livelier?

But I can’t stop trying. This is one of several sketches I’ve worked out recently in an effort to understand and articulate this grander thing going on. The photo images I took in May were only a beginning. Facing some cut rock I felt as if I was at the edge of a very rich mine.

And reading Jesus, I see he even deliberated out loud before his disciples about “how to picture” something which to us is only mystery. He spoke many parables, “figures of the true” that some would catch and others would completely miss. T.S. Eliot said “human kind cannot bear too much reality”

drawing to discover

Blasted rock face breaks off according to the composition of the material being forcibly disrupted. Some rock just crumbles at impact, like so much hardened sand. Other rock, having been deposited by volcanic flow or metamorphic heat reveals these jagged architectural planes and lines when blasted. The visible cuts un-bury the evidence of long-term history in the making of the substrate.

I have a good number of wonderful (to me) photos of cut-faces as we recently drove around Lake Superior. Since a little kid, these broken faces have always drawn my eye. All I could say was “these are beautiful!” to the casual glances of others. Now I am trying to understand why these have so magnetized my attention.

From burst photos taken in the car, then on site: en plein air, I have been drawing and begun painting — not to replicate, but to discover. This posture takes the pressure off, and opens doors for freed up investigation. For it’s not about the rock/lines/planes/color though that has captivated first. I use those as jumping off points. It’s more about the nakedness of the cuts and the beauty therein exposed. Oh to be able articulate that! It’s like this solid rock thing with its cut contrasts is a signifier of something else being expressed to me.

In his dreamy, harsh, philosophical novel “The Island of the World”, Michael O’Brien says early on that “people always seem to fall in love with the image first, never the substance…”. It’s pictures that draw us originally, but if we get hooked and we want to know, organic things can lead us so much further.

A good number of artists spend time endeavoring to go deeper, like cave artists. And ‘going in’, underneath, behind the surface of things is where so many spend dogged time. For example, the subject of “beauty” has long been recognized by artist/thinkers as having a component of fear attached to it. It’s strange but sure. It’s something really important to discover.

“Poets are dreamers, Josip. They scribble their subconscious onto paper in order to connect with food sources.” O’Brien brings in characters to help his protagonist Josip along in this search. And that’s exactly what I am doing here: connecting to some food sources of a deeper hunger.

merry Christmas

The brilliant fall cover has given way to a quieter landscape, as the sun dips lower and lower in our sky. It was only last year that I realized that winter landscapes “send me”. And so I started painting them in large and small ways. Here’s one of the biggest ones I did in January, and it is no longer mine: sold for some guy’s Christmas, bought by his wife as a surprise. I’m not stealing the show here, as they likely won’t be looking in this space (and you don’t know who it is :). But this painting is a gift that keeps giving, for now I have the room in my studio to make more. And you get an early peek at this glorious moment when the snow was melting over the hills.

The great American painter Andrew Wyeth said “I prefer winter and fall when you can feel the bone structure in the landscape—the loneliness of it—the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it—the whole story doesn’t show.”

I like that. I sense that. Merry Christmas!

on art making in a disintegrating time

“Hope is the thing with feathers — that perches in the soul” Emily Dickinson, who penned this sweet line, knew a thing or three about meaningful hope. Hers was a buoyant expression, all the more poignant because she was equally aware of the hardness of her time/place and of her own internal struggle. Her poetry is rich for this reason: real, but outward even as she felt the confines of her tiny upper room.

Any glib optimism about our current cultural future is berated and mocked by reports we hear, and evidence we see daily, hourly. One could go numb, choosing to be unfeeling. One could get frantic with fear (outrage is already exhausted). Or, one could get busy/stay alert doing what speaks to the bigger issues as Emily, and Flannery O’Connor, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, Georges Rouault, and any number of others did in their own disintegrating times. Real honest, counter-cultural artistry comes out of hard ground. Each of theirs was hard, and their work still speaks now.

Real artistry takes the stuff available, even broken stuff, and does something whole with it because there is such a thing as creation and cultivation and hope. We were made for this — under the watch-care of the One who started all this creativity and then got into the dirt with us. (that’s key: He got into the dirt with us). There is real, counter-cultural, reason for hope then.

Taylor Worley, a prof of faith and culture at Trinity Intl. Univ. says “hope does not operate in the abstract. It must reckon with the real material of the disaster. It must start somewhere.” And adds this “We’re reminded once again that hope is dangerous, and yet for that reason immensely prophetic.” The art critic James Romaine remarks “I see art as very similar to prayer. It’s as futile or as powerful as prayer. It all depends on your faith.”

If my faith is in men, or in some idea of political progress or in what I can do with my own hands, I am honestly sunk. But if my faith is cast instead to the One who forms, gives breath, renews real hope and is still at work in this time, in this culture, then I get really energized in spite of what is all around me. What energizes you?

This little 8×10 oil piece is named Tanager, for the flush of color moving from a scavenging but still beautiful bird. It will be for sale at a Holiday event in my town next week.

the practice of digging in

I was in three short workshops this past weekend at a big art ‘Palooza’ and trade show in Raleigh. The downtown Hilton had taped plastic over all their 1^st floor meeting room carpets (!) and all the conference tables were covered with plastic, converting many spaces into studio workrooms. Some of these rooms had 30 or more learners staking out places at tables and unpacking their tools with anticipation.

You should have seen the crowd in this fine hotel: scraggly characters walking around in their paint spattered clothes.

The costs, especially for the supply store, were LOW compared to any discount house, so the gatherings were jammed. About 34 teaching artists, from all over the country, held court in each of these many rooms. Speed dating meets art class I suppose.

Each teacher had to discipline his presentation, highlight tools, gather the crowd for demos, and then let the students do practice sets. I learned some tricks. I bought a lot: new colors, supports to work on etc. But mostly I’m taking this home: practice what you already know and have. Dig in and keep at it. Keep your body moving toward what your heart is after. And don’t take partial as the finish.

What I mean is there were dabblers here at this conference, but also lots of examples from persevere-ers too. You can see the difference. The ones making progress are holding on alertly, curious, and active.

In one class there were so many folks that the teacher really couldn’t take much time beyond the basics, so I stayed in the back, one ear listening while I just worked and worked, turning out 5 pieces in 3 hours. The results were good. Here is one of them. What was the difference then for me compared to staying home and working? I am still thinking about that.

But here’s maybe an illustration that cuts to the chase. Eugene Peterson tells the story: the theologian Karl Barth was on a bus in his Swiss town, when a tourist came and sat next to him. Barth struck up a conversation. “You are a visitor, yes? And what do you want to see in our city?” The man said, “I would like to see the great theologian Karl Barth. Do you know him?” “Oh yes, I shave him every morning.” The man went away satisfied, telling his friends that he had met Barth’s barber.

There is joy here in this illustration for me, for I have sitting next to me, whether here or on the road, the One I really want to see and learn from. I just have to keep asking as I work.

palettes

“Our summer made her light escape into the beautiful”*

I’ve been collecting notes in a folder — from photographs taken and magazine tear outs — of color groupings. This is simply data, ongoing practice, recently revved up. For, I use these color collections as prompts into paintings. When I don’t know what to do, color seems to awaken. It’s as if my eyes, directed by a still beating heart, lead the way for my hands.

Last night, near the point of retiring for the day, I opened a small poetry book, a gift given to me in Canada. Therein I found an added bit of beauty between the leaves. Pressed in the pages of this lovely booklet was a singular remnant from a maple. I had almost squished this leaf with my shoe on a walk in Vancouver. My eyes must have stopped me then, but I forgot that I had this incredible thing. The re-discovery near a month later was more delight than I even remembered in the initial find.

Look at this specimen simply for its color: The greens have retreated to the background, allowing in that desaturation such quieter tones of olive. The removal of pigment provides a surprising highlight of pales, tans and muddy yellows, like the translucence of aged skin. This, in turn reveals the markings of veins ever more vitally. And the reds! The stars in this symbol, have their chance to shine now: like the bleeding herald of a great King. It’s the victorious finale! Even the stem has turned its signature to alizarin strength.

Any one of these hues could be matched somewhat closely in a paint store. But what would you have in the dissection? A clinical compartmentalization? It is only in the grouping where the colors dance, and play off each other, where they sing their song again. Even a dead leaf plays it. I am so heartened that I did not miss this.

*Emily Dickinson, #1540 Johnson’s Chronology, 1865

look out

Yesterday in studio I worked up a palette of hues in oil, building from a photo I’d saved of an arctic scene in National Geo. You can see that here if you look closely at my messy table. I mixed up a set of replicated hues, pleasing together, and then added notes of my own with them, before I had any idea what I would do myself with this color grouping.

Then I took several prepared papers, and one rubber brush and started making marks. My angled rubber tool is pretty cool for I can switch easily from hue to hue by just quickly wiping it down. This gives me a brief freedom. I can vary the stroke widths by the angle, and modulate the intensity of the laid down paint so easily that exercises with this tool become play. For me, quick work like this gets better at what is deeply inside me than labored more planned out attempts at perfection.

The artic quiet of the original image had me captivated, the skies in that photo looked foreboding. And that’s maybe why I selected it. The skies outside my window were carrying ominous hints too as hurricane bands are moving our way. But things move slow. And it’s in the slowness where I live. Things that matter take so much time! I ponder this and my soul is impatient to the point of unease. That’s maybe also why quick work is so cathartic to me. And so I purposed to just make marks, to let my arms work it out, to try to outline it, as if prompting a resolve. This work is like prayer, it suddenly occurs to me. It happens only because things are not right. It’s productive, learned and practiced because there is felt need. I’m looking out, but “we’re not there yet.”

The Irish writer Josephine Hart said “there is an eternal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives.” And Jesus praised those who hunger and thirst for the things that matter most. I think this is why I keep articulating the contours of horizon.

Mary Barton Nees

Conceptual Landscape