Category Archives: beauty

“Sitting with Pretty”, or seeking the WHY before the HOW

I remember the day I painted this, sitting on a high rock perch with my oldest daughter. She (always pretty) owns this painting now, and every time I visit her home, I am reminded of those quiet moments in that magic place with her. The natural pink palisade wall below us overlooks the great midwestern American lake we love. That day and some way over on the edge of the cliff, my son and husband were fixing rope to rappel this wall. Preferring not to watch that episode, I chose this view, and got transported instead into the beauty of the long and the far of it all. As C.S. Lewis puts it, we went “higher up and further in.”

This is an early work, one of a few I show on my reorganized image page. It’s important not only sentimentally, but also aesthetically because of the pull landscape has long held for me. Before I knew how to work painting tools, and even as I was fumbling around through the years with them, it was always the big views into far away vistas which moved me into any effort to capture something onto a 2D surface. The result has never been enough but rather a reminder of the “something more” out there that gets me pursuing. I can feel that inner draw even as I type these words.

There are poignant moments when one senses that kind of pull, even without knowing its source. It’s a faint whisper that there is something really important, really heavy, really good “out there for the asking”. How do we even know these things? I do wonder with a kind of humble awe. I somehow grasped a bit of this early on and wanted to understand more long before I became interested in biblical specifics. The WHY draws one first, it seems to me at least, before the HOW has any pertinence. What about for you?

Emily Dickinson, a recluse and a poetic mystic often would use dashes — as if extending thoughts into the air — as part of her vocabulary. I suspect this is so because words themselves (like painting tools) could hardly frame what she was after in any attempt to communicate for others what she could sense in her spirt. Here are just two samples:

In many and reportless places

We feel a Joy –-

Reportless also, but sincere as Nature

Or Deity –-

It comes without a consternation –-

Dissolves — the same –-

But leaves a sumptuous Destitution –-

Without a Name –-

Profane it by a search –- we cannot

It has no home –-

Nor we who having once inhaled it –-

Thereafter roam.

(c. 1876, #1382 in T. Johnson’s Chronology)

____________

I groped for him before I knew

With solemn nameless need

All other bounty sudden chaff

For this foreshadowed Food

Which others taste and spurn and sneer –-

Though I within suppose

That consecrated it could be

The only Food that grows.

(c.1882, #1555)

Jesus called this food “rivers of living water” and invited the hungry and thirsty to dine with Him. I’ve become convinced that every longing that we experience here, is only a merciful foretaste of the truly more that is available to any, and that, as He said — just for the asking.

the repose

How fitting, though unplanned by me, that the last entry I post in this tumultuous year 2020 is Psalm 131! This psalm and this particular painting is my practiced place of determined rest. I set this Psalm to music in my 40’s so I could memorize it and live it better. These words have served me, checked me so importantly and practically! Soak in them for just a moment of your own:

A Song of Ascents, of David (NAS version)

131 O Lord, my heart is not proud, nor my eyes haughty;
Nor do I involve myself in great matters,
Or in things too difficult for me.

²For Surely, I have composed and quieted my soul;
Like a weaned child rests against his mother,
My soul is like a weaned child within me.

³O Israel, hope in the Lord
From this time forth

and forever.

We’ve been tracking on this blog my ambition in the present year to finish a long-imagined dream rendering the 15 Psalms of Ascent onto 14×14” cradled panels. There are 3 more yet to show you, but those I’ll talk about next year. For now, it is enough to just stay in this important place for a little while.

King David of Israel spoke these words, likely put it to melody, and also had to learn it the hard way. In other words, this place of repose did not come naturally to him either. His life was complex, but this psalm is not!

This entire collection of 15 Psalms were arranged into the book after Israel’s exile for travel home. Four of these songs were selected from Israel’s archive, from their ancient King. Here are David’s contribution to the whole: 122 (the 1^st triplet’s rest Psalm), 124 (the 2^nd triplet’s determination to trust), 131, here the result of the 4^th triplet’s trial, and then 133 (the last triplet’s middle declaration).

David surely practiced what he talks about here. The imagery of a haughty look is something easy to imagine in any gifted personality exalted to a high place. We have current examples from our own time. But David, from a young age had also a heart after God. Note that God has a true hatred for arrogance. And God won out.

David’s imagery continues with this idea of a weaned child resting against his mother. As one who fed babies, this is poignant to me. If the baby stays close even when the feeding part is over, there is a wonder of rest for both the child and for his mother, skin to skin. It is a matter of just quiet enjoyment, of built relationship. This is priceless. And for many who use God just for what they imagine he can do for them before they quickly run off, this is a hard thing to learn. It takes time and a decision to stay.

The 17^th century Catholic mystic Madame Guyon wrote in her autobiography about this very thing. Like David, she’d had to determine where she would reside for “the better part” beyond physical nourishment. David said “I have composed and quieted my soul like a weaned child…” So even past child feeding, there is this place of sumptuous rest. Guyon describes it this way:

“It is not a repose in peace tasted, in the sweetness and mildness of a perceived presence of God; but it is a repose in God himself which participates of his immensity, so much has it of vastness, simplicity and purity.”

In my version here, the key of the painting is much lighter and brighter than the Psalm painting which preceded this (which in fact led to this). No longer is the voice here self-focused but rather enmeshed. The pilgrim here has moved more deeply into God’s side, and more simply into the place of His given repose. For David, for Guyon, even for me and any number of others who know this sweetest place it is a very personal thing.

This is not a corporate psalm; it is in no way a group experience. The last triplet to come in the collection we’ll see is entirely a corporate experience. But this personal expression necessarily comes first, this is a singular place learned and enjoyed. Yet as the last verse here hints, from this place one longs for others to know it also. That’s why all three of us: David in Hebrew, Guyon in French and me in English have labored to put this beauty to words.

As a further treat to end the year, I offer a link, introduced in English spoken in contemporary French and referencing the Hebrew which grounds the hope given therein.

repulsion

I “came to Jesus” because I was repulsed by religion.

I saw “revival” signs outside churches as a youngster and pondered: “ if they have truth why do they need reviving?” As a teen I saw a man talking about “being saved” but his manner was harsh. As a young college student, our team bus passed a sign on a hill saying “Jesus is the answer”. One of my friends said: “if Jesus is the answer, somebody please tell me, what is the question?” We all laughed. I was happy on my own and had no questions, thank-you very much.

Later that frosh year militant students stormed our campus student union…with machine guns. I joined a committee to better understand the disruption since the Newsweek Magazine reporter obviously didn’t. We were true eyewitnesses. We cared about the student’s grievances. We pooled our heads and hearts to better explain what had happened so the whole wide world would understand. We were going to “restructure the University”. Seriously.

There was one big problem: we couldn’t agree. Ten or so of us spent hours debating. We were a select group, and we were motivated. But it soon became clear that each persuasion to “tell the story correctly” had certain bias, even if slight. And like a one-degree difference on a line to the target it impacted the result. It dawned on me that it must be a truth that every journalist aiming to tell any story has bias. The confusion amongst my cohort was eye opening, disappointing; it sunk in deeply. And that lesson was worth the price of my entire undergraduate education. At the same time, it did not escape my notice that the presumptions of the student activists were starting to smell like religion of a different sort: certain behavior was expected, certain ways to think were required. I stepped out.

Just a couple months after that, a friend of mine was killed in a tragic accident. That was when my easy idealism completely halted and real questions deepened. The subsequent sorting out of what mattered and what was ultimately reliable was the pivot point of my entire life. I can sense so clearly that we in America are in a similar consequential time now. For this reason, even midst the confusion and the smoke, the uncertainty and the biases — that bigger more important questions are forming and being quietly decided. If every action has an equal and opposite reaction, then repulsion can be an important awakening.

I post today a detail of a painting I am delivering to a Gallery this week. The larger piece this is excerpted from is titled “Marking Magma”. The fire born volcanic rocks that inspired some recent work is, in this painting, all marked up on its surface with graphite. The markings are like historical notations on something birthed eons earlier by a great disruption. There’s contrast and random angles visible today, there’s beauty midst fear. There’s light and dark together. My bias is obvious. My fingerprints are all over this. But my hope has been forged by things long ago and things current. All that is visible here.

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.

Mary Barton Nees

Conceptual Landscape