Category Archives: meaning

the question of beauty

When I was in high school, I had a remarkable teacher in a world history class. I remember his name (and wonder if he is still alive). I cannot remember any of the exact words or streams of thought in his lectures, but I remember how his ideas ignited things inside me. He spoke about the question of beauty, this in the context of worldwide movements of upheaval (!) and without dropping packaged answers into the hearts of skeptics, he left at least me wondering. . . what exactly is beauty? Why do I respond to certain things and not others? Could there be a code of meaning here that speaks beyond language and culture and time? This further fueled a life long interest in art, and in the meaning behind things.

This morning I watched as a spider finished her web. She had several strands tied way beyond her tiny body up to the gutters of the house. Then she had one tied to the Laurel bush, and another anchored on the Japanese Maple. She swayed in the beautiful center of her fragile trap. Her brain, or instinctive operating center, or whatever she has that makes her move with such deliberation, has to be no bigger than a pinhead! How does she do this, and can she possibly know the beauty here? She certainly cannot see the bigger picture of what she has constructed. And it’s a trap of death for goodness sake! There is something bigger that has set things in play that she has no ability even to imagine.

And so I continue, my pencils making webs, my brushes searching with color, my tiny awareness of the things brewing worldwide at great disadvantage. This same morning I saw this in Psalm 2: “Why are the nations in an uproar, and the peoples devising a vain thing?” And I realize that before we can really handle answers, we have to be somehow startled to grapple with the big questions. And beauty, it seems to me, is one gentle way of walking us there.

casting

My husband likes to fly fish, and we carved out time to fish and paint together. We are so fortunate, that we live near such beautiful places to do what we both love. Carving out the time together is the task, and then we wonder again why it took us so long. . . anyway, what he usually does is cast, catch and release. What I do is cast and try to capture! I laugh often at his ability to give up so easily what he has worked for, but then I often end up doing the exact same thing. We are both on a silent quest. This activity is much more than the result that either of us comes home with. I love this photograph my husband took because even here he is selecting and searching, more like an artist then a fisherman. I am in the center background sitting on a rock, working on a small watercolor sketch. He composes his photograph nicely, such good color too! The image says a lot more to both of us than a viewer might see.

An art critic I resonate with, James Berger, says this same thing better when he defines the act of drawing. “Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw (to fish? to paint?) derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself.” We are in fact both doing just that when we go out and work: searching, selecting, plotting and placing. That is why we can come home filled even when there is no concrete result. The activity is accomplishing something deeper.

This past week also, I attended the art showing mentioned in my last post. Stephen Wicks, curator from the Knoxville Museum of Art gave an engaging talk about the collection he had assembled, and even highlighted my two pieces with prescience. I spoke with him afterwards to thank him and gained even more, for he said something like this ‘Your work is not just about the collection of color, isn’t it; there is something much deeper going on.” Oh! How encouraging for me, he could not have said much else to propel me further.

Meanwhile, the watercolor piece I laid out, painting by the stream has since been gessoed over. (The paper was worth more than my result that day!) But the morning was memorable, marking both of us. We were both casting for what we knew not. I think we captured something that day; nothing got away.

gathering

I have been doing an inventory of certain supplies and gathering several new hues and panels toward a workshop I will be taking next month; investing toward meaningful production. Just spending the money is hard. It must be a work of faith and hope too. I want to be stingy, and make do; but I also know that unless I am ready to give it up again, there will be no worthy result out of this studio. The whole process is another reminder that this slog is hard work emotionally, physically, every which way. Sometimes I think being an artist is like being a glutton for punishment. (I used to think that same thing about raising teenagers, another rare art form of faith and hope). Now that the teenagers are grown and I get to do concentrated work in my studio, I guess I need to remember that it is just another form of the same battle. It is battle. So strange, that something so fun could also be so perplexingly hard! Willa Cather said “Artistic growth is a defining of the sense of truthfulness. Only the great artist knows how difficult it is.” I am so encouraged by that statement. For it was in the raising of young people and in the working of art that truthfulness is one of my highest motivations. One of my kids just said to me last month “…that’s because for you Mom, truth is such a core value.” Hearing her say that over a difficult thing we were processing, was very satisfying to me.

So I am pondering a lot of things today: the hard battle, the investment of hope needed in that battle, and the spine of truth that enables any real progress. We’ll see what comes of this next month. Meanwhile, I can highlight here a small cold wax panel that got selected into a good local show. This is called “Unseen Working; Gathering Undercurrent.”

fragile return

A friend gave me this lovely plant as I have been grieving the loss of my Mother. Yellow was my Mom’s favorite color. Mom would have enjoyed seeing how lovely this is, such a tender reminder. I am not a great plant person, so I hope I can keep this alive to bloom again. It is so interesting to me. These tender orchid blooms emerge out of long tendrils, pencil-like stalks. And the long blooming stalks (which look like nothing when they appear out of the base of the much showier leaves) need to be supported as they lengthen. For it is out of these emerging outgrowths, that the beautiful blooms finally appear. Someone else set up the support on my bloomed stalk. I am told that without that support the bloom simply would not have happened.

Friday, I received back a huge box from the Monotype show in Massachusetts. I have been traveling, so I forgot about this simultaneously traveling piece of artwork. It was neat to have my piece “Selah” come back to my door. I had set up return shipping, and without any more effort, my piece came back.

This whole paradox between effort and supplied reward in time has me musing. And the reality of fragility…That anything so beautiful exists for any length of time is quite extraordinary here, it seems to me. My heart feels as fragile as these blooms. But I can feel the support right inside my heart.

unfinished

Here’s a beautiful little passage out of a piece I am working on/struggling with right now. I will not show the whole, for it is kind of a mess. The whole piece actually may never get finished in the way I want it to. In fact this morning, I realized that my problem is that I am trying to “make it happen”. I am trying to aesthetically force a conclusion, and it is not working! I have learned/keep on learning that once energy moves in that direction, it is a recipe for failure. So, I will work in my garden today and ease back.

The vision I’ve had for this larger piece is the prophetic statements of Balaam over Israel. You can read that strange but true series of events in Numbers 22-24. If you know that story then maybe the irony is already hitting you, for Balaam too is confronting an unfinished vision. He could not curse Israel, though he was given much incentive to do otherwise with his prophetic skill. What Balaam sees in his last vision is a dramatic statement of something sure to come, but far distant. I have been thinking on his utterance “I see Him, but not now. I behold Him, but not yet” for years and years…

As for my piece…it may get torn up and used as fragments in many new pieces. That would be fitting. I can settle with regeneration, might actually be better.

Day of Fire

John Valadez is new to me. His concerns are the dissipation and the distractions of contemporary (Southern CA) culture. His skill is brilliant. This piece, entitled “Pool Party,” was one of his strongest for what I read as a sober warning. The piece is arresting, or it should be I would think, if you still allow yourself compassion and an honest alertness for the dangers (metaphorical and real) we live in, for the people caught clueless when hell breaks loose. Look at these young girls, enjoying their candy colored lives, oblivious to the inferno about to overrun them. A writer I came across recently said that the time we are in now is like being sheltered in a basement during a tornado, where we are all screaming but the noise outside is so loud that no one hears even his own wide open scream. Valadez takes a calmer view. He has his characters playing through shallowness, while he clues the viewer that there is much more going on. This is maybe the California version of Munch’s “The Scream,” that ensign from another anxious era.

The local University art department where I live is sponsoring an exhibit this month called “The Day on Fire.” I guess they want to join the fun with all the 2012 apocalyptic talk going on. In fact, interest in the foreboding is happening everywhere. Prominent Galleries in NYC and London have had shows recently titled “Abstraction of Destruction,” and “Those Who Remain.” The jurors for our local fire show were shocked at how many entries they got from artists all over the nation wanting in on this subject. My entry, “Appointed” did not get into the final show. So goes it. I wonder if John Valadez’s piece would have made it in. My guess is no. He too takes this subject too seriously.

Emily Dickinson is another who took such things seriously. Here she is in her poem simply numbered #530:

You cannot put a Fire out —

A Thing that can ignite

Can go itself, without a Fan —

Upon the slowest Night –

You cannot fold a Flood –

And put it in a Drawer –

Because the Winds would find it out –

And tell your Cedar Floor –

Cairns and wonderwork

Here’s my near 96 year old Mom sizing up an Andy Goldsworthy sculptural Cairn at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LaJolla, CA. Cairns are markers, to show presence and history. Which do you think is the true Cairn? My Mom or Goldsworthy’s Iowa limestone construction? I love Goldsworthy’s work, I love my Mom more. She is the one who introduced me to the wonders in museums. She is fading now, though Goldsworthy’s stuff will likely remain for a longer time, it too will not last forever.

Mom and I went into the museum and her most alert moment was comparing her walking cane with one of the guard’s. That was sweet. Two broken pilgrims comparing their supports. Then she was happy to sit on a bench overlooking the Pacific (always loved a good view, always had an eye for the best art in the place). The show on the walls was interesting, but she chose the best view, and then preferred the reproductions on the paper pages of the museum catalogue, tho the real pieces were steps away on the walls. It’s a wonder I can even take her into museums still, that she wants to even go. I mused on the meaning of art as she looked at the Pacific and I looked quickly at the pieces on the walls.

Vincent Van Gogh once said to his brother Theo that the greatest artist (in the whole place) is the One who can work in human flesh. I read that statement while in college and it shaped my future, directing a lot of choices I have made since then. My Mom is one of His canvasses. And He is not done yet.

Go Forth, Abraham

I was awakened one evening long ago. My young Jewish friend wanted to talk about Abraham. I listened out of respect, surprised by her wonder, startled actually by her belief. This was a fairy tale to me, but she held onto it as if it were true. We took many steps that night, one foot in front of another, hiking around a lake, high in the Colorado mountains. I was quiet mostly while she spoke. But that night, something ignited in me because of the words she exclaimed about one man, long ago, who simply decided to trust what God had told him. “how could that be?!” I wondered.

“Go forth, Abraham” is a piece I finished this year. It is an emotive response from 40 plus years of steps for me, in which I have been reminded so very often of Abraham’s example.

I don’t think it is a very pretty piece, and therefore, to me, it is all the more true.

Abram, (renamed Abraham by God), was a real man, a very unique man. He listened. His radar was tuned for wherever there was God-frequency. And when he heard what God said, Abraham took it seriously and he stepped it out. If you read of his life in Genesis 12-25 you can actually follow the learning curve of this man’s developing trust in the One he was aiming to follow and learning to love. Though a Mesopotamian ancient, culturally distant from us, the human-ness of Abraham’s growing trust comes through. It was a real-time process that took decades. And God did real time revealings and interventions into Abraham’s process. The key throughout though is this verse: “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him therefore as righteousness.” Abraham was not righteous, as his history only displays. But God made a call, based on Abraham’s distinguishing characteristic: and Abraham simply believed what God said. This is big. It was Abraham’s believing that accomplished righteousness. This believing Him is a big deal with God; it is defining for us.

Abraham lived according to the promises given him. These promises came in clear when they came, but they did not come often. And so there had to have been so many steps where Abraham was just putting one foot in front of the other, trusting, trying to remember what he had heard, relying on the character of the promise giver. That is what I was thinking about when I made this piece. This is a linear picture of all the heavy steps being made in desert sand, as Abraham moved out trusting. This piece looks at his whole journey. High in the stratosphere are markings: recordings of the words that rumble in his memory and bring light to his heavy soul. There are shining bits that come on the ground: the epiphanies he would tell us of if we could hear his whole story at the end. But a lot of the steps for Abraham as he lived them out, I expect felt dry and hard and shifting under his feet. Each step was consequential. And there is this dark hovering cloud overhead. It is not one that brings rain, but one that brings only darkness and static. Discouragement is hovering not far away.

You will be hard pressed to find a better example of a mortal who risked it all to believe the One he heard speaking. It was not a pretty thing, but it was true. And it ended up being amazing.

I am delighted therefore to highlight this piece for it has been selected to be part of a traveling show called “Scribes of Hope II” which will be making the rounds in the coming couple of years. An artist whose work I have admired, Timothy Botts, was the juror. This is cold wax with metal filings embedded, using also sumi ink and gold leaf; it is on a panel 19×15”

estranged

an offering today. from one of the wisest women I know (though she too, as a daughter of Eve was being held captive. . . for a time). Here is how her heart reached for what she knew was beyond her cell:

pexels-photo-132076-medium “Estranged from Beauty-none can be-
For beauty is Infinity-
And power to be finite ceased
Before Identity was leased.

Emily Dickinson, #147

wonder working

That nothing is entirely original has been a subject of interest for years. All ideas, all artwork, all the best of everything that we call “original” is yet derived from things that have preceded it. Every maker of things himself has a history, influences and experiences that set context, and which are partly directive toward what he does that is “new.” The materials he uses were already in existence before he picks them up. In an absolute sense, artists are really only creative re-arrangers. One teacher I had once said that the word “original” has its root in the word and the concept out of origin. Therefore, for something to be “original” it needs to come out of precursors; it is derived from something that went before. Postmodern theory has taken this face on: admitting and highlighting imitation to the point of parody: making “art” that is simply a tongue-in-cheek hogepodge/borrowing in an outright effort to mock that anything could be original, that there even could ever be such a real thing as “art.” In the purest sense, its true: nothing stands alone therefore as truly original, except the very first cause. This is liberating actually. I am a good re-arranger. I am not able to make things out of nothing. There is only One I know who does that.

A short while ago we were in a big Chinese city on Easter Sunday. That day not being any special Holiday there, we were a little out of our element, and missed what we would have been doing at home to welcome the day of original first things, of creative emergence out of death. So my husband and I got up early and walked around taking pictures of the blooming trees. We found others responding the same way. People celebrate when they know they are looking at something wonderful and new, even when it is something they’ve seen the year before. We have so many of these lovely shots, recording the display of color and emergence and beauty. The pixels only remind me of the live moment. This is not pastiche: a patched together borrowing of other things (well, the blooms are not, the building behind it, that’s another story). These lovely blooms are not parody, or the man and his friend in the wheel chair would not be finding delight on the sidewalk. This is simplicity and loveliness and it just sits there waiting to see if anyone notices.

award of excellence

The juror for the Appalachian Art show this year was previously at Wellesley College as museum curator and also lecturer in their dept. of Art. David Mickenberg also had professional experience at the Louvre, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among other things. This interested me and so I selected some things to enter that I hoped might catch his interest. One piece I entered didn’t even make the show (so it goes) but this piece won an award of excellence, I am glad to report.

Like so many for me, this piece is marked out not with any message intended, but rather as a physical response to all that rumbles within. And there is a lot rumbling within. It surprised me when it got done. I started it last summer and fine-tuned it just last month. There is one collaged phrase that is embedded in other text-like markings: “pray for Jerusalem’s peace.” Again, I emphasize, this piece was not a pretext to say that, but rather a natural and right seeming way to finish what I was looking at. There is a lot of energy in this piece, layering, piercing and shroudedness. I showed it to a friend who is very bright but very un-artsy and he said before seeing the text fragment “it looks like a swastika.” Ridiculous! I went home and did some research on that symbol and then became even more interested in that strange possibility, especially that in my case the symbol is definitely broken up at its core. I say all this to try to help the reader understand some of what happens in art making: it is a duet, it is intention made visual, it is something that goes beyond the artist. It can be deadly or it can be good, and often is maybe even both. Such it is for things that come from our hands and our hearts. Such it is when even these things can go beyond our hands and our hearts.

I’ve been doing some reading this month also in a fine book I got from one of my daughters for Christmas: “Objects of Grace; Conversations on Creativity and Faith,” by James Romaine. In the great interviews he has here he often discusses with the artists the idea that art making is a form of prayer. I never, ever thought of that before. I am not sure I even agree, for prayer as I practice it is much more proactive, it is also much more specific. But there is some parallel in that with both prayer and artmaking there is an extravagant use of time and trust, of faith and practice. Today, as Purim is being celebrated, I offer this prayer, entitled “Fight Unseen,” with prayer.

Mary Barton Nees

Conceptual Landscape