Category Archives: meaning

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.

light comes in

I have been pondering Jesus’ statement that “the lamp of the body is the eye.” How curious that has always seemed to me, almost indecipherable at times. I mean, it’s a very simple sentence. But maybe it has hit me like a riddle because it is so counter-intuitive to the way I usually think. How can the eye be the source of light for men? To me there is a lot that comes from inside people that brings out light and ideas and kindnesses. But Jesus says in another place “It is not what enters into the mouth that defiles the man, but what proceeds out of the mouth, this defiles the man.” Jesus’ view of man is that there is, by original nature and ultimate potential, no light inside of man; that what man needs originates from outside him. This is radical, and disruptive to the ways we think of ourselves and others; we easily dismiss this.
However, Jesus says that the eye is the gate through which light can enter the body; that it is made for that purpose. In fact your cornea, your pupil and the lenses of your eyes are specifically arranged to take in and transmit light right onto the waiting receiver, your retina, which then translates to your brain. We do not come up with light, it must come into us.
hand-1044883__340 Think about it, your body is a very dark place on its own. When scopes go into our bodies they must bring their own light, like miner’s lamps, to be able to see anything. When bodies are on surgical tables they are dark chasms until the surgeon’s knife cuts open flesh and the huge lights over the table light up what was hidden and all closed in. We only see these things because our eyes have taken in light first. This is simply true, and the physical is a signal/type for what is more important, the spiritual. Looking into someone’s eyes is often so intuitively instructive as to whether there is any life or light in there. According to Jesus, for any light to be inside us, we have to let it in, we have to allow our lamps to be lit. We cannot come forth with light on our own. Light was the 1st creative accomplishment in Genesis and it comes forth from God. This is basic though I stumble over it.
As an artist, I am working with the contrast of darks and lights all the time. I am taking materials and ideas and trying to bring forth new things with the stuff on my work table. It feels so presumptuous sometimes, impossible other times. Indeed it is. I cannot make things out of nothing. I need something to “inspire” me, to get me started. I have been invited to co-create with the One who brings light and ideas and continual kindnesses in and around me. And sometimes THIS feels like a floodgate, that I have difficulty channeling.
Today begins the festival of lights, or Hanukkah. This festival is a historical victory celebration of God bringing surprising light. How interesting that this yearly festival comes at the time of darkest days in the Northern Hemisphere. The King of Israel once said that “In Thy light we see light” Ps.36:9, in other words it is a parallel to what Jesus was saying: that light is apprehended in our experience by His initiative, only by His initiative. This is common grace, meaning it is given to everyone even though they don’t know what they have.
I think of this too because John’s gospel begins with a similar theme: ‘light came in… it came into darkness; and the darkness was exposed and illuminated and graced with the light of life. And darkness simply could not understand or comprehend this light; it could not invent light, but it could reject the light. This is such a mystery of grace. It was in the beginning and it remains.

in the image of my father

I saw something last night that caused tears to just stream down my face. It was somberly, maybe one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. The whole day was somber, the 10th anniversary of 9/11. This date is now a euphemism for what we still can hardly grasp – that our nation came under attack by 19 men, driven by some kind of hateful ideology that could justify their driving planes full of innocent men, women and children at high speed, full of fuel, into some of our iconic landmarks. I lived not too far from NYC then, I remember the incalculable shock as events unfolded quickly. I remember when the towers INCREDIBLY collapsed, and the aching realization that thousands and thousands of souls were turned to dust in seconds. This is still unimaginable to me.

Those towers were a part of my own life. I toured the 78th floor in college, wearing a hard hat with a team sponsored by the Port Authority, for a project we were doing to design the space on that floor. My twin girls dressed up as the twin towers one Halloween. My husband and I celebrated our 10th anniversary at the Windows on the World restaurant in the North tower. We would often take visitors to see these amazing buildings. If you were close to them you could not see their size for how hard it was to crane your neck directly up to see such height. One needs to understand these buildings were packed with offices and people on twin levels of 110 floors each! Estimates are that at capacity these buildings held between 10-25,000 people each on a working day. This is what I was thinking about as the towers pancaked into dust and ash. It is absolutely incredible then that the actual death toll in those two towers, not counting the firemen who came inside, was only just over 2000! We don’t celebrate this number as we do not and cannot celebrate this day, but it is important to mark it. It is crucial to try to understand what events like this can teach us. There were several things we did yesterday and contemplated yesterday that helped us to piece together some meaning from such wanton evil. Yes, evil, and we are naïve to think it could be called anything else but what it is.

What tuned and melted my heart yesterday, however, was a program I saw at the end of the day. On it was a slide show of images. Dianne Sawyer has been apparently marking each year since our 9/11 by gathering the babies born to widows, most of them the widows of the brave firefighters who ran into the buildings. Over 3000 children lost their fathers this sad day. What ABC had done was to quietly show, one after another, photos of the fathers and their 10 year old children. There on their faces is a mark of connection. These children never knew their Dads, but their faces show their Dads. This is such a picture, in varying kinds of uniqueneses of what it means to be “in the image of my father.” These Dads are gone, but their children carry them in their own DNA. It is a most beautiful thing.

My soul knew it before my mind even understood. My body responded before I knew what was happening. This was beauty, and beauty often carries such an ache of recognition and longing.

Vincent Van Gogh said in one of his letters to his brother, that ‘the greatest artist is the one who works in human flesh.’ I have often thought of this, for it is true. We can’t do this kind of art, but the One who said that we all are “made in His image” can and He does.

arrested by a painting

This month, I was arrested by a painting. It was among many other works in a fine exhibit the Germans brought to Beijing, housed in the newly constructed National Museum. The exhibit, covering several rooms, highlighted the “The Art of the Enlightenment.”

The Enlightenment is known by historians as a time of great scientific discovery in the West, and known by art historians for its grandiose swings away from the patronage and parochialism of the Church to a search for higher human ideals for source material. Artists explored themes and styles to authenticate their aims. From this time we get the beginnings of brilliant graphic political satire (Hogarth and Goya), a revisit to the ancient mythologies of Classicism (Delacroix, Titian), and the development of Romanticism and its reach to the landscape.

It’s easy to see how the Chinese, though not as inclined to the former two aspects of this time in Western history, would certainly resonate with the importance of the landscape. Enlightenment artists thought they had discovered “the sublime,” when all along Chinese landscape artists had been musing on those depths for centuries. There was a whole room dedicated to these sublime European landscapes and the room was being well visited.

In this room I found a small oil—“Dolmen in the Snow”—by a German I knew little of, Caspar David Friedrich. This piece is simple and profound. The foreground is foreboding, indeed a dolmen is a burial place. The three trees in the painting appear dead as well, though likely dormant from winter. The central tree is leaning and is closest to the dolmen. There has been much cutting of branches of the other two trees. But of the fingerlets of branches we see, they are all reaching upward.

Snow blankets this quiet scene, and there are no figures except a lone bird whose position indicates we are located in a high place. The starkness of contrast between this dismally yearning and empty scene and the sky is what stopped me. The sky is luminescent and beckoning, warm and enveloping/changing the entire effect. Apparently Friedrich intended this piece (as with some of his other works) to be a defense of his faith as a Christian.

Friedrich was living at a time when to be overt about one’s faith was “uncool” according to the groupthink. So he stays under the radar but uses his art to symbolize what is in his heart. It still speaks. In fact, later artists look to some of his work as the beginning of symbolism.

The last room of this entire exhibit was a jump into the Modern/Postmodern era with a few selections: a portrait by Andy Warhol, some abstracts and a sculpture by Beselitz, and a video by Joseph Beuys. My sense is that the curators were wanting to show the end result, to date, of the aims of the Enlightenment. In their Western conceit they think that the end is always going to be better than the beginning, that tolerance really is the highest ideal, that meaninglessness and self-mythologizing is very deep.

I think the Chinese observers will likely have more an objective detachment and consider this end otherwise. The art speaks for itself. For me, I’m back in that landscape room.

Hope, with strings attached

We’re living in a time now where the word Hope is hot. It was the theme of a political campaign that won a young man the Presidency. Now he sits precariously as the harbinger of hope. I pray for him with all my heart. I pray to the only One who gives me hope.

Hope is like a helium balloon, it is lighter than air and all too quickly can disappear, even as the Greeks feared that hope’s companion is that inevitable foe: Delusion. Hope must be tied to something to really be able to stick around, to have any verity of reference, any true sustainability. So, one of the strings that holds my balloon is grounded to the true Giver of hope. The other tie (and I’m not sure yet if there are any other strings, but these two are enough for me) is time: Time is the context for hope to have any meaning at all as a word and as a concept. I hope because I live in time and my present time causes me to hunger with hope. Hope is a real thing because I am in the not-yet time of what hope looks to. Anticipation is sweet if it is grounded in something real that I am beginning to taste and understand. The string I hold leads me to the sight of that lofty balloon. There is something there and I can almost touch it, I am munching on an hors d’oeuvre and that is why I can hope. The compound word in French literally means “outside, the main work”. Hors d’oeuvres sustain the guests until the meal, the “real work” arrives; and these hors d’oeuvres are said to increase my appetite. These are concepts that only make sense if there is such a thing as time. Time’s stretching out and its restless, yearning ambiguity are context for true hope. Because of time, I can learn and experience hope. Without time, hope makes no sense and is meaningless.

Here is a rich quote about time from a book I am presently enjoying:

“Childhood’s time is Adam and Eve’s time before they left the garden for good and from that time on divided everything into before and after. It is the time before God told them that the day would come when they would surely die with the result that from that point on they made clocks and calendars for counting their time out like money and never again lived through a day of their lives without being haunted somewhere in the depths of them by the knowledge that each day brought them closer to the end of their lives.” Frederick Buechner The Sacred Journey, p.10

Speaking of Motherwell, and Art’s Intention

I was recently over at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts in Boone, NC to see the exhibit “Lost in Form, Found in Line”. What a treat of imagery that was! Since I first was exposed to his work years ago, Motherwell has interested me; and then the more I read of him, my visual perceptions were confirmed that his work was not only attractive visually, but important conceptually. He was a thinker. I think he was also a paradox. For as was true amongst all the Abstract Expressionists after World War II, Robert Motherwell said that his work did not carry meaning. Yet his working process involved a lot of serious thought, considered musings, was often prompted by text. So his protestations about specific meaning often seemed disingenuous to me, the political correctness of his own time. Surely he was protesting the insult of casual viewers’ assumptions, e.g. “I see a duckie and a fishy”, when looking at his or anyone else’s non- representational work. He said that the subject of his work would emerge undirected “out of an interaction between myself, my I, and my medium.” But he also often admitted to big themes. One of his biographers, Jack Flam, says that Motherwell “wanted to create an art that would deal with the universal rather than the specific, yet be charged with feeling.” Motherwell often started with an idea. Then that idea got melded in the creative process, yet remained the idea/now feeling nonetheless, for he considered every mark, even buried under newer layers, part of the work’s important expressive history. Is this not then communication? Is this not then the embodiment, however shrouded, of some particular meaning?
I know for me, the first time I confronted abstract work at the Art Institute of Chicago when a teenager, I assumed immediately that it was coded language. It was not simple, but it was fascinating and even beckoning to me. See an example here. Now, I have been teased by an artist friend that I am looking for meaning everywhere. Actually, I have decided this is not such a foolish thing, for art is ultimately another human language. It is enculturated and wholly nuanced certainly, but it is a form of communication, I am convinced. Bird tracks on snow have meaning, even if the bird had no intention. How much more the marks of humans. The impetus to get out the materials and create starts with some kind of intention in mind, however small or unformed. Our marks leave a trail, and even trails that lead nowhere carry some inherent meaning.

(above image is “Elegy to the Spanish Republic, No 110”, accessed off Bing)

On Hope-first thoughts

I am by genetic temperament, and fostered by early upbringing a pessimist; yet my work is said to be filled with hope! This to me, as I stand back and look is a complete surprise- “a huge contradiction,” I critique myself. Or, maybe better reckoned as an intervention – that is, there is something else that is working inside of me. Indeed, hope is the thing that gets me into the inks at all. Sometimes there is this inevitable agony – every artist I have ever spoken to attests to this agony. I love how David Bayles and Ted Orland summarize this in Art and Fear, “Basically those who continue to make art are those who have learned how to continue – or more precisely, have learned how not to quit…art is all about starting again.” So, there has to be hope that is dredged up from somewhere, or every artist would simply have no choice but to quit.

The Greeks considered hope dangerous. Indeed in the myth of Pandora, when the box was opened, there were released all the evils except one: that being hope. Hope was protected from release for its risky companion was delusion. However, in the end, Pandora had to release hope because otherwise humanity was filled with despair. To the Greeks then, hope must first have been considered an evil, which when weighed on the scales opposite despair, was bartered from evil to good.

Emily Dickinson succumbed to the risky business. And she heralds it this way, “Hope is the thing with feathers – That perches in the soul – And sings the song without the words – And never stops – at all.” I can identify with this thing that sings inside (and I didn’t put it there, I simply can’t make this happen). I share resonance with the words first penned by that serious and solitary woman from Amherst. It is an intervention, and it strikes me with awe. This is a core thing.

On Beauty (or, fools rush in where angels fear to tread?)

I have thoughts that roll around and confound me both before and while I work. (Robert Motherwell said, “When I am thinking, I am working”). And one of the things that really interests me is this illusive thing we have named Beauty.

I remember once walking along on a cold sidewalk, heading somewhere, with some plan in my head. On my left was this ordinary bush. The sidewalk actually went around it. I happened to look up at this rather obtrusive dark green thing, and suddenly was caught to a dead stop. For there were these delicate clusters of tiny silvery-blue orbs all over this thing. They were astounding, and so winsome, and they brought me to tears, right there in the cold.

Here is a photo I took this last month, while at a meal with some friends. A Chinese radish had been carved to reveal this delicate surprise. It too was winsome. And inviting, It is made of just the common stuff from a garden, and yet it has been made with care, and anticipation, and just joy! Maybe the crafting of beauty is just like this. We start with the stuff that’s just hanging around us, but there is a remaking with anticipation and delight. And the result is so much bigger than the crafter can even know.

Beauty is not the meal, but it leads me to the meal. Beauty is like an usher, a silent gentleman who offers his arm. I am at the back of some important gathering, and I am not sure that I am dressed right, or not sure where I should sit. I am worried that I have arrived too late, I am thinking about all this mundane stuff. But beauty comes up alongside me with welcome on his face, and he ushers me in.

Beauty humbles me, and yet it does not win my humility with dominating power. It captivates me by it’s profound and winsome silence. And there is this mysterious ache I am left with after an encounter with beauty, that there is more coming.

Past Present Future

Welcome to my new webpage. And thanks to my daughter Betsy, who understands computer meta codes, and put all this in place so beautifully for me. I plan to use this blogsite to record musings that relate to the visual work I do, and will do.

I had a dream last night, and in it I was finally weeping. My husband, oldest daughter and one of her childhood friends and I were cleaning up after a party in our old neighborhood. I was folding the table cloth together when it all hit me. Years of hard and earnest work were coming to an end. All there was to show, it seemed, were crumbs on the floor.

I am reminded as I ponder this now of a story that always moved me deeply. Jesus, after feeding thousands, asked his disciples to go and pick up the leftovers. And, it is recorded for us in all four gospel accounts, as if this accounting is important, that there were 12 baskets, each full of broken pieces. Why did Jesus instruct them to gather the fragments, what was there in this for them? I remember thinking once, while living in that neighborhood, that the greater miracle would be if each soul had been fully satisfied just as the last piece of bread and fish had been consumed. Why are there fragments? Why is there a mess on the ground? And why do they need to gather it? And why does it fill 12 baskets?

It seems to me in this telling that the event is not just about the present tense feeding to assuage physical hunger. They were definitely hungry- these crowds of people; Jesus felt compassion for them, and acted. But there was more He was doing there, and the disciples would not understand it until later. This story for me has held an aching wonder. Those piles of broken pieces, of leftovers, filled a very specific number of baskets. There is a symbol of future completion in this that superintends the present mess on the ground. He knows what He’s doing, even in things that look to me as very undone, even wasted. My work is about this wonder in the midst of brokenness. I can hardly, in fact, I cannot explain in words the deep hope that rises up in my own soul when I am fed, and my heart is again lifted to believe from this broken ground. It is a hope that is rooted in accomplished work in the past, that carries me in the present, and that will be fully realized even later still.

Mary Barton Nees

Conceptual Landscape