Sanctifying Art

The semester is off to a new start this week, and I am back with good news. I spent the summer virtually attached to my computer, and finished the book. And, just because God likes to laugh, just as I was writing the last few words of the last chapter, and all worried about what I would do if I didn’t have a publisher, I received an offer of publication from Wipf & Stock, under their Cascade Books imprint.

The book is called Sanctifying Art: An Invitation to Conversation Between Artists, Theologians, and the Church. As you know if you have been following this blog at all, or have ever heard me talk about art and the church, I have often been surprised and dismayed by the unexamined attitudes and assumptions that the church holds about how artists think and how art functions in human life. In this book, I have tried to investigate these attitudes and tie them to concrete examples, hoping to demystify art—to bring art down to earth, where theologians, pastors, and ordinary Christians can wrestle with its meanings, participate in its processes, and understand its uses.

Needless to say, I am beyond excited to know that the book is on its way. I still have some editing and formatting to do, and then there is a long process one the publisher has it in hand, but I should have a physical book in hand sometime in the spring. Expect to hear me celebrating.

Taking a Break

The semester is over, my grades are in, and I'm taking a break from my weekly postings in order to work on my book, Sanctifying Art. So far, I've written three chapters: Introduction, The Problem of Art, Visions of Beauty, and Art and the Need of the World. Today, I hope to get a running start on the next chapter, Art and the Body of Christ.

After that, I'm not sure if there is another big chapter, or just a conclusion, wrapping it all up in a nice, tidy bow. I keep having the nagging sensation that there is some important area that I am forgetting to address, but I guess I won't know until I finish the part that I can see. It's a lot like art, I suppose. Or like life. If I just keep stepping into the light that I see, the surrounding darkness doesn't seem to matter as much. So as long as I don't allow myself to get distracted, I should have a good, solid first draft by the middle of August. I'll report back then.

Into the Fire

The other day, one of my students submitted a ceramic communion cup and plate set as her final project. She talked about the process of making it, about the necessary compromises between her original vision and the concrete exigencies of available resources. Having no potter's wheel meant the cup had to be hand-built rather than thrown. Having no kiln meant a search for firing space to rent. Having no recent glazing experience meant trying to predict how the glazes would look after firing, based only on small color samples that someone else had made. Then, despite her careful planning, there was the sad moment when the nearly-finished plate shattered and she realized that she would have to start again. She chose the glazes as best she could, put the cup and re-made plate into the fire, and waited.

I have often observed that those who make objects of fired clay are the most courageous of artists, their relationship to their chosen medium most easily compared to the spiritual life. After all their thought and effort, they must quite literally submit their work to the fire, often multiple times. The heat of the kiln changes the clay, making it hard as stone, changing its color, and melting the glaze into a thin layer of glass. What emerges from the kiln may be shattered into a thousand shards; or slumped into an unrecognizable lump; it may become something near to the thing of shining beauty that the artist envisions. Whatever happens, the object that enters the fire always emerges transformed.

Like a potter who puts her work into the kiln and waits to see what will happen, all of us are forced to make compromises every day between our vision of perfection and the unpredictable messiness of our actual lives. Every morning, I arrive at my office with a list of what I hope to accomplish. Then, someone needs me to make a decision or answer a question, someone else needs a shoulder to cry on or simply an ear to listen, and someone else offers me an opportunity that I cannot pass up. By the time I leave the office, I have done a lot, but often not the things that were on my list. My student's communion set didn't turn out quite the way she had planned, but she is still happy with the result and hopes to use it when she is ordained. May those who receive Holy Communion at her hands be blessed by the fire that transforms us all.

On Seeing and the Art School Crit

In the gospels, Jesus is described at least twice as giving sight to the blind. In Christian thought, Christ is the light of the world. One may derive from this that the principle of seeing is very important, both literally and figuratively. To see is, in a very real sense, to know. Clear seeing may be understood as a way of knowing the truth.

Expanding the metaphor of sight, artworks invite us to look closely, to observe faithfully what is there (and what is not there!) and the relationships among the various elements. Learning to see through art may be a means of learning to see one another in love.

One of the most important rituals of art school is the group critique. In my memory, in this exercise each student puts up his or her most recent artwork, and everyone takes some time simply to look at what has been set before them. Then, the teacher invites the students to say what they see, interjecting or adding to the discussion as necessary. 

Done poorly or without charity – as is too often the case – the art school critique is a harsh evaluation of quality in which a work is designated as “good” or “bad,” celebrated as a success or relegated to the trash heap. Such heartless criticism does little to help the student know what has gone right or wrong, or how to do better the next time.

Done well, this is an opportunity for students to learn how other people receive their communications. While the artist certainly has an intention, at the crit only the reception is important. How does this color interact with that one? How do these shapes related to one another? What is the emotional charge of the negative space? As the teacher and the other students consider aloud questions like these, they may also make suggestions about what might improve the work. Meanwhile, it is the student artist’s job simply to listen and take it all in. 

Whether the distance between the intention and the reception is great or little, this exercise is almost always both humbling and enlightening. No opportunity is given to defend one’s choices. Rather, back in the solitude of the studio, the artist is free to accept or reject the suggestions, either making changes to the original work, or beginning again with another.

What I have learned though the kind of disciplined looking that I first encountered in the group crit and have honed through years of teaching and curating, is that any artwork can be read through the eyes of understanding, or it can be dismissed out of hand, without really receiving anything at all except a superficial impression. And, as Jesus shows us, when we see with the eyes of understanding and compassion, with the eyes of the heart, we see one another in the light of God.

The Art of Children

My 5-year-old grandson drew a picture for my birthday. As you can see, it’s a birthday cake, complete with candles. It’s a little lopsided, and the table it is sitting on is a bit odd, but I think that it is the best birthday card I’ve ever received. While of course I am prejudiced because it was done by my brilliant, talented, amazing grandson, it got me thinking about what it is about children’s art that makes it so charming. After all, your grandchild or niece or nephew or godchild or son or daughter is also brilliant, talented, and amazing, too, and the birthday cards they draw for you are also the best ones that you have ever received.

Some part of me wants to say that we delight in the drawings of children—especially our own children—because we love the children, and their drawings somehow connect us to that love. Or, in a more sentimental mode, perhaps the spontaneous, untutored nature of children’s drawings reminds us of our own childhood, or the childhood that we wish we had had. Or, maybe we wish we could still draw that way ourselves, without worrying about whether we were doing it right, or if the colors go together, or any of the other judgmental things our inner critic says about our own drawings.

I think that all of these things do come into our appreciation, but there is something more. When I look at a painting or drawing by an adult, I think about things like design, craft, and style, on the one hand; and where the work before me fits into the overall conversation that is the history of art, on the other. None of these criteria are applicable to the drawings of a five-year-old. We cannot really compare them to great works of art like a self-portrait by Rembrandt or Picasso’s Guernica or Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross. Nor can we compare them to the anonymous and equally skillfully made tribal masks from certain places in Africa, or the prehistoric drawings of horses and bison deep in the caves of Alta Mira.

It seems to me that what the drawings of little children share with the great works of art of any time or place is a certain kind of truth. This truth is not found in a literal depiction of what can be seen with our physical eyes, but rather in what can be seen with what the Apostle Paul calls in Ephesians 1:18 “the eyes of our heart.” This drawing, like so many other drawings by children, is connected to the outer world – the cake is on a table, it has candles, it is decorated with a bright, red band – but it also seems to reveal the very thoughts and feelings of the person who made it.

The drawing shows not just a birthday cake, but the way the artist gave himself over to the process of drawing it. In the process, the imperatives of the picture took over from the simple reality of a cake on a table. There is no awareness of outside judgment in this drawing. It wasn’t done for a critic or a museum or for history. It exists as a true record of a moment in a person’s inner life, and that truth has value.

Or, maybe I’m just a doting grandmother.

The Need for Art

One afternoon, a young woman sat in my office asking about art classes at the seminary. Trained as a lawyer, she told me that she had been working for a program that provides essential services—health care, legal aid, food, and shelter—to homeless people.  She said that she believed passionately in the work that she was doing, but that she came to realize that the most important part of the program was not filling these practical, immediate needs, but rather the art experiences that were also made available to the clients. Given paint, clay, or other materials, and the time and space to explore what they could do, the people became more than the sum of what they lacked. They remembered who they were at the deepest, most spiritual and honest level, and opened to the truth of their shared humanity. Now, my visitor told me, she wanted to learn to make art herself, to find out how to tell her own truth in visual art.

The need for art is not secondary, to be filled after people are adequately fed and housed, but rather a primary part of what it means to be human. Art is not only, or even primarily, about making one’s surroundings more attractive, or adding ornaments to an already satisfactory life. Art is an important pathway towards knowing oneself, of communicating that knowledge to others, and becoming an integral part of the human community.

Poetry and Healing - a post by Kathleen Henderson Staudt

From now through early June, the Smith Center for Healing and the Arts will be featuring an installation called FLUID:  Rhythms, Transitions and Connections, work by Francie Hester, Lisa Hill and Reecca Kamen.   Of particular interest to me is the blending of poetry with fabric art and Sculpture in Hester and Hill's piece " Words as Legacy – A Leaf of Knowledge.". This work was Inspired by the words left behind by Brendan Ogg, a young poet who passed away from brain cancer at age 20. An integral element of the work includes community knitting by more than a hundred participants and a musical composition by Mattson Ogg.

Brendan Ogg and his family were members of the babysitting co-op in our neighborhood when our children were young.  I remember sitting for Brendan when he was quite small, but I got to know him well during the last year of his life, when we had several deep and important conversations about his passionate interest in and love of poetry,the poetry that he wrote both before, and particularly in the year after, his diagnosis and surgery for a brain cancer that proved fatal. I had the privilege of editing for publication Brendan's chapbook, Summer Become Absurd, which was published by Finishing Line Press in 2010, shortly after Brendan's death.  A gifted poet, he learned much from the experience of illness and limitation and wrote eloquently out of that experience.  Some of the poems in this volume were written during a workshop offered by the Smith Center for Healing and the Arts,  and I will have an opportunity to help perpetuate this gift when I lead a workshop on April 28 at the Smith Center, called "Finding our Voices, Telling our Stories.". More information is available here .

I found my own voice as a poet coming out of an experience of illness and loss:  a cancer diagnosis and the encounter with mortality that this can bring -- and did bring for me (some of my poems from this experience are included in my book Waving Back: Poems of Mothering Life).  20 years later, I found that this experience, and the paradoxical sense of grace that came with it, created a connection between me and Brendan, younger than my own children and living a lifetime in the last year of his life.  We will be exploring themes of poetry and healing later this spring at the Bethesda Writer's Center I will be reading with Margaret Ingraham (one of the guests at our recent  dean's forum on poetry and Scripture ) and friends of Brendan.  Our program will be entitled "Poetry of Loss and Life."

Brendan's story, his poems, and the lively artistic community that has sprung up in our neighborhood in his memory, all testify to the power of the arts to bring healing and deepen community, perhaps most of all in times of deep sadness and unbearable loss.  The events around his work this spring carry for me some deep insights into the mystery of Resurrection, and how we grow into that mystery through our creative work.

More on Brendan's work and story can be found at the website "Words as Legacy".