Georgia O’Keefe

She documented the beauty around here. She can make us feel the place, see what she sees, feel what she feels.

Georgia O’Keeffe: One View

Preaching Without Words

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-yancey/preaching-without-words_b_6075114.html?utm_hp_ref=tw

Preaching Without Words
Posted: 10/30/2014 10:08 am EDT Updated: 10/30/2014 10:59 am EDT

Writing for the Internet, I’ve learned, is a bit like taking on the hecklers at the Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park. The normal rules of civil dialogue do not apply. Especially if the topic is religion–any religion–you’ll likely provoke a reflexive verbal blast.
Apart from the typos and bad grammar, I’ve come to appreciate these Internet outbursts. All too often scientists, psychologists, health workers, politicians, writers and, yes, preachers address people who already agree with them and give polite nods of encouragement. As a writer who explores matters of faith, I find it stimulating, albeit bracing, to find my words and thoughts challenged at every turn.
Consider this response to an article I wrote in The Huffington Post, which I reproduce without change or correction:
if there is a god, he sucks. no good god would allow some of the things going on around us to exist. conseqently, if the there is no god we would have no one to blame. assuming there is a god he doesn’t do any of us any good at all.
I doubt I would hear such sentiments at a booksigning, yet they reflect the attitude of an increasing proportion of the population. Militant atheists pack out the lecture halls of universities, and when pollsters ask about religious affiliation one in three of the millennial generation answer “None.” The United States is gradually drifting toward a post-Christian culture, although at a pace well behind most European countries, where a majority do not believe in the existence of God.
There are many reasons for this drift: a Christian history that includes the Inquisition and the Crusades, recent identification of Evangelicals and right-wing politics, disagreements over sexual ethics, religious battles with science, a disgust with internecine divisions and squabbles. Often the aversion traces back to the Christians themselves. In the novel The Second Coming one of Walker Percy’s characters says about Christians, “I cannot be sure they don’t have the truth. But if they have the truth, why is it the case that they are repellent precisely to the degree that they embrace and advertise the truth?… A mystery: If the good news is true, why is not one pleased to hear it?”
Walker Percy’s question so intrigued me that I decided to write a book about it (published recently as Vanishing Grace: What Ever Happened to the Good News?) In it I describe many of the things we Christians do poorly and ask whether the Christian message truly represents good news in a modern world. I also look for representatives who can still communicate effectively to a post-Christian culture. As I was writing, a friend mentioned to me, “There are three kinds of Christians that outsiders to the faith respect: pilgrims, activists, and artists. The uncommitted will listen to them far sooner than to an evangelist or apologist.”
Artists
I spent some time with an unlikely spokesman for religion and the arts, a Japanese-American by the name of Makoto Fujimura. Though born in Boston and educated in the U.S., Mako became the first non-native to study in a prestigious school of painting in Japan that dates back to the 15th century. While earning a doctorate there, he learned the ancient Nihonga technique that relies on natural pigments derived from cured oyster, clam, and scallop shells and from stone-ground minerals including gold, silver, platinum, azurite and malachite. Rather than painting traditional subjects like kimonos and cherry blossoms, however, Fujimura applied the Nihonga style to his preferred medium of abstract expressionism.
Mako’s paintings hang in almost every major museum in Japan and in the U.S., too, his work commands respect and high prices. He was honored with a career retrospective in Tokyo before he turned forty, and as a Presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts, Fujimura served as an international ambassador for the arts. A thoughtful Christian, Fujimura was also named the 2014 recipient of the Religion and the Arts Award given annually by American Academy of Religion.
Every artist knows that for centuries the church served as a sponsor and patron. Western culture would be far more impoverished without the works of Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Bernini, Raphael, Caravaggio, Titian, Velazquez, Vermeer, Rembrandt and Van Eyck. Yet few artists today look to the church as a nurturer of art and many see it as an adversary. Mako Fujimura seeks to change that. In 1992 he founded the International Arts Movement, “a community of artists and creative catalysts wrestling with how to fully integrate our art, faith, and humanity.” IAM brings together aspiring and accomplished artists in conferences and offers ongoing encouragement to artists of all media. During one of those conferences, Mako painted live on stage at Carnegie Hall as part of a collaboration with the composer and percussionist Susie Ibarra.
One thing about Mako impresses me more than his many accomplishments. In the wider artistic community he lives out his faith with grace and compassion. On September 11, 2001, Mako was residing a few blocks from Ground Zero in an area popular with artists. After the World Trade Center disaster, with many of these artists shut out of their homes and studios, Mako opened a communal studio to allow them to continue working. He called it his tea house, and dedicated it as “an oasis of collaboration by Ground Zero artists.”
At that time, Mako told me, many of these artists were producing works intended to shock, most of them portraying obscenity and violence. On 9/11 reality trumped creativity: what happened in their own neighborhood was more obscene and violent by far than anything they had imagined. In the safety of Mako’s studio, these artists rediscovered other values–beauty, humaneness, courage, gentleness–and their works began to reflect this new outlook. For example, one avant-garde artist who had worked to “decode gender and sexuality” made a different kind of creation, folding hundreds of white origami butterflies and arranging them in a beautiful pattern.
For six months the artists held exhibits, performances, poetry readings, and prayer gatherings in this safe place, this oasis. As Mako later commented, “our imaginative capacities carry a responsibility to heal, every bit as much as they carry a responsibility to depict angst.” Art succeeds when it speaks most authentically to the human condition, and when believers do so with skill, others takes note. The Christian artist may offer consolation to a wounded planet even while awakening a desire for ultimate healing.
Activists
The theologian Miroslav Volf lived through the Balkan War of the 1990s and went on to teach at Fuller Seminary and Yale Divinity School. During his early years, then-Yugoslavia was officially atheist: Volf’s father served time in a communist labor camp and Miroslav himself underwent extensive police interrogation. When communism fell, he watched as the country broke apart along religious lines and the bloody civil war began.
Volf now proposes a different model for people of faith. Leading with what we believe, he says, tends to provoke opposition–witness the tragic history of the Balkans. By emphasizing doctrine, we set ourselves apart from “the other” and may be tempted to impose our beliefs by force. Instead, guided by the Golden Rule we should concentrate on living out our beliefs, progressing from hand to heart to head. Practical acts of mercy (extending a hand) will express our love (the heart), which in turn may attract others to the source of that love (head beliefs).
I believe Volf may also have framed the best way of communicating faith. Protestants, especially those who would welcome the label evangelical, have traditionally stressed “proclaiming the word” in a direct appeal to the mind. They preach sermons, write books on apologetics, conduct city-wide evangelistic campaigns. For those alienated from the church, that approach no longer has the same drawing power. And for the truly needy, words aren’t enough: “A hungry man has no ears,” as one relief worker told me.
Most of my secular friends see the church as a place where like-minded people go to feel better about themselves, not a change agent that can affect all of society. That stereotype of the church stands in sharp contrast to the vision of Jesus, who said little about how believers should behave when they gather together and much about how they can affect the world around them. Jesus used these images to illustrate his kingdom: a sprinkle of yeast causing the whole loaf to rise, a pinch of salt preserving a slab of meat, the smallest seed in the garden growing into a great bush in which the birds of the air come to nest.
Two books by sociologist Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity and The Triumph of Christianity, spell out how early believers in the Roman Empire took Jesus’ agenda to heart. The Christians organized relief projects for the poor and ransomed their friends from barbarian captors. Some voluntarily freed their own slaves. When plague hit, Christians tended the sick–including their nonbelieving neighbors–whereas the pagans forsook them as soon as the first symptoms appeared. When Romans abandoned their unwanted babies to exposure and wild animals, Christians organized platoons of wet nurses to keep them alive for adoption by church families.
Wherever Christianity took root, care for the vulnerable spread. To mention one example, in Europe of the Middle Ages the Benedictine order alone operated 37,000 monasteries devoted to the sick.
As a journalist, I have seen many contemporary examples of ordinary Christians who cheerfully serve the common good, a fact that gets overlooked in the media’s focus on Christians and politics. I wish those who ask “What good is Christianity?” could spend time with some of the remarkable people who dedicate their lives to humble service. I have visited schools for the Dalits (Untouchables) in India where the first generation from that caste in five thousand years is obtaining a quality education. I have reported on leprosy hospitals in Asia, AIDS clinics and orphanages in Africa, and a renowned hospital for obstetric fistula sufferers in Ethiopia, all products of missionary work.
Out of the media spotlight, Christian activists have found creative ways to fight moral battles. Prison Fellowship International has shown such expertise in caring for prisoners that several governments have asked them to take over the management of entire prisons. A sister organization, International Justice Mission, tackles sexual trafficking overseas by working with local authorities. An IJM representative learns about a corrupt mayor and visits his office. “We know you are getting kickbacks from a prostitution ring. And we both know that your own laws forbid that. We want to stop the exploitation of these women, and can handle it one of two ways. We can bring in cameras and expose you to the world press. Or we can make you a hero, letting you partner with us in a public campaign to break up this ring. Your choice.”
I can predict how critics of the church would respond to these examples of Christians helping to improve society. They would cite European countries like Denmark where few claim any Christian commitment and yet society seems to work admirably, yielding a high quality of life. Having visited Denmark and its equally secular Scandinavian neighbors, I would have to agree–though, to be fair, let’s admit that the region was populated by warring and pillaging Vikings until Christianity came along. The gospel transforms culture by permeating it like yeast, and long after the people abandon belief they tend to live by habits of the soul. Once salted and yeasted, society is difficult to un-salt and un-yeast.
Critics should also visit countries with little or no history with Christianity and compare their care for the oppressed, their range of freedoms, their treatment of women, and their basic morality. I have traveled to places where you need to double-lock your suitcases and count your change after every transaction, where innocent prisoners rot in jails with no legal recourse, where converting to another religion–or any religion–constitutes a serious, even a capital, offense. Christianity’s leavening effect is hard to ignore: nine of ten nations that Freedom House labels “free” it identifies as Christian, and the same pattern applies to nations that Transparency International ranks as least corrupt, the World Giving Index rates as generous, and the World Economic Forum cites for best gender equality.
A skeptical world judges the truth of what we say by the proof of how we live. Today’s activists may be the best evangelists for they express their faith in the most persuasive way of all, by their deeds.
Pilgrims
John Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress from a prison cell, and the allegory struck such a chord that for two hundred years no book except the Bible sold more copies in English. “Christian,” the main character, consistently chose the wrong road and the wrong friends. Each time he fell down, though, he let God pick him up and dust him off. Like most of us, he progressed not by always making right decisions but by responding appropriately to wrong ones. The author knew grace: Bunyan titled his own spiritual biography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.
In an allusion to Bunyan’s allegory, the philosopher John Hick describes two travelers who take a journey together. From all appearances their lives do not seem much different since they both face the same hardships and enjoy the same pleasures. However, one traveler believes he is on the way to the Celestial City while the other sees it as a simple expedition with no real goal in mind. As a result they experience the journey very differently.
Writes Hick, “One sees the pleasures that travel brings as foretastes of the greater joy awaiting him, and its pains as being worth enduring for the sake of that final happiness. The other takes the good and the bad as they come, making the best of a journey that ultimately has no point…. The journey will prove either to have been ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ or ‘Just one damn thing after another.'”
A pilgrim is a fellow-traveler on the spiritual journey, not a professional guide. Followers of Jesus have no claim on moral superiority; to the contrary, we turn to God only when we have recognized our moral inferiority. We come to God out of need and must constantly rely on God for help. We get sick, lose loved ones, settle for an unfulfilling job, battle temptation, hurt those we care about, make bad choices.
I have visited churches where authority figures make sweeping promises about prosperity and good health, as if faith will elevate you into a privileged class. That message may get results for a while–until reality sets in. And the approach has far less effect in a cynical post-Christian environment. Although post-Christians do not oppose a spiritual search, they will listen only to Christians who present themselves as pilgrims on the way rather than as part of a superior class who has already arrived.
As the recovery movement teaches, naked honesty and helplessness are what drive us to God. The truth, about ourselves and about our need for outside help, sets us free. We don’t need to pretend that things are fine; we admit we are needy and look to God for both vision and strength. In the process of doing so, ordinary pilgrims can have far-reaching effects.
As the year 2013 came to a close, Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of such bestsellers as Blink, The Tipping Point, and Outliers, spoke out publicly about his own rediscovery of faith. He credits a visit with a Mennonite couple in Winnipeg, Canada, who lost their 13-year-old daughter to a sexual predator. After the largest manhunt in the city’s history, police officers found the teenager’s body in a shed, frozen, her hands and feet bound; it took them twenty-two years to arrest and prosecute the suspected killer.
At a news conference just after the girl’s funeral her father said, “We would like to know who the person or persons are so we could share, hopefully, a love that seems to be missing in these people’s lives.” The mother added, “I can’t say at this point I forgive this person,” stressing the phrase at this point. “We have all done something dreadful in our lives, or have felt the urge to,” she added. [Afterward, Wilma Derksen became a Forgiveness Therapist, and outlines her approach in a moving TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sGmYDYTwUs.%5D
The response of this couple, so different from a normal response of rage and revenge, pulled Gladwell back toward his own Mennonite roots. As he told Relevant magazine, “Something happened to me when I sat in Wilma Derksen’s garden. It is one thing to read in a history book about people empowered by their faith. But it is quite another to meet an otherwise very ordinary person, in the backyard of a very ordinary house, who has managed to do something utterly extraordinary. Their daughter was murdered. And the first thing the Derksens did was to stand up at the press conference and talk about the path to forgiveness.”
Gladwell found other instances of ordinary Christians who acted in extraordinary ways, such as the Protestants in rural France who sheltered Jews during Nazi occupation. He adds, “Maybe we have difficulty seeing the weapons of the spirit because we don’t know where to look, or because we are distracted by the louder claims of material advantage. But I’ve seen them now, and I will never be the same.”
From each of these representatives–artists, activists, and pilgrims–I learned the truth of a dictum laid down by Francis of Assissi nine centuries ago: “Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words.”
Philip Yancey has written such bestsellers as What’s So Amazing About Grace? and The Jesus I Never Knew. Some of this material is adapted from his latest book, Vanishing Grace: What Ever Happened to the Good News?

The Church needs Great Art….Again

5 Ways the Church Can Make Great Art Again
Reclaiming the Church’s calling to reflect the Creator.

Read more at http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god/church/5-ways-church-can-make-great-art-again#GYQXXzFC1UKwSzhu.99

By David Ryan Gutierrez

September 11, 2014

David Ryan Gutierrez is a Christ-following writer, drummer, spoken word artist and budding actor based in San Diego, CA. You can find and follow him online at twitter and instagram @davegute or in person pretty much anywhere caffeine is readily available.

The church was once the workshop for the greatest art the world has ever known.

Past tense.

Wander through an ancient cathedral. Rest in front of a Renaissance painting. Listen to a 19th century hymn. All of these are amazing feats of art inspired from a desire to lead creation toward its Creator.

Where are we today? Worship music that sounds like a bad U2 cover band—or if we’re really hip, a bad Mumford & Sons cover band.

Many churches are no longer seeking to create unique encounters with God. Instead, we’re often settling for following a successful model from a book or personality.

Real talk: there is very little about the modern evangelical church that is creative. And this is a huge problem.

If the Church is going to reach the current generation and those to come, it must engage culture with more than cover bands and cults of personality.

We must rebuild our creative heart. We must reclaim our place as creative leader in the story of humanity. Here are some ways this restoration can begin:

If the Church is going to reach the current generation and those to come, it must engage culture with more than cover bands and cults of personality.

1. Embrace The Crazy Beauty of Artists.
“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” Depending on whom you believe, this was said by Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson or even George Carlin. Probably a great minds thinking alike type thing.

The fact remains: Most of us can’t hear the music anymore. We’ve grown creatively deaf. So when faced with an artist who can still hear their internal song loud and clear, it’s easy for us to assume they’re crazy for dancing.

But it’s such a beautiful kind of crazy—innocent, raw, unfiltered. And absolutely necessary.

Artists can be a challenge to work with. They’re an emotional crowd. But that’s only because they’re more in tune with their emotional spectrum than most. That’s how God designed them. And because of that, artists can give language and vision to our deepest emotions. When we reach the end of our limited emotional bandwidth, artists take us further.

Welcoming a little artistic insanity into our churches is a crucial first step. If for no other reason than it might start our souls dancing again.

2. Pay for Great Art.
We’ve come to rely too heavily on the free contributions of our artists. I get it. We are called to offer our gifts, finances and time as sacrifices. But there is a problem when we always apply this thinking to artists and their art.

In 1 Timothy, Paul states the importance of paying ministers. We need to start seeing our artists as ministers and start paying for their contributions. We rightfully take offerings for missionaries and guest speakers. But when it comes to artists, we pay only with opportunity and platform.

We need to rediscover the value of art as ministry. What if more churches had artists in residence? What if the first question we asked artists wasn’t “how can you serve us” but, “how can we fund your creations?”

Great art costs the artist. The least we can do is compensate them.

3. Demand A Higher Standard.
In an interview during his prep for the movie, Ray, Jamie Foxx tells the story of the first time he played piano with Ray Charles. Foxx sat down, trying to calm his nerves and just get through it.

Disaster struck. He hit a wrong note.

Charles’ response was priceless. “Now what’d you do that for? You know where the right notes are. Just hit the right ones.”

While art is subjective by nature, there are elements that are objectively good or bad. An out-of-tune note is displeasing to the ear. Wooden dramatic performances are uncomfortable to watch. Poor writing fails to engage the mind.

The Church is, of course, meant to be a place of support and encouragement. However, we have to be careful that we don’t extend this to a point that costs us objectively good art.

We have to stop blindly encouraging our artists and instead encourage them to aspire to the best version of themselves.

Criticism and critique aren’t bad words. Sometimes they’re necessary. We have to stop blindly encouraging our artists and instead encourage them to aspire to the best version of themselves. We need to be willing to say when some art isn’t ready for the congregation yet.

We need to be willing to hit the right notes.

4. Refuse Mimicry.
Many worship teams today are required only to print a chord chart, listen to a track and then karaoke the experience to the best of their abilities. To be sure, there are extremely talented teams and leaders who are fantastic at this exercise. But here’s the problem: It is wholly uncreative.

If the Church is going to re-establish itself as a birthplace for creativity, it has to take a stand against mimicry. Imitation may be the greatest form of flattery, but when our efforts end at imitation, I think it borders more on insult.

It’s certainly easier. It’s safer. But it’s wrong. With so many new songs to write, new sermons to speak and new pieces to perform, why would we ever settle for the art that’s already been created?

5. Take Risks.
Standing on the front lines of a revolution will always carry with it greater risk. Many of us who take up the charge as creative leaders will find ourselves taking the first shots from the opposition. Many will be thought crazy, irreverent and even sacrilegious.

And we will likely fail. A lot. But that’s when we get up and keep creating. Art that hinges on the hope of success will never reach its potential for greatness.

Great art is an investment of self and soul. Any investor will tell you that the greater the risk, the greater the reward. Artfully leading people into the story of Christ is the most risky endeavor of all.

But that’s only because there’s no greater reward than inspiring creation to return to its Creator.

Let’s go build some new cathedrals.

Read more at http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god/church/5-ways-church-can-make-great-art-again#GYQXXzFC1UKwSzhu.99

Andrew Wyeth Painted Me Home

“Last Light”
watercolor on paper
1998
Greenville County Museum of Art
Andrew Wyeth Painted Me Home

August 20, 2014 Haley Littleton
When I moved out to Colorado from South Carolina, I was embarrassed by my Southern origins. My voice still raised at the wrong inflections, still drew out vowels into two or three syllables. I wanted the sophistication and sleekness of the city, not the cracked feet of my grandmother’s kitchen table surrounded by patterns that died in the 1970s. I wanted a change of scenery. I traded a field of red clay for a vista of cascading mountains.

And then, as I began to be away for longer periods of time, home became this idealized notion. Home was a cool summer evening in the country, with fireflies flitting by that we would catch in Mason jars, as my mother brought out fresh sweet tea with a smile. Then, I would go home, and the humidity would suffocate, the bugs would bite and there was no sweet tea to be found, with all the sounds of nature drowned out by arguing. We didn’t even live in the country anymore; the trees barely hid the encroaching neighborhoods behind us.

mason jars and fireflies

A few years ago, on a trip home, my father begged me to go to the local art museum to see an exhibit by his favorite artist. There’s a tradition of amateur painters in my family, one that I was unkindly left out of. My father was taught to paint by my great-aunt. The houses of my family have always been lined by my father’s oil colors, mostly of nature, scenes of places he’s been and seen. I always found it odd that my father was such a talented painter, aside from being an engineer and businessman. I always cherished this secret artistic side of him; it made him much more sensitive to the “aliveness” of the world around him. I think it was that sort of view of the world that he wanted to pass on to me.

I chuckled at the idea of my town having an impressive museum, but his favorite artist was on display, so I trudged along, cursing the humidity as we drove amidst open fields. This was the first time I experienced Andrew Wyeth. I quietly maneuvered among his temperas and watercolors, with my father explaining certain techniques. Wyeth’s concept of home dispelled the idealism and communicated a reality I had forgotten. I wanted to cry right in the middle of the small gallery. My father looked sympathetically at me like he understood and knew that I had grasped the meaning of it.

To this day, he can’t really verbalize how he feels about Andrew Wyeth’s paintings, just that “they feel like home to me.”

The stark contrast of the yellowed land and green growth, light and dark, in Wyeth’s paintings mirrored the dry fields of my childhood, my grandfather’s hands, the decrepit auction house on the side of the road, and the bushes bursting with blackberries behind the train tracks, reminding me that my roots were rugged and dry and tough. But they were real, and that was what mattered. Attachment to reality, tradition, history, the people and places, staying and not running away, seeing the beauty in the ordinary—all these notions fluttered from Wyeth’s paintings into my head, like the lone feather floating amidst a barren field in one of his watercolors. I needed to reconsider home.

What is home and why is an Andrew Wyeth painting the closest I’ve ever gotten to understanding it?

Philosopher James Tuiedo wrote that getting to a philosophical understanding of home requires us to rethink our understanding of safety, fragmentation, and transcendence. At the core of one’s understanding of home is the understanding of identity and self-perception. In our concept of home, we “materialize and territorialize” who we are.

Home is a place where we make dynamic and continuous connections between the past and the present, always reevaluating who we are in light of it. Tuiedo writes:

“Caught in a chiasmic relation of immanence and transcendence, we are assimilated to a dynamic interplay of familiarity and difference, as if we were weaving together threads of nostalgic security and transformative growth.

Ultimately, we understand home through our creative preservation of it.

This sort of creative preservation of home seems to be what Wyeth was getting at. Richard Meryman writes in his biography of Andrew Wyeth that his

“‘truth’ is the essence of objects and people, everlastingly elusive, teasing him forward. He says, ‘I want to get down to the real substance of life itself.’ The route to his goal is realism, because ‘the object is the art, not what I make of it.’

The land itself is the art; the home itself is the art. Perhaps home is the opening of eyes to the present value, rather than what I may construct it to be: the relationships of family members, though sometimes tainted with arguments, yet always abounding in love, and the land that doesn’t ask for much but gives a lot.

How do you understand the land? How do you understand where you live? In Wyeth’s paintings ­­­­­home becomes art. I think this is at the heart of the American Pastoral movement. Not the bucolic, edenic sort of pastoralism that mirrors that of a Thomas Kinkade painting, but a kind that wrestles with the beauty and bone of the land, its hardness and harvest. My problem is not accepting the idyllic beauty of some corners of my home; it’s accepting the yellowed, withering field behind my grandparents’ house that sporadically produced undersized apples and over-ripe berries as a form with value and beauty. It’s accepting the unsavory parts of the cultural heritage I come from. Perhaps that why Wyeth’s paintings stood out to me. The landscapes he painted were dry, hardened, and bare, unyielding from their depiction of a difficult culture, and yet flowing with grace and elegance.

“Winter Fields,” 1942. Tempera on canvas, 17 1/4 × 41 in. (43.8 × 104.1 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, © Andrew Wyeth
“Winter Fields,” 1942. Tempera on canvas, 17 1/4 × 41 in. (43.8 × 104.1 cm).
Whitney Museum of American Art,
© Andrew Wyeth

My problem is not accepting the idyllic beauty of some corners of my home; it’s accepting the yellowed, withering field behind my grandparents’ house that sporadically produced undersized apples and over-ripe berries as a form with value and beauty.

Is home merely an escape from fragmentation? Tuiedo suggests that if this is our sensation of home, we will continually be disoriented by the changing circumstances of life that embed themselves within our concept of home. If safety is the key concern, can one feel at home when the circumstances are uncertain? If wholeness is the goal, what shall we do when the cradle of we what consider home is broken?

But what happens when one sentimentalizes home? Tuiedo suggests that we may find homeless in the warmth of the hearth and more in the fire within it, the seed of transformation and change. When you try to escape the wildness of home, you lose the true understanding of what it is. Andrew Wyeth was not a sentimental man. In his biography Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life, Meryman recounts Wyeth’s disdain toward a painter who painted the sea in fluffy pastels. The sea was supposed to be wild and hard, not comforting. He did not have many attachments to people, as his wife Betsy pointed out, but had deep attachments to the land.

We may find home less in the warmth of the hearth and more in the fire within it, the seed of transformation and change.

Andrew Wyeth (American, 1917–2009) “Christina’s World” Date:1948 Medium:Tempera on panel Dimensions:32 1/4 x 47 3/4″ (81.9 x 121.3 cm) Credit Line:PurchaseMoMA
“Christina’s World” Date:1948
Medium:Tempera on panel
Dimensions:32 1/4 x 47 3/4″
Credit Line: Purchase MoMA

Andrew Wyeth painted the hardness of the people and landscape of Cushing, Maine. Christina Olsen, who is the poised woman dragging herself across the ground in Wyeth’s Christina’s World, was a woman of intense pride, who would sooner leave the house as a soiled, stinking mess than bow to weakness.

In Walden, Thoreau urges us to seek out the unfamiliar in the home we have grown accustomed to, to find wonder within it, to embrace the wild as a means of disorienting our complacency in our home. Embracing the arguing and the messy relationships, as well as the hardened land, might bring a new level of transcendence that was missed before. As a family friend, Elizabeth Sargent, remembers about Wyeth,

“Andy was always so interested, gulping in all of life. His mind was open and receiving everything, every impression. You could see his imagination in his eyes – far away. With Andy you feel the earth is always new.

Perhaps we can come to see home as a place of continuous newness, a place that simultaneously subverts and redeems itself.

But, ultimately, I found in Wyeth’s paintings, what is home if it is not some sort of love? There is a love for the ordinary, and the love of roots, rugged as they may be, that draws one towards home. It is this sort of love that American pastoralism and Wyeth are trying to communicate, and it is neither a pretty nor an ephemeral love. As Wyeth himself says, “I think one’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes. I see no reason for painting but that. If I have anything to offer, it is my emotional contact with the place where I live and the people I do.”

Wyeth’s art stems from a love of home and a love of the commonplace:

“The hardest thing for a young person is to see romance in the surroundings of the commonplace. We cease to see the quality of an electric stove against a window. If you believe in it, have a love for it, this specific thing will become a universal. Of course, the mundane has got to have a life, but it all depends on how strong your imagination is.

Wyeth’s painting is a mixture of paradoxes: hardness and love, harsh realities and comforting landscapes. It is, as Pete Candler puts it, “the human longing for home and the melancholy alienation of human existence.” But, Candler also points out, Wyeth understood the deepest level of reality: “reality is itself magical.” A world created as good that deserves a response.

This, with Wyeth’s help, is what I have come to see home as: a place of deep metaphor and goodness. If I truly love my home, I will not just love the beautiful, easy parts of it, the parts that overwhelm with grace. I will also love the toughness of it, the parts that are not what we might consider beautiful, and yet are real. Sentimentality is not my struggle with home; I can quite easily do that in my head when I am away. It is about returning and staying and embracing all that comes along with a place. In a sense, I am always returning home, both physically and metaphorically, always trying to creatively preserve it within my memory and writing.

If I truly love my home, I will not just love the beautiful, easy parts of it, the parts that overwhelm with grace.

I perched on the faded front porch, staring at the tattered auction sign across the street, in a place I had avoided for the past six years but found myself happy to be back in. Crunching one of the sweet pickles my grandmother made, I let the juice trickle its salty path down my hand to wrist to forearm before wiping it off. The sounds of a sputtering lawn mower, spring bird, and buzzing gnat serenaded the muggy, warm air. Grandfather bent under the hood of his old Chevy, while my father busied himself with the engine; mother and grandmother made lunch inside. I couldn’t help but feel like a child again, spending a summer day at their house, playing hide and seek at the railroad tracks, picking blackberries that would stain my mouth dark red. This was home. I think maybe this was what Wyeth was trying to get at the whole time.

This world can make me unsure and fearful.

This isn’t an art blogpost per say, but I felt like it really hits the core of what I am trying to convey to my students so I wanted to save it here to read in class.

http://themattwalshblog.com/2014/08/20/the-world-is-a-horrible-place-and-youre-in-it-for-a-reason/#mcZ4v6OKQ68LXwtW.01

I received this email from someone named “TB.” I very much related to his/her struggle, and I think you might, too:

Matt,

First off, thanks for your blog. In a world like this, as a Christian, it’s easy to wonder if there are any real allies out there. If I can believe anyone. If there is truth anywhere. Reading your stuff gives me a glimmer of hope. There are people out there who care. Who get it. So thank you.

I have come to realize over the past few months that I have deep-seated fear. Some of it is founded and logical. Most of it is delusional and irrational. All of it stems from a failure to trust God. And I’m not sure what to do about that.

People say to “trust God.” It’s in the Bible. It’s obvious that I should. He has pulled me through so much, why should I not think He will continue to do so? But I can’t seem to wrap my mind around what real trust in God is like. Can you sympathize with this feeling?

I’ve turned off the TV. I don’t have satellite, digital cable, regular cable, anything. I don’t watch the news. But it doesn’t seem to help. I listen to state and world news on Christian radio. I see links to news articles on Facebook. I visit my family and they are constantly playing Fox News. I seem to be constantly reminded that evil is afoot.

I shouldn’t worry about this. For the most part, there is nothing I can do about it. I can’t bear thinking about the state of the world. ISIS. Progressivism. Communism. Facism. Hatred for Christianity. Islam. Guns, political indoctrination, cults, riots, mobs, totalitarianism, robbery, jobs, toxins, synthetics, poison in water, food, air, whatever.

I try to divorce myself from fear-mongering, sensationalism, zeitgeist. But I can’t get away from it. Ever since I was young it seemed like the world was a huge, terrifying beast. I still think that way. And while I am glad to know where I am going when I die, I still constantly worry about what will happen while I’m here. Do I even want to have children in this place?

I don’t need counseling. I don’t have mental issues. I haven’t had any major traumatic events in my life. I’m probably not even as panicked as I seem to be in this letter. But when I hear one little thing… my blood pressure goes up, and I start to think in this long chain of “what-if” thoughts. Why? I don’t want to be this way. I actually sometimes wish I was like everyone else. Not caring. Lethargic, apathetic, getting from day to day in a simple shell. But I’m not. I actually think about where things are and where they are going. And it terrifies me.

I’m not really asking you a specific question here. I’m not even really trying to tell you anything. I guess the purpose of my sending this email is to make a simple request of you. I would very much like to see you write about this. How can I trust God? How can I stop living in fear? How can I discard my irrational fears and possible delusions? Have you ever felt the same way?

Thank you for getting through this long email. I thank God for you and I am glad you are willing to be such a truth-seeker and unashamedly stand for Christ. Amen.

-TB

TB,

Thank you for your message and for your kind words. I don’t deserve them, honestly, but it’s nice to read.

I want you to know that you are not alone. I could have written this myself, minus the part about not having a TV and not watching the news (though I envy you on both counts). I often feel exactly as you do, and perhaps that makes me qualified to answer your questions, or perhaps it makes me especially unqualified to answer them. I suspect the latter. We have this bizarre idea in our society that we can only give advice to someone who is struggling as long as we are also in the throes of that same struggle. I think the opposite is often true. After all, when we are drowning we should wish for a lifeguard to save us, not for someone else to come along and drown beside us.

On that note, I confess that I am a coward. I read your email and I thought you brought up an interesting subject that would make for a good blog post, but my first instinct was to reject that idea. I knew that it might be helpful to a lot of people if I published your words, but I initially resolved not to do so.

Why? Because I don’t have any kind of brilliant insights to offer here. Whatever I say will be insufficient and incomplete, easily critiqued and torn apart. I’ve trained myself to predict what my critics will say before they say it, and so everything I write is long and thorough because I want to head them off at the pass and dismantle every criticism before its uttered. This is often a fine strategy, but the problem is that sometimes I am tempted to tackle subjects where I believe I might have something constructive to offer, even though I know that whatever I offer won’t necessarily be bullet proof and all-encompassing.

Usually, that’s enough to get me to abandon ship.

But not this time.

So here goes.

You asked some very penetrating questions, and the only one I can answer with certainty is this: “Have you ever felt the same way?”

Answer: yes, often.

Your other questions, though, are a little tougher to handle. How can I trust God? How can I stop living in fear?

Now, I can say confidently that the first step in defeating fear and trusting God is prayer. I know that sounds like the cop out answer, and it is to a certain extent, because it’s really easy to say. It’s the Christian equivalent to the encouragement a teenager is given after he breaks up with his girlfriend — “there are other fish in the sea.” Both are offered reflexively, and often not for sincerity but for lack of anything more profound to say.

Yet, in the end, both are also true. There are plenty of other girls in the world and the kid will get over his heartbreak and meet someone else, just as prayer is the best way to trust God and fight fear. Our battle plan is futile if it does not include vigorous and frequent prayer. I know this for sure.

This might be a dumb question, but have you asked God for help in trusting Him? Have you asked Him to help you fight the fear?

Maybe you have, maybe you haven’t. I know that I’m frequently shocked when I realize that I’ve been struggling with some demon for years and yet I’ve somehow forgotten to ever specifically ask God about it.

Beyond that, all I can say is that maybe you and I should begin by asking not how we can trust God, but what we should trust God about. And not how can we stop living in fear, but what are we afraid of, specifically?

Yes, we should trust God about everything, but “everything” doesn’t quite clarify the matter.

So let me tell you the thought that comforts and motivates me, and I think it addresses both the trust and the fear:

I must trust God that He put us here, in this place, in this country, at this time for a reason.

Sometimes, in my weaker moments, I’m tempted to look at all of the things you listed — the hatred, the death, the evil, the lies, the ignorance — and think that God drew up the blueprints for the human race back before the beginning of time, evenly distributed a healthy dose of just, virtuous, and righteous souls throughout every period of history, and then got to our civilization and realized that He did His math wrong and used up all of the good and intelligent people on the previous eras. Then He didn’t feel like going back and reworking everything so He just figured that He’d pack all of the weak, selfish, imbeciles into our spot on the timeline.

You know, it’s sort of like when you have a big bag of mixed nuts and you eat all of the good stuff — walnuts, almonds, cashews — in the first couple of days, until there’s nothing but peanuts left.

We are the cosmic equivalent of a picked-over bag of nuts. We are the peanuts. Or, in another snack analogy, the purple Jolly Ranchers. The rejects.

At least, that’s what I think when I’m feeling especially sorry for myself.

However, the truth couldn’t be further from this.

The truth is that God knew what challenges we would face before we faced them. He knew where our society would be before we were born into it. He knew of the despair, violence, and misery before we felt it.

He knew that our time would call for warriors, and so He sent us.

He sent us — you and me and everyone. He sent us here, now, today, because we have work to do. We have a mission to complete, a purpose to fulfill.

I know you wish you were like those people who don’t seem to care or notice while the whole world burns around them — sometimes I desire the same for myself — but we can’t wish for coma when we are so awake. We can’t wish for blindness when we can see. These oblivious people need our help, and our first job now is to grab them by the shoulders and shake them until they open their eyes.

I think this is the answer to our fear as well. We can only be afraid of this world if we think we were born into it by accident; if we look at the challenges of our vocation like a man who forged his resume in order to get a job as a heart surgeon, and is now staring at an open chest cavity without the slightest notion of how to discern a left ventricle from a pulmonary vein (those are both in the heart, I think, or maybe they’re parts of a car engine).

The point is that we belong here. God selected us back before the Earth, the Sun, the stars, before everything, and earmarked us for this time, this reality, this battle.

Do you ever think about that? I do. I imagine God whispering to me when I was still in the womb and saying, “Matt, I brought you here to save the world.” And that isn’t to say that I believe myself to be a prophet. In fact, I recognize that I am one of the weaker and dumber men walking on the planet today. But I believe that God whispers those words to everyone. (This is, it should be mentioned, one of the many reasons why abortion is such a terrible, ungodly atrocity.)

Only Jesus can save, of course, but He has delegated an enormous amount of power and responsibility to us. We have the capacity to spread truth and bring souls to Him. We are armed with abilities beyond our comprehension, and our actions, our words, or thoughts, will reverberate through the cosmos in ways that we cannot possibly understand. A distant star in a remote galaxy could explode tomorrow, destroy a hundred planets and alter the fate of a thousand solar systems, and still that would not be as significant or devastating as one sinful choice that we make.

But, on the same token, a star could form and burn so bright that it brings daylight to a hundred planets and sends a beam of light across 400 trillion miles of emptiness right into our eyeballs here on Earth, and still that would not be as beautiful, impactful, and illuminating as one virtuous or righteous choice of ours.

I think that fear always stems from hopelessness. But what reason do we have to be hopeless when we were made to serve such a magnificent purpose, and designed to live finally, once our time is done here, in the Promised Land?

I know you question whether you ought to bring children into this world, but I hope that doesn’t stop you. This culture wants us to become so beaten and broken that we abandon the loving, sacrificial, and procreative facets of our humanity. Don’t let them do that to you. Have kids and raise them with hope and equip them with the armor of truth. They will suffer, just as you have, but they will also live, and love, and win many battles for Christ.

Sometimes I look at my own kids and with dread I think to myself, “you have no idea what this world will do to you.” But then I realize that I should be looking at the world and with joy saying to it, “you have no idea what my children will do for you.”

And so I haven’t answered your question, it would seem. I’ve only offered a paltry response to a question that you didn’t ask.

Still, I hope you find some value in it. And I hope that it gives you at least a faint bit of encouragement in the middle of all the chaos that seems to only get worse with each passing day.

If in your journey you ever figure out a better answer, please write to me immediately and let me know.

Thanks for reading,

Matt

“Where did I learn the song that shakes the sky?”

http://www.jannalafrance.com/2014/07/author-interview-jeffrey-overstreet-giveaway.html

“If there’s no feast for this appetite
No reason in nursery rhymes
Why can’t I shake this great and glorious lie?
And if there’s no dawn beyond this dark
No secret stair to climb
Where did I learn the song that shakes the sky?”

Jeffrey Overstreet

How can Artists help the church?

A few years ago, I was at a conference in front of a room full of artists, participating in a conversation with an art historian and avid collector. It was a freewheeling conversation about many things: patronage, travel, and the role of art and beauty in social justice.

In the midst of the conversation, someone asked about artists and the church—reasonable, as the conference we were at was sponsored by Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, a church that is notable for, among other things, consistently and vibrantly supporting their own arts community. The attendee asked how she might also encourage her own church to be supportive of the artists in its community.

I’ve been in what’s usually called the “faith and arts” community for a considerable length of time and worked for several organizations devoted to helping people of faith make better art, so I’d heard this question raised before. The stories I’d heard (and known from firsthand experience) were of well-meaning churches who “supported” their artists by asking them to donate free labor in the form of murals, musical performances, and so on. Or I’d heard stories about artists who had left or mostly-left the church entirely because they were on the fringes, ostracized because their work was transgressive or frightening or just not easily understood.

But that day, when I thought about answering the attendee’s question, I was thinking about something else.

At that moment, I was in the middle of my first quarter of a Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing, and starting to feel what it was to be “an artist.” Growing up, I considered myself an artist: I learned ballet as a child, then switched to classical performance, where I trained as a pianist and, later, picked up the flute, organ, violin, and a variety of related instruments.

But starting an MFA was an entirely different thing. It was my first time truly experiencing what it meant to create on a regular basis. I had learned to perform, and now I was learning to make things. I was working for hours, and hours, and hours every week, and writing and deleting sentences, and reading everything I could to try and figure out how to do this bewildering thing.

So when I thought about how I’d answer the question, I realized that I was less interested in or knowledgeable about how churches could support their artists—although there are many great resources on that point. I realized that there was another question I hadn’t heard much.

How can artists support their churches?

And not just by volunteering their skills where they’re needed—though I tend to think that artists, especially working artists, ought to think about ways to support their churches that don’t have as much to do with their vocation. I’ve heard from professional musician friends that working in the nursery, where nobody cares who they are or how great their last album was, is a rich and humbling experience.

Instead, I was thinking about what artists learn that has to do with the Christian life. That is, I believe that being an artist, as in any vocation, requires developing skills and gifts that are part of the richness of a spiritual life. So just as people with highly developed logical skills (lawyers, for instance) can help the church understand what it is to reason well, or as people blessed with the gift of nurturing others can teach and model the practice of hospitality and compassion, artists develop practices that help them make art—and help the whole church to grow.

So, then, what can artists teach the church? Here’s a few thoughts.

Failing Well

The hardest thing for me to accept when I first started my MFA—even though I should have known better—was that I would often write things that I thought were pretty good and submit them to my mentor, only to realize a month later that they were, in fact, awful. There’s nothing quite like being embarassed by your own work to make you aware of how much you fail.

Every artist knows what it is to fail, just as every athlete knows what it is to fall or miss the shot or botch the goal. And artists—really great artists—make a lot of terrible work before they start making good work. There are no immediate geniuses or surefire hits for artists. You produce a lot of dreck.

Of course, this can be disheartening: why even bother, right? You’ll never be good enough. But artist lore is rife with stories of people who sent the book manuscript out forty times and got thirty-nine rejection letters, or who labored in obscurity for decades, their families and friends looking at them in pity, before they finally made a great work.

Similarly, for Christians, failure is part of life. Given that we can’t live perfect lives because we’re fallible humans, we’reguaranteed to fail.

When we realize this, it can be very frustrating. About nine years ago, I started going to a church in which we knelt and verbally confessed our sin to God every single week. A few weeks in, I realized I was getting frustrated because every time I knelt down, I realized I’d just done that last week, and I had a whole new set of things to confess. And I would next week. And next week. And for the rest of my life.

And then I realized that was sort of the point.

Artists understand this intuitively—and, what’s more, can speak to it directly and model a right response by being faithful to their own calling. Every time they fall, they get up again, buoyed by the grace of what they are called to do in their very being.

Practice as Formation

Along with this knowledge of failure is the reality of practice. Every kid who took piano knows this. As a former piano teacher, I know this keenly: every kid who quits piano does it because they just don’t want to practice.

The thing is that practice makes us into certain kinds of people, and it helps shape us into the sort of people who love particular things. I always use this example in the classroom: when I started playing the piano, I loved it, because I was seven years old and it was new and exciting. About six months in, I stopped loving it. I wanted to do anything other than practice.

But my parents made me stick with it, and then, a magical thing happened (about ten years later!): I began to love piano. It became a relaxing, enjoyable thing to sit in front of a piano and play whatever I liked. I don’t practice as regularly as I might, but I can say that I am a person profoundly shaped by my practice of the piano. Similarly, I learned to love to write by writing, writing, writing and hating it a lot of the time.

The spiritual life of the Christian is all about practice. Sometimes people tell me they stopped going to church because they didn’t feel like they loved God or believed in him anymore, and I understand the sentiment. But at the same time, I go through long stretches of life where the only thing that makes me feel at all like I’m clinging to faith is the practice of the Christian life.

I don’t have to believe it in my heart before I can do it; I do it so that I can believe.

Knowing Bodily

Finally, there’s an odd thing that artists understand: we learn through our bodies. We understand the world in intuitive ways that don’t totally make sense. I can’t explain it, and it’s not really rational.

I remember the first time I realized that when I sat down to write something, I rarely knew what I was about to do. I had an image or a sentence or an idea in my head. Then, the act of sitting down at the keyboard and typing that out triggered something else. And that new thought triggered another one. Before you knew it, I had an essay.

And another thing: not only did I have an essay, but often that essay was filled with thoughts and images that I didn’t even know were in my head. They came springing up through the act of writing—which is a profoundly embodied activity. When I’m done writing, my fingers are a little sore from typing or moving the pen across the page furiously. My rear end hurts. I even have to drink coffee or a glass of wine to make it feel right. I’m aware of myself as a creature, not just a brain, when I write.

All those things work together to help me put down words that make me discover things about myself and my world. It is always surprising. I am by nature a person who is skeptical when I hear people talking about “the muse” or “inspiration” or all those things, but I know what they’re getting at: there is something that is non-intellectual and non-rational about the creative act.

Similarly, sometimes we get too dependent on our brains for our faith. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting that we should check our brains at the church door, or that we should become anti-intellectual or skeptical of education. (I’m a college professor!)

But sometimes we expect that we will understand everything that happens in our religious lives—that we’ll be able to explain things. We get into theological trouble by trying to perfectly explain things like the problem of evil or the Trinity or the Incarnation.

It seems to me that artists are more comfortable with the idea that some things are simply wrapped in mystery—that we can’t explain everything about existence or, more, about God’s existence with words.

Artists can teach us that some things must simply be felt or intuited—that we learn them through the daily, embodied actions of life: eating, drinking, loving, walking, kneeling. And they teach us—through their songs, their paintings, their poetry, their dance—about mysteries too great for our finite minds.

Artists can teach the church about what it is to be more fully human, and that? That is a marvelous thing.

Image sourced from Flickr and used under a Creative Commons license.

 

I feel a little bit vindicated…..

http://www.vulture.com/2014/06/why-new-abstract-paintings-look-the-same.html#last-slide

http://www.vulture.com/2014/06/why-new-abstract-paintings-look-the-same.html#

Zombies on the Walls: Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look the Same?

• By Jerry Saltz

For the past 150 years, pretty consistently, art movements moved in thrilling but unmysterious ways. They’d build on the inventions of several extraordinary artists or constellations of artists, gain followings, become what we call a movement or a school, influence everything around them, and then become diluted as they were taken up by more and more derivative talents. Soon younger artists would rebel against them, and the movement would fade out. This happened with Impressionism, Postimpressionism, and Fauvism, and again with Abstract Expressionism after the 1950s. In every case, always, the most original work led the way.

Now something’s gone terribly awry with that artistic morphology. An inversion has occurred. In today’s greatly expanded art world and art market, artists making diluted art have the upper hand. A large swath of the art being made today is being driven by the market, and specifically by not very sophisticated speculator-collectors who prey on their wealthy friends and their friends’ wealthy friends, getting them to buy the same look-­alike art.

The artists themselves are only part of the problem here. Many of them are acting in good faith, making what they want to make and then selling it. But at least some of them are complicit, catering to a new breed of hungry, high-yield risk-averse buyers, eager to be part of a rapidly widening niche industry. The ersatz art in which they deal fundamentally looks the way other art looks. It’s colloquially been called Modest Abstraction, Neo-Modernism, M.F.A. Abstraction, and Crapstraction. (The gendered variants are Chickstraction and Dickstraction.) Rhonda Lieberman gets to the point with “Art of the One Percent” and “aestheticized loot.” I like Dropcloth Abstraction, and especially the term coined by the artist-critic Walter Robinson: Zombie Formalism.

Galleries everywhere are awash in these brand-name reductivist canvases, all more or less handsome, harmless, supposedly metacritical, and just “new” or “dangerous”-looking enough not to violate anyone’s sense of what “new” or “dangerous” really is, all of it impersonal, mimicking a set of preapproved influences. (It’s also a global presence: I saw scads of it in Berlin a few weeks back, and art fairs are inundated.) These artists are acting like industrious junior post­modernist worker bees, trying to crawl into the body of and imitate the good old days of abstraction, deploying visual signals of Suprematism, color-field painting, minimalism, post-minimalism, Italian Arte Povera, Japanese Mono-ha, process art, modified action painting, all gesturing toward guys like Polke, Richter, Warhol, Wool, Prince, Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Wade Guyton, Rudolf Stingel, Sergej Jensen, and Michael Krebber. I’ve photographed hundreds of examples this year, at galleries and art fairs, and a sampling appears on these pages.

 This work is decorator-friendly, especially in a contemporary apartment or house. It feels “cerebral” and looks hip in ways that flatter collectors even as it offers no insight into anything at all. It’s all done in haggard shades of pale, deployed in uninventive arrangements that ape digital media, or something homespun or dilapidated. Replete with self-conscious comments on art, recycling, sustainability, appropriation, processes of abstraction, or nature, all this painting employs a similar vocabulary of smudges, stains, spray paint, flecks, spills, splotches, almost-monochromatic fields, silk-screening, or stenciling. Edge-to-edge, geometric, or biomorphic composition is de rigueur, as are irregular grids, lattice and moiré patterns, ovular shapes, and stripes, with maybe some collage. Many times, stretcher bars play a part. This is supposed to tell us, “See, I know I’m a painting—and I’m not glitzy like something from Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons.” Much of this product is just painters playing scales, doing finger exercises, without the wit or the rapport that makes music. Instead, it’s visual Muzak, blending in.

Most Zombie Formalism arrives in a vertical format, tailor-made for instant digital distribution and viewing via jpeg on portable devices. It looks pretty much the same in person as it does on iPhone, iPad, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. Collectors needn’t see shows of this work, since it offers so little visual or material resistance. It has little internal scale, and its graphic field is taken in at once. You see and get it fast, and then it doesn’t change. There are no complex structural presences to assimilate, few surprises, and no unique visual iconographies or incongruities to come to terms with. It’s frictionless, made for trade. Art as bitcoin.

Almost everyone who paints like this has come through art school. Thus the work harks back to the period these artists were taught to lionize, the supposedly purer days of the 1960s and 1970s, when their teachers’ views were being formed. Both teachers and students zero in on this one specific period; then only on one type of art of this period; then only on certain artists. It’s art-historical clear-­cutting, aesthetic monoculture with no aesthetic biodiversity. This is not painting but semantic painterbation—what an unctuous auction catalogue, in reference to one artist’s work, recently called “established postmodern praxis.”

Apologists offer convoluted defenses, saying that certain practitioners differ from all the others. Lucien Smith uses fire extinguishers to make his little drips; Dan Colen uses M&Ms for his; Adam McEwen deploys chewing gum; Parker Ito paints fields of hazy colored dots. There are many artists who make art that looks printed but is handmade; others make it look handmade when it’s printed. We’re told that a painting is made by cutting up other paintings, or that it was left outdoors or in a polluted lake or sent through the mail, or that it came from Tahrir Square. We hear that the artist is “commenting on” commodity culture, climate change, social oppression, art history. One well-known curator tried recently to justify the splattered Julian ­Schnabel–Joe Bradley–Jean-Michel Basquiat manqué of Oscar Murillo—the hottest of all these artists—by connecting his tarp- or tentlike surfaces to the people living under makeshift canvas shelters in Murillo’s native Colombia. Never mind that he was educated in England and largely grew up there. At 28, obviously talented, Murillo’s still making his student work and could turn out to be great. Regardless, so many buyers and sellers are already so invested in him that everyone’s trying to cover his or her position. In one day at Frieze last month, three major art dealers pulled me aside to say that, although they agreed that we’re awash in Crapstraction, their artist was “the real deal.” I told each dealer what the other had said to me, and that each had named a different hot artist.

I’ll admit that I don’t hate all of this work. Frankly, I like some of it. The saddest part of this trend is that even better artists who paint this way are getting lost in the onslaught of copycat mediocrity and mechanical art. Going to galleries is becoming less like venturing into individual arks and more like going to chain stores where everything looks familiar. My guess is that, if and when money disappears from the art market again, the bottom will fall out of this genericism. Everyone will instantly stop making the sort of painting that was an answer to a question that no one remembers asking—and it will never be talked about again.

*This article appears in the June 16, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.

Why we need to stay in our jobs as artists

Sheep Amidst Wolves: Redeeming Creation through Process

Dated: 28 May,2014

The work of redemption…

“Behold I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”  – Matthew 10:16

Recently I had the opportunity to speak to a college stage management class at a small Christian liberal arts school in the Deep South.  The kind of college that made me wonder if it was okay to wear a top without sleeves for my speaking engagement (I did) and if I should maybe wear shoes a little more conventional than cowboy boots (I didn’t).

I shared my story as a working theatre professional with kids who are all the things graduating theatre majors should be – cocky but terrified, smart but naïve, excited to fly on their own but still keeping one foot over mom and dad’s threshold. Sheep, preparing to be sent out in the midst of wolves.

I covered my career trajectory as a stage manager.  I discussed my first internship, my first job, my current job, my insanely high New York rent, my love of overpriced lattes, and my faith.  They asked questions about everything from my favorite show to when I joined Actors’ Equity (the union of professional actors and stage managers).

And then this:

“What show have you worked on that most challenged your faith?”

I knew it was coming.  It always does.  Amidst the life questions about rent, health insurance, and where I went to graduate school, in between the wonderings about how to make a living freelancing all over the world, these faith-filled students really want the meat.  They want an answer to the question that tugs at us all:  how do I maintain my distinct identity as a Christian and keep my faith strong while portraying people or helping others portray people who are messed up and broken, who have affairs and go to strip clubs and commit murder and fornicate with goats and every other unimaginable and terrible thing? 

Where are the lines between healthy challenges, difficult confrontations, and direct conflicts?

It is in this complicated Bermuda triangle of challenge, confrontation, and conflict that I find my way in and through the redemptive power and quality of art, that I find the strength to say, “Did not my heart burn within me?”

For I propose that it is not only in the art itself that creation is redeemed, but in the process of creating that art.  It’s in the collaboration, the relationships formed, the daily conversations and meetings and phone calls and email exchanges.  It’s in the comforting smile I give an actor in rehearsal or the cup of coffee I bring my director.  It’s in the assistant who tells me my presence encourages her.  By being the best Bible I can be – I participate in Christ’s redemption.  By being as wise as a serpent and as innocent as a dove.

Years ago I was faced with a decision to stay on or leave a show that I believed was in conflict with my faith.  I wrestled, I prayed, I talked.  I was ready to quit until someone confronted me with this challenge:  “How do you know that by leaving you won’t be doing a greater disservice?  Who else might be on this project that will need the advice and experience of your own struggle?”

It’s the challenge I now issue to you.  Consider the process and the people over the product.  Consider the creation groaning in travail together and how you, a sheep sent out in the midst of wolves, through your own creative and collaborative processes actively participate as you await the adoption as sons and the redemption of our bodies.

Evangeline Rose Whitlock is a professional stage manager.  She lives and works in New York City, and has blogged for Church & Art Network and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Follow her on Twitter for more thoughts along the journey.

Listening to the longing and groaning of Creation

N. T. Wright, Bishop and New Testament scholar, may have something to offer. In his sermon to the Southern Cathedrals’ Festival Eucharist, he says this:

“The whole world is already filled with God’s glory; that is precisely why we feel the present horror and shame of creation the way we do. But the whole world will ultimately be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea, on the day when God makes all things new, and binds up every wound, and wipes away all tears from all eyes. The Christian contribution to the worlds of the arts, not least music, is therefore neither to collapse into sentimentality, to murmur the easy half-truths which comfort for a while but wither in the face of the horror of the world, nor to connive at that brutalism which, under the guise of ‘telling it like it is’, denies the very possibility of hope. The Christian contribution to the arts must lie along the line of listening to the longing and groaning of creation, a longing which is itself multi-dimensional because it is the evidence of the Spirit’s groaning and longing within the world, and expressing and portraying that longing both in its present agony and in its certain hope.”

Tension and Truth