column :: art
Posted by Paul | Filed under columns, photos
Here’s another recent (short) column from 360 magazine (edited slightly)
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Good art helps us to appreciate the parts of creation that we tend to take for granted.
We tend to think that art is supposed to be about something, but sometimes it can just celebrate the ordinary. Photography can show us how interesting light is when it falls on a person’s face; abstract art draws us to the marvel of colours and shapes; dance demonstrates the beauty of bodies-in-motion.
Think of all the things you learnt names for when you were two and quickly took for granted. Like reds, greens, oranges, triangles, squares, circles, running and jumping. Good art makes us notice these things again. It helps us to remember the world that gets lost in our day-to-day. To see that God has surrounded us with wonder.
As the great philosopher Ferris Bueller once said “Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
form, content and incarnation
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
A poem, as Mallarme once said, is not made of ideas but of words, and faith also expresses itself through that which is lived, breathed, uttered, left silent.
Kathleen Norris
If I am honest, I am a poor reader of poetry for this very reason: I am always trying to look through the words to reach the ideas. I skip too quickly past the words themselves in a hope to find the reason behind them. I don’t think I am alone. Frequently interactions with art are more concerned with the ideas than the medium.
Our visual world today is dominated by a need for information. Once we have the information, the visual is disposable.
Edward Knippers
We are more worried with ‘What is the artist trying to say here?’ instead of how has it been shaped and formed in particular materials. But the art is not a message that can be transferred without change from one medium to another. If Rembrandt had written novels, they would not simply be his paintings in narrative form, but something utterly different.
We may speak of the theme of a work of art but we should never do so as if the theme is something that can be detached from the work’s form. Form is meditation: it makes something intangible known to us — in and through tangible words, gestures, materials.
Gregory Wolfe
Art is always a wrestling with some raw material, even if that material is something as common place as words or stories or life. In the end, the ideas are shaped by the medium even as the medium is shaped by the ideas. For this reason, art always has a truth component, even if the artist’s ideas do not correspond with reality. Always reality imposes itself through the medium. A story must be coherent with our understanding of the world; and even if we try to express meaninglessness, we are forced to used the meaning inherent in words and images to do so.
With this gospel of incarnation, then, and only then, it is possible to speak of fusing spirit and body, content and form. Christ’s incarnation resolves the most difficult dichotomy that exists for an artist; that is the dichotomy of form and content. … Christ’s uniqueness lies in not just the content (divinity) but also in the form (humanity).
Makoto Fujmura
It seems that, as with art, we have a tendency to run past the particular person of Jesus in our attempt to reach the transcendent and timeless. We skip quickly past who he was and the things he did as we try to get to the ideas. But a life is not made only of ideas but of moments and actions, of living and breathing. If the incarnation is God’s self-giving art then we see Him engaging, maybe even wrestling, with the raw materials of human life, experience and existence. And the life of Jesus is not just an arbitrary form for the content. The expression is found in the way the raw materials are shaped and used.
We must learn to speak in the light of this Jesus about the identity of the one true God.
N.T.Wright
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...