A long while, actually. Probably since I graduated from college almost ten years ago now.

Julie's sculpture does not forget it's roots.

In my architecture classes, in my graphic design classes and some of the time in my ceramics classes I watched aspiring artists and designers, myself included, forget the basics of design. We’d go after an assignment with passion, with dreams of being featured on the front cover of Architectural Digest, and forget that there are certain building blocks to every visual and spatial solution. They were overthinking the problem.

I suppose this is a symptom of the genius mentality, the drive for stardom usurping the desire to make useful and beautiful contributions to our surrounding environments.

First project underway, now complete.

The most expensive project will be replacing the kitchen cabinets. In our previous home we got away with painting and replacing the hardware, but the cabinets there were in better shape and more plentiful. We have a lot of saving to do before I tackle the kitchen. Before then will come removing the wall between the living room and kitchen (which is done), adding walls and flooring in the basement to create a family room and a bathroom (the bathroom is already partially plumbed) and painting inside and out.

Part of creating an organized studio space for myself to work in will be adding the walls in the basement. This is a relatively inexpensive project when you don’t include flooring, but it takes a fair amount of time. As in probably a month of weekends start to finish when you consider the wiring and pluming that will also be involved. And building in an entertainment center.

The struggle comes with another pervading inclination, that of creating works of art. Today I want to start a small series of paintings. My clay is either too wet or too dry at the moment (I’m still looking for a local supplier of a new clay body that I like since we moved) so I thought I’d do something in the way of conceptive creation, in this case painting (something I do on occasion). I quickly realized, however, the lighting over the new work surface I scrapped together is insufficient, so I’m back to thinking about spaces and projects around the house.

It’s a vicious cycle for me.

In developing his general theory about how humans decide what they like or dislike, he lines up evidence to show that what people believe about a work of art is crucial to the way they feel about it. He goes on to suggest that modern art collectors are partly motivated by the way they wish to be seen by the rest of the world.

And then this.

Humans are incapable of just getting pleasure from the way something looks, he argues. “The history of an artwork is absolutely critical, although you might argue that it shouldn’t be. It is just the way our minds are built.”

Mammatus overhead from mid-June.

On first read I have a very hard time — thinking about myself — believing that humans are incapable of getting pleasure from the way something looks. However, I regularly talk about the importance of associations in how works of art are interpreted, how they’re viewed. Does that mean, however, that something can’t give pleasure on viewing without certain history does it? The associations I refer to are more or less the same thing as making history a prerequisite to pleasure.

It’s hard for me to imagine not liking the structure in a storm over the prairie, the colors on it as the sun sets, the many shades of purple the clouds are tinged with as lightning courses through it after dark. Yes,I have a history with storms but going back to my childhood it isn’t a positive one. I was scared to death of them until I was about twelve years old. How I came to love them is a mystery even to me.

What about flowers? Why do we consider, pretty much universally (right?) flowers beautiful? We may not all like the same ones, and guys may claim to not like them at all in a pretentious and ignorant show of masculinity.

I suppose Bloom’s book explains a good deal more of his research and theories than the article lets on, but I’d also guess that it won’t necessarily quell in me what suggests that there is some sort of innate [Divinely appointed] basis for beauty.

THE ARTIST & THE TERRAIN OF BEAUTY

THE NATURE OF BEAUTY
Thomas Aquinas gave a definition of the beautiful that is still helpful and relevant seven centuries later. The beautiful, he said, is “wholeness, harmony, and radiance,” and these define the terrain of the artist.

WHOLENESS
Wholeness means nothing is missing. All parts are present, suggesting completeness. No one looks at the Pietà and says, “You know, Mary needs just a little more fringe around her veil. Oh well.” Or, people don’t listen to Mozart’s Ave Verum and say, “Needs another high G in there. Oh well.” There’s something about these works that suggest completeness. Wholeness also means there is nothing extra, nothing gratuitous that isn’t an essential part of the whole. Isn’t that one of the primary complaints about so many movies? “Gratuitous sex and violence.” That is, too often there is no context for these things in a project, so it feels to the audience like they were just slapped in there to try and distract from some flaw in the storytelling. A beautiful work has nothing gratuitous . . .

WHAT THE TERRAIN OF THE BEAUTIFUL IS NOT

POLITICAL
The first thing we’ve done to wreck art is make it serve the political instead of the beautiful. I don’t necessarily meaning left or right, but statement-making, which is an utter perversion of the concept of radiance. The goal of statement-making is to manipulate, to coerce, to get people to vote a certain way, to propagandize, to merely change behavior.

I can’t think of a better example of this than in the awful statue of Mary that stands over the outside door of the $200 million Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. It’s just dreadful. The statue is of completely uncertain gender, with a female torso, but harshly cropped hair and distinctly masculine arms and hands. In fact, my students call her, “Man-hands Mary.” But it’s worse than just androgyny. The image has black lips, Asian eyes, a Latino face, and other scattered Anglo features. When I first went on a tour of the new Cathedral, our guide said, “This statue was conceived so that people of all races would see themselves in it and feel welcome in this place.” And I said, “But it’s kind of ugly. I don’t know about you, but if you saw that kind of freak inviting you into its house. . . .” Well, the tour guide sniffed at me, waved her hand, and said, “The church is not about that anymore.”

It begs the question of whether Japanese people really do look at the Pietà in Rome and shrug, “Well, that’s okay for the white people.” But my point is that the goal of the statue was not to make something that would deliver the beautiful. The goal of the statue was to communicate a political message. The fact that it is ugly and makes my students mock it indicates that it has been a failure as a political vehicle too. In politics, you lose wholeness because the political only tells its own side of the story. As a result, people lose a feeling of rest.

Pre-order For the Beauty of the Church on Amazon.com.

This should stand as a subversive warning against all sentimentality: when we misrepresent reality by evading or trivializing evil, usually for the sake of indulging pleasing emotions. Our refusal to face evil for what it is takes many forms, but is perhaps most pointed in Western society’s common denial of death. We grab at the things of this world because we cannot bear the thought that they will dissolve into dust like everything else.

We dupe ourselves into thinking there will always be enough to meet our wants—enough fuel, enough energy, enough land—because we cannot imagine an end to all our acquiring, the possibility that there are limits, that things and people are not everlasting. Provocatively, theologian Stanley Hauerwas contends, “There’s a connection between the amount of money [we] spend on medicine and our reaction to 9/11. Both are attempts to deny that we’re not going to get out of life alive.”

Many believe we have reached an “aesthetic moment” in our culture, when artistic media are quickly assuming massive importance in shaping the Western imagination. If there is truth in this, it is vital that Christian artists do not succumb to the sentimentality that so often accompanies surges of aesthetic enthusiasm. William James once wrote about a visit to a Christian resort in New York State. He tells us of “the atrocious harmlessness of all things” and how he longed for the outside world, with its “heights and depths, the precipices and steep ideals, the gleams of the awful and the infinite.”

It is probably in our worship that this sentimental “flattening out” is most evident. We see it in our tendency to avoid any art in worship that will not instantly push the “feel-good” button, lest we lose members or repel newcomers. We see it when we insist God should grant everything in an instant, matched by music where every tension is immediately resolved, no dissonance “lived through.” We see it when we crave for direct, unmediated access to God, forgetting that God is always to some extent mediated through the finite materials of the created world. We see it in what Rowan Williams calls the “sentimental solipsism” of some recent songwriting, where the erotic metaphors of medieval and Counter-Reformation piety reappear but without the theological checks and balances of those older traditions. As a result, “Jesus as object of loving devotion can slip into Jesus as fantasy partner in a dream of emotional fulfillment.”

Begbie is a prominent advocate for the arts in the context of Christianity. You can pre-order For the Beauty of the Church on Amazon.com.

• I don’t know. Maybe through some false, Puritanical idea that work should be cheerless drudgery? That if you’re enjoying it too much, it’s not really “work”?
• I think it depends on whom you’re talking to. Great societies need art as well as industry and politics (Actually, do we really need politics?). I, for one, would love to quilt or knit, but I’ll apparently have to wait for Heaven to succeed at those arts.
• Arts and Crafts aren’t considered “work” because people can do them as hobbies or in their spare time and don’t realize that (perhaps) there is a great amount of craftsmanship and skill in what you do than in (perhaps) what I do, when I’m not punching a clock. The correct answer is, “Paul, we’d all love to do what we love to do but have to punch a clock and it’s more fun to mock you than to say, ‘I’m jealous.’” I’m not jealous of your vocation but I wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to do what I loved either.
• Probably for a similar reason that being a “homemaker & mother” is not considered “real work” — because it doesn’t bring in the bread.

Through the course of these responses, I began to wonder if part of this cultural sentiment might also result from the underlying and powerfully subconscious underpinnings of our mass producing consumerist culture. The value of handmade has, perhaps, been relegated to the status of hobby because such objects don’t make significant contributions to national statistics. They don’t pay homage to the god of the economy. They don’t create enough of the right kind of jobs.

The value of imagination, beauty, leisure, philosophy and so forth also fall short of the god of efficiency’s standards, all of which often tie into the arts. These things take time out of an otherwise productive life and are generally frowned upon by American society.

Those are the beginnings of my thoughts anyway, and I’d be interested in hearing more from readers.

That is the International Arts Movement‘s way of asking a question that has partly driven my artistic philosophy for ten years now. I was never able to put it in such succinct terms, however. I usually talked about original creation, what the world looked and acted like before the Fall. IAM’s more concise phrase is a much better jumping off point.

A few months ago I was thinking about photography, a media we all love as long as we’re the ones behind the lens, a technology that seems to capture every wrong moment in time if the lens is pointed towards us. Recently I’ve been working more and more with video. Interlaced in all of the footage lie a myriad of embarrassing gestures. Without this technology though, most of us never see the contorted nature of our countenance midstream. Before the advent of the camera, we were more in control of our image.

Is there something about our dislike of seeing ourselves, especially when we don’t look our best, that relates back to the way things ought to be? Do we possess some kind of internal aesthetic editor that is still faintly yet immutably calibrated to a world before the Fall?

Image by Derek Jensen from Wikipedia.

Just before we moved back to Nebraska I sold our couch. We liked it quite a bit (and it was a great buy), but every time I sat down in it my allergies flared up.

We planned to replace said sitting tool with something, or somethings, after we moved. In particular we hoped to find a click-clack (sometimes called a flip-flop) couch. Their styling is less garish than many others, and we like to be able to accommodate visiting friends. Apparently these glorified futons aren’t all that though, and we can’t find them in most retail stores anyway. We also thought of a recliner for the wife to read in.

Her neck has bothered her in a bad way since we’ve moved, and we were both hoping that a different sitting situation would rectify that. So we started looking around. Craigslist and the Facebook Marketplace are very slow here in central Nebraska (apparently auctions are the in thing), so we resorted to shopping retail style.

Buying new furniture is not something the wife and I are accustomed to. Most of what fills our dwelling we were given, I salvaged and fixed up or I built. Cushy chairs are a little more complicated than beds and dressers to fabricate though, especially when you don’t exactly have a wood shop at your disposal. That said neither of us were prepared for the garishness or the cost of the furniture retail store.

First off, the garishness. Of the, for example, 100 recliners in a furniture showroom only three seem to have any aesthetic sensibility. Most appear thrown together (i.e., not designed) and cheaply built. The upholstery is strange in most instances and also seems lacking any serious consideration.

We couldn’t imagine paying money for most of these products, especially at the prices plastered on such monstrosities. Why is it that so many new chairs costs as much as the used cars I’ve purchased?

In the end I bought a used chair from a pawn shop. It’s quite clean, although it seems to have previously rested in the presence of a smoker. The offending smell isn’t too overpowering since the object is vinyl (a requirement buying used for people with allergies, if you can’t find leather). Hopefully it will buy us some time to save some money and find something we actually like.

I wasn’t shy about my dislike for the selection at the furniture mall. The salesperson responded more or less by saying “to each their own.” I have to wonder, though, if our aesthetic sensibilities as a culture haven’t more or less succumbed to the cheap and unconsidered sensibilities of overstuffed furniture factories. That’s what there is to be bought, and most people won’t question it. They’ll look around a little, find the ones they like best and be happy.

Not me. I have higher standards and, while I don’t aspire to snobbery, am proud of those standards.

I do not want ever to be indifferent to the joys and beauties of this life. For through these, as through pain, we are enabled to see purpose in randomness, pattern in chaos. We do not have to understand in order to believe that behind the mystery and the fascination there is love.

In the midst of what we are going through this summer I have to hold onto this, to return to the eternal questions without demanding an answer. The questions worth asking are not answerable. Could we be fascinated by a Maker who was completely explained and understood? The mystery is tremendous, and the fascination that keeps me returning to the questions affirms that they are worth asking, and that any God worth believing in is the God not only of the immensities of the galaxies I rejoice in at night when I walk the dogs, but also the God of love who cares about the sufferings of us human beings and is here, with us, for us, in our pain and in our joy.

From her book Two-part invention.