Thanks to Sue Ellen, a former resident of Siloam Springs and neighbor of Ella May Mason, for emailing me the following photograph of another Mason watercolor.

My gut level reaction upon seeing this work was to identify it with the kind of generic paintings one sees on the wall of a hotel room. I think, in part, the frame in this photograph isn’t living up to the complexity of the painting. With a more neutral matte and elaborate (or, perhaps, just wider) frame, my gut would probably think differently of this watercolor. My eyes are telling me that Mason was an very proficient illustrator. This would, I imagine, be a very time consuming work of art. Of course, every Mason work is interesting to me since I live in her former home.

Sue Ellen’s comment imparted a number of interesting details about the artist. Here’s an excerpt:

She was extremely intelligent and loved to talk about any subject, she excelled in the world of art. She knew so many painters personaly. I always looked up to her. I used to take my small daughter down to her house in hopes that some of that “fiesty’ spirit would rub off on her. I think it did, and I may pay for that one day, but I don’t mind.

See other Ella May Mason paintings via this link.

I missed the opening for this show but was able to wander through the gallery this afternoon after meeting a friend on campus. I really didn’t know what the show was about, but to be honest didn’t have very high hopes. Thankfully I was surprised. The works on display covered roughly 100 years, from the late 1800s to late 1900s, and were each a unique work. A wide variety of styles comprise the exhibit.

I chose two images to give you an idea of the works. The first was an interesting painting, but was more interesting to me in that it was torn, sort of repaired and now is part of a gallery show. I like the sense of reality and temporality this conveys. Works of art aren’t necessarily untouchable. Paintings aren’t going to last forever, as much as we’d like to be able to preserve so many masterpieces.

“Two Women and a Soldier” by Dean Cornwell

“End of Rivalry” by Laurence Fellows

My good friend Joel Armstrong recently started his own blog. He’s a prof at John Brown University teaching drawing and illustration. His own work is more three dimensional in nature — other than his art cards. He “draws” with wire and creates small iconic wall sculptures out of small found objects, such as the following “Rust Bird.”

I’ve noticed for a while now that people like to post videos on YouTube (or the like) recording the creation of certain works of art, painting or drawing mostly in my experience. I came across a link to one such regular vlogger this afternoon called The Daily Monster.

These monsters are wonderful illustrations. They remind me of my own doodles when I was still in school; and apparently these are the second hundred in the series (I’m featuring number 160 in this entry). The first hundred will be available in less than a week as a book you can purchase on Amazon.com.

While I appreciate the nod to process these videos display, I’ve yet to understand why anyone would want to record and post them let alone watch the them. By far, The Daily Monster is the most interesting of the group that I’ve seen. But I doubt I’ll be adding it to my own feed reader.

It’s worth noting the marketing potential in artist Stefan G. Bucher’s videos in relationship to his upcoming book. It costs him nothing (assuming he has a camcorder) to post them on YouTube; his blog is a part of his business website and likely doesn’t incur any extraneous costs either.

Generally, I’m not one for monsters — at least not most Hollywood-esque creations such as Alien and Predator, which are grotesque to a fault in my opinion. Bucher’s creations are, however, disarming if not lovable.

I’ve avoided, to a large degree, commentary regarding painter-slash-marketer Thomas Kinkade, and the couple times I have mentioned him I tried to maintain the utmost professional decorum. He and his work easily give rise to polarized passions for and against. My personal observation is that — while I grant the artist liberty to depict any subject matter he chooses — the saccharin nature of his works supplant or bury whatever ills he’s suffered or observed in life (this based on reading articles about and interviews with the man). The artist’s personality will always come out in his or her works.

It surprised me last night to see that Gregory Wolfe included an essay talking about Kinkade in his Intruding Upon the Timeless collection, and I was eager to read it. Jumping off of the common criticisms of The Painter of Light, Wolfe’s commentary considers the artist’s seeming love affair with sentimentality. Critics go so far as to call Kinkade’s work “art as a Happy Meal” and “cultural Prozac.” At the same time, Wolfe concedes that the paintings must be meeting a felt need in the culture judging by their popularity.

Wolfe defines sentimentality using R.H. Blyth: “We are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it” and Oscar Wilde: “A sentimentalist is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.” He goes on to use Mark Jefferson’s characterization of sentimentality not as inherent in certain emotions, but instead as a disjuncture between emotion and object. “The heart of the problem is that of a misrepresentation of the world in order to indulge certain emotional states,” Wolfe says. “The essence of Kinkade’s sentimentality is the packaging of nostalgia. It’s an oxymoronic idea, but it has become a major part of our cultural life, as Florence King has noted: ‘True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories . . . but American-style nostalgia is about as ephemeral as copyrighted deja vu.’”

He concludes the essay thus:

“There are times when criticizing sentimentality seems like overkill. But it would be wrong to simply dismiss the phenomenon — and the specific instance I’ve been discussing, religious kitsch — as nothing more than examples of harmless mediocrity. The great theologian, Cardinal Henri de Lubac, once wrote: ‘There is nothing more demanding than the taste for mediocrity. Beneath its ever moderate appearance there is nothing more intemperate; nothing surer in its instinct; nothing more pitiless in its refusals. It suffers no greatness, shows beauty no mercy.’

Perhaps, at its best, sentimentality strives for something approximating the theological virtues of hope and love. But in refusing to see the world as it is, sentimentality reduces hope to nostalgia. And in seeking to escape ambiguity and the consequences of the Fall, it denies the heart of love, which is compassion. Unless compassion means the act of suffering with the other in their otherness, it becomes meaningless. Well-intentioned as the purveyors and consumers of sentiment may be, they still want the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.”

I haven’t personally thought of the marketing guru’s impressionistic works as utopian before, but the word seems appropriate to me now. Kinkade describes his paintings as depicting a “world without the Fall.” As a child I regularly created — in my mind and on paper — such worlds without sin. While bored in high school math class, I devised islands where only Christians were allowed to live, combining (probably) the sense of isolation I was beginning to feel in the church with my fledgling interest in architecture and community planning. In retrospect, I realize these ghettos I dreamt of fly in the face of Christ’s mandates to make disciples of all nations and bear potentially frightening similarities to historically heinous circumstances such as the Nazi concentration camps.

All that to say that as I continue to think about Kinkade and his work, I may be able to more aptly understand where he’s coming from.

What really irks me about the artist is his ceaseless marketing, his dependency on reproductions — no matter how high their quality or how many dots of “light” are applied — and insistence on plastering his paintings on everything from mugs to, apparently, recliners. The man is more of a brand than an artist. It seems as though this is how he wants it, but it makes it very difficult to take him seriously as an artist. And by artist here I mean someone deeply interested in his craft as a vehicle for imaginative and probing communication. The paradox is that his model is all about mass communication. While I don’t understand, personally, the world of artistic reproductions, I have no significant problem allowing a painter or printmaker their limited edition giclees. Kinkade, however, takes this to an astronomical new level, paying no respect (it would seem) to the original, the tactile.

I wonder how Norman Rockwell was perceived in his day, or even Maxfield Parish (one of my favorite illustrators). Perhaps if we think of Kinkade as an illustrator, his wildly successful and ubiquitous marketing endeavors will seem less offensive.

What Kinkade’s paintings lack that Rockwell’s and Parish’s often rely on are images of people. Wolfe, in his essay, points out that Thomas Kinkade’s “genius” is that he never lets us into the “Cotswoldy cottages” that are his staple, “leaving us free to imagine the world within.” But that’s another topic for another time.

I’ve been looking for good artistic images of Christmas trees the last few weeks but came up empty. Searching again today I ran across this old post card. Greeting cards — indeed, any kind of personal paper mail — has always been something I very much enjoy, and the vintage aspect all the more.

I found the image on the Brocante Home Chronicles blog. This, of course, inspired me to Google for other Christmas card fair, and I straightaway searched for some of the beautifully illustrated greeting cards from the Victorian era. I liked this one from 1878:

Over the last four or five years I’ve engaged in a number of discussions online concerning the use of nude models in the art world from a Christian perspective. Commonly, a Victorian (or, as some would suggest, “prudish”) sensibility seems to drive many Protestant’s response to any kind of undraped human body, and many people of faith condemn the use of nudes in the teaching of art.

A number of factors must be considered when approaching this subject, including the place of the human form in Creation, the place of the human form in artistic tradition, how the human form is viewed in present day culture and, as Christians, the human tendency to pervert all good things. I recently, perchance, ran across Gordon College’s policy and reasoning for the use of nudes in their drawing classes; Gordon is a private, faith-based institution. Some key points in their article are excerpted here:

“We have chosen in the Art Department at Gordon College to work respectfully with the human figure attempting to bring honor and glory to God in the process. We base this, in a Christian context, on a time-honored professional practice, holding the belief that the human form is the crowning achievement of God in Creation - worthy of our expert knowledge, and analogous to the scientific knowledge of the human body in medicine and biology. In our tradition as artists it is seen as the linchpin of our practice of visual knowledge. If you can accurately and expressively draw or paint or sculpt the human form you can draw anything.”

“In our teaching, the nude has much more in common with medical knowledge than with popular sexualization of images in advertising and movies. The context of the encounter determines the meaning of the unclothed form. An operating theater in a hospital has a drastically different meaning from that of a strip joint. An art studio with students or artists surrounding a model is akin to the operating theater. Knowledge is being gained and a professional activity is being practiced.”

My own experience drawing with the aid of nude figures at the University of Nebraska followed this same professional decorum. Never was the act of drawing with a live, undraped model sexual or erotic. It was academic and — despite not preferring the teaching style of my professor — key to furthering my own skills. I learned more in my figure drawing class than I could have imagined, and firmly believe the cause of this learning was directly related to the challenges inherent in rendering the human form. Ironically, the two models I drew most while in class went to my church (and happened to be brother and sister).

My brother, who attended a different public university in Nebraska, drew from models not entirely undraped, but in their underwear. My mother relayed to me that he was personally glad for this. I find it interesting, however, that it’s not just Christian schools that hedge against nudity.

In the last year I’ve desired to begin sketching again, in order to further my craft in all respects. Knowing the important part figure drawing played in my artistic development during college, this is where I would like to focus. However, I don’t have access to models at this point (and can’t really afford to pay them anyway) and haven’t begun sketching regularly despite my desire. Another option lies with the variety of books for artists available at major retailers. These feature numerous photographs or drawings of nude models in a variety of poses. I fear, however, this option falls short of the actual experience; the photos are small and detail will certainly be compromised.

Here in America we are a bit prudish at times (I remember when, in college, friends of mine — being female — offered room and board temporarily to a German friend — being male — who had no problems with walking around in the nude after showering, to the girl’s chagrin. All three involved were Christ-followers.). Here in the United States we are required, to a degree, to suffer through overly-sexualized, unrealistically-modified advertising on a ludicrous and unhealthy scale — a fact which distorts our perception of reality and can subsequently wreak havoc in almost all areas of our lives.

Perhaps a renaissance in figure drawing is a good antidote to the absurd culture of beauty marketers and film-makers have cultivated around us. Maybe a resurgence of the nude (”nude” being different than “naked”) in American art could actually serve to refocus our perspective. Maybe if our reaction to the Divinely created human body weren’t so awkward — perhaps most often a mixture of lust and shame — women would not feel pressured into hiding while breast-feeding, a beautifully intimate but non-sexual act. Just maybe the culture would be less prone to sexualizing (read “objectifying”) women and, more and more, men. Perhaps God would be more glorified when people took the time to observe new drawings and paintings depicting the figure, as they contemplate how wonderfully and fearfully made we are.

Perhaps.

Leonardo da Vinci
The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist (c. 1499–1500)
National Gallery, London