Some time back I found a Lilias Trotter eBook put online by the Project Gutenburg. Parables of the Cross and Parables of the Christ-life were both available, and I quickly downloaded and printed them for my own collection. I’ve yet to read them, but I wanted to share a few of my favorite images from Parables of the Cross (the image quality in Parables of the Christ-life is lacking). I can see why Ruskin thought her the next best thing in the art world; her craft here is exceptional.

Her handwriting is gorgeous as well.

I like the composition of these three works, as well as a certain softness that seems to be her style. It gives the subjects certain kind of handmade beauty without compromising the rendering, the realism.

Via the Ruah Arts Blog, from a website dedicated to Annie Heyne’s paintings, from her own bio:

So I’m off to the convent, folks! After receiving my Bachelor of Arts in Art History from the University of Dallas, my Masters of Fine Art in oil painting from the New York Academy of Art, I set out for Florence to do post-graduate work at the Florence Academy of Art. It was in Florence that I became familiar with the Religious of the Sacred Heart.

This semi-cloistered order, rooted in St. Madeleine Sophie Barat’s Society of the Sacred Heart, houses a community of 15 nuns, the only community in the only house of this new reform order. As every Roman Catholic religious, these nuns take the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Their special fourth vow is one of education of the youth.


Annie Heyne at work on a painting.

Many of the rooms of the convent building are used as classrooms. The school is co-ed with kids from 3 to 18 years old. Some of the nuns teach others busy themselves with the boarding students, while others deal with the business aspect of things. Whether it’s with the house, the school, the infirmary, or of course with prayer, you can imagine these nuns keep busy!

The convent stands as a large, white pillar amidst two-hundred olive trees, fruit trees, small vineyards and honey-beehives. While simple on the inside, it is bedecked with every sort of flower and greenery throughout the year on the outside! And of course, there is the view! As the building is just far enough outside the city-center, it lends itself to a breath-taking view of Brunelleschi’s Duomo and really all of Florence. And how amazing it is!

Continue reading via this link. Haven’t made time to really read the bio yet, but my question is “Will she still be able to paint as a semi-cloistered nun?”

Interesting video with a myriad of well-known paintings, progressing from the time of Da Vinci into the 20th century.

It’s a bit early in the day for me to be thinking about abstraction, so I may come back later and edit this post as necessary. But certain things in this recent Trees Walking post captured my attention.

“I think it’s safe to say that much modern art (and architecture) suffers from a sterile, monolithic, boring oneness.” I’m not sure what Stephen, the author on Trees Walking, means when he says “oneness,” but I concur that much modern art is sterile and monolithic. This is particularly true of architecture in my opinion. Reading magazines like Dwell might be fun, but living in 95% of the homes they feature would be like institutionalization.

“Art (the skillful making of things to evoke beauty) is, when man does it, by nature representational, because man himself is an image of God, a representation, an imitating creature who makes by the law in which he’s made.” First off, and I probably don’t need to remind most of us of this, art is more than about making beautiful things. Sometimes I wish, personally, this weren’t the case, but creating works intended to convey specific messages or move people to certain action or record certain events (as in the case of painting and sculpture before the advent of photography) is also a valid part of the definition of art. Secondly, I agree with Stephen’s statement above, but I must elaborate on it. It seems to me, and I’ve said this here before, that creating non-representational works is a way for man to flesh out his being created in the image of God. God created out of the void. Man cannot do this in the same way; we don’t have the ability. Nor should man try to be God, a futile effort that will end you up like the pretentious Lucifer. Yet, if God created ex nihilo (and to do so is therefore part of who He is), would not that be infused into who man is? And would not abstract and non-representational artwork display this?

R.H. Ives Gammell, author of Twilight of Painting, once referred to anything that didn’t resemble French academic painting as “Misplaced intellectualism imposed on ignorant execution.”

More recently, Gage Academy (a bastion of realism) invited a prominent art dealer to judge a competition. The judge, Greg Kucera, said of the works that “There seems to be a good deal of showing off what one can do but very little that caught any kind of emotional depth. It’s like hearing a violinist who can hit all the notes in a complex sonata by William Walton but not give you any satisfaction of the passion.”

(The students replied on an obnoxiously large piece of paper, “The Passion is in trusting yourself even when the rest of the art world tells you what you are doing isn’t valid. The Passion is in beginning an endeavor like this in the first place. The Passion is in spending 30 hours on a painting struggling to keep it fresh and alive.” All well and good as an artist, but you can’t fault the judge for not seeing trust in yourself or thirty hours on the canvas.)

The above snippets are taken from a long article titled Art School Confidential in The Stranger. One of the Gage Academy students, someone who already has an art degree, said of her university experience in Hong Kong: “It was like, here’s a brush, go paint, you are an artist. After I graduated, I felt like I couldn’t paint, I couldn’t do things.” She dismisses her university art education—”I feel like it’s a lot of BS.” My own art school experience was not quite so stunted, thankfully, although there is precedent for such things.

Both Gammell’s and Kucera’s commentary is valid. Much modern art can be overly-intellectual (or emotional) angst lacking in craft. Likewise, academic painting can be just that, academic — dry and unengaging. However, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Abstraction or realism? Why does it have to be one or the other? Must we establish such extremes, diggin into our own trench and throwing bombs at the other side? Both abstraction (and non-representational work) and realist works have their place. Both can be, if passionately planned and executed, engaging works, beautiful works, socially challenging works that spur viewers on to better lives.

And perhaps we even need both of these extremes, and everything in-between. People think differently. People respond to different visual stimuli in different ways. Maybe it is a right-brain/left-brain thing.

This isn’t a sappy “Can’t we all just get along” line. However, our inbred bickering (”bickering” to be clearly distinguished from discussion) does neither artist or viewer any good. It would do us well to acknowledge the value in different artistic expressions, even in ones that may not suit our personal taste.

Last week I asked in a post something like, “Is a greater or primary appreciation for realism or abstraction a right-brain left-brain thing?”

Wikipedia defines right-brain functions as:

“holistical algorithmic processing, abstract-oriented, mathematics: quality - perception of shapes/motions, present and future, language: intonation/emphasis, spatial perception” [emphasis mine]

And left-brain function as:

“linear algorithmic processing, concrete-oriented, mathematics: quantity - perception of counting/measurement, present and past, language: grammar/words, pattern perception”

I’ve no other data or experiences to back up this idea any further, but thought it worth mentioning again.

An experience I do have time and time again, however, is a person asking what a piece of artwork is “for.” It happened yesterday in my hearing, granted the piece in question was being done by someone known for functional crocheting. At times I wonder if it isn’t generational, where people my parents age (baby boomers) are predisposed to concrete ideas. Then I quickly remember the people I know who debunk this theory as well.

I know I’ve also asked this here before, but why can’t art just be beautiful? Some will suggest this equates art with decoration. A Makoto Fujimura show opens at the JBU gallery this week— a show I’ve waited for all school year. Last year, a videographer interviewing Fujimura for The Christian Vision Project noted another artist calling Fujimura’s work “decorative.” The interviewer noted that in the high-art world of New York City, this is a snub. It was not complimentary (Fujimura took the comment with the humility and grace commonly attributed to him.).

What’s wrong with decoration? Granted, most full-time artists’ works show their passions, be they personal, political, social, even if it isn’t via recognizable forms. Therein, abstract work possesses imaginative thought beyond mere ornamentation. I often wonder if people who too-quickly and thoughtlessly poo-poo abstract canvases or sculptures as not worth their time aren’t being, frankly, lazy viewers.

In this all-too-fast-paced culture, the blame isn’t entirely on the viewer. We hurry. We don’t take time to stop and smell the roses, or the cherry blossoms, or even our dinner before inhaling it. Hence the category on this blog titled “Intentional observation.” Further, many people don’t have the slightest training in artistic viewing. They don’t know how to approach a Pollock or Rothko without thinking, “My three year old can do that.”

Not everyone who poo-poos abstraction is a lazy viewer, Tim Jones being a proper example for this entry on this blog. I fear, however, many people do fit this description.

Crystal Bridges has purchased six portraits by Gerardus Duyckinck of a colonial German Jewish family. One of the works:

Arkansas Democrat Gazette story

Benton County Daily Record story

Crystal Bridges museum of American art

Gerardus Duyckinck on Scholar’s Resource

The following is from an email I received from Tim Jones, followed by my response which his articulate notes inspired.

Thanks for the tip. I have been planning to be at the reception for Makoto Fujimura for some time. We have briefly discussed him at our meetings, but lately we have been consumed with the JBU show.

I have been reading some of his articles and interviews, hoping to get a little insight. I have not been convinced of the usefulness of abstract art as significant communication for some time, though I have held off dismissing it altogether. I consider myself an agnostic on the subject at the moment, and would be very interested to speak with Fujimura, though I know he has better things to do.

When I say “abstract” art, I mean non-objective art. My main gripe with it is that I see nothing unique to abstraction that I don’t see in good pictorial art, and yet significant things are sacrificed. I see the losses, but no net gain.

Art without imagery, to me, is like trying to write a novel without characters or a plot. Okay, you have words and ink and paper, a cover, so call it a novel, if you like, but can it be a great novel?

Non-objective art at its best, to me, could be described accurately as “interesting”, but not significant. There is good abstract art and bad, but even the best has never truly moved me. I’m willing to be converted, though. I will be very interested to see Fujimura’s work in person, as well as your own.

Thanks, yes I took home a small prize from the OAA show for Pomegranates, but I need to be more ambitious in my coming work, and really try to create some profound pieces. to that end I’ll be working soon with the U of A museum. They have agreed to let me have access to some of their collections, and I hope to find some truly exquisite objects to paint. I would like to work with some really ancient artifacts, stone tools, pots, etc… those things have always fascinated me.

I also will be doing a lot of plein air work in the next few weeks, which I look forward to.

My response:

My own work I refer to as non-representational, not abstract. Modern connotation, however, uses these terms interchangeably. I use them as I learned them in college seven years ago. Some of Fujimura’s work is abstract and some non-representational, at least to my eye.

I don’t know why I’m now so drawn to the non-representational mixed media sculpture I find myself engaged in. I think a lot of the reason lies with my intense interest in architecture. Architecture is function, but also decoration and proportion (and, of course, many many other things). I suppose this is an odd combination for most “fine art” types, I suppose, what with the technical aspects of building design. I really am as interested in architecture and community planning as sculpture, but not necessarily more so.

My work, though non-representational, is inspired by and visually refers to palpable things — or intangible ideas. This is where I believe abstraction and non-representational works exhibit real value, in its ability to draw people in to more ethereal ideas that don’t necessarily have any visual reference in the three-dimensional world. In the movie Pollock, the actor portraying Pollock talks about how his style came about: He felt as though this was the best way to represent the chaos (a rather enigmatic idea to present visually) in the observed world, the wars, the social upheaval, and so on. This makes sense to me. Sure, a realist work can also represent chaos. But the difference, I believe, is that abstract works can — potentially, not always — better convey a feeling or an intangible idea.

A realist work might make a person think about or make an observation about the subject matter. An abstract work, it seems to me, is more probing. The abstract work can cause me to think differently about the topic, often more deeply. Or it causes me to think about the process and the material. A lot of what I think about, and thus hope some of my own viewers think about, in my own work is process and material. I know this is not going to serve every artists’ interest, but suffice it to say that Picasso’s Guernica causes me to think in a more profound manner about war than classical depictions of war. Maybe this is just a right-brain left-brain thing. It’s quite possible classical depictions of war are more profound to other people than abstract works.

Francis Schaeffer, in his treatise Art and the Bible, pointed out that there was no practical reason for God to ordain the decoration of the temple’s pillars with chains and the priest’s robes with off-color pomegranates. Yet God did this, and therein we have certain precedence for abstract works — though not exclusively.

I grew up drawing. In junior high and high school I started with fish and other animals, drawn from pictures in books. I began college as an architecture student, where we spent much of our time rendering. I know what it is like to spend countless hours on a drawing, (even painting still life). My drawings were better than my paintings, none of which meet the caliber of your own works. I know I still have this ability, though, and actually lament not finding the time to continue this discipline. I know to be able to do so would aid in the rest of my work, continually training my hands and honing my eyes. This is especially true of figure drawing, where the proportions of the human body are so precise that the slightest unintentional mistake looks grossly out of place.