Flannery O'Conner's cinematic prose

Look at this excerpt from Flannery O'Conner's short story The Life You Save May Be Your Own:

Mr. Shiftlet's eye in the darkness was focused on a part of the automobile bumper that glittered in the distance. "Lady," he said, jerking his short arm up as if he could point with it to her house and yard and pump, "there ain't a broken thing on this plantation that I couldn't fix for you, one‑arm jackleg or not. I'm a man," he said with a sullen dignity, "even if I ain't a whole one. I got," he said, tapping his knuckles on the floor to emphasize the immensity of what he was going to say, "a moral intelligence!" and his face pierced out of the darkness into a shaft of doorlight and he stared at her as if he were astonished himself at this impossible truth.

Isn't that very filmic? It may just be by obsession with film, but it seems like that's a heck of a lot of acting, directing and cinematography for a paragraph, not to mention amazing writing.

Perhaps the Brothers Coen could take on one of her stories? Their new film (an adaptation of a novel by another writer of 'southern gothic'), No Country for Old Men, looks amazing.

P.S. I listened to the O'Conner story today on Miette's excellent Bedtime Stories podcast. Kind of strange listening to rednecks read with an English accent, but she's an excellent reader.

"The subject of this anthology is of the greatest importance, not only for the understanding of the art produced in traditional civilizations, but also for understanding of the real nature of human condition and knowledge of what it means to be human. To be truly human is to reflect the Divine Image here on earth. By virtue of being human, man creates and makes, and by remaining faithful to his primordial nature produces traditional art, in the vastest sense of the term. Such an art reflects her on earth the Divine Artist, thus making possible the creation of the forms that lead to the world of the Spirit and the Formless. This understanding of art has been to a large extent forgotten in the modern world as a consequence of modern man's forgetting who he is, why he is here on earth, and where he is going. This anthology is, therefore, not only an exposition of the significance of traditional art, but also the means for rememberence of what it means to be truly human, to be the pontifical man who is the bridge between Heaven and earth and a channel of grace for the world around him."

-Seyyed Hossein Nasr in the Preface to Every Man An Artist: Readings in the Traditional Philosophy of Art

This looks like a goldmine. I'll probably be quoting it here this summer. I like the connection of art to eschatology, which I've talked about in a few posts too.

Richard Wilbur on abstraction in painting and poetry

"There must be some poets who have very little visual imagination, even though the eye is the primary sense. Everybody's agreed on that. Since the middle ages I think. Even D.H. Lawrence, who made out a strong case against the primacy of vision, was a painter.
...
I think I can say why there are more painter-poets, or poets who are would be painters, than there are poets who have to do with music. It strikes me that music is infinitely more abstract then painting or poetry. That you can't make any precise statements as to what music is up to. Poetry simply has to be exact and concrete or it bores to death. And on the whole, I think--despite some successes in abstract painting-that it's the same with painting."

-Richard Wilbur, Conversations with Richard Wilbur

Synesthesia and the Glory of God

Synesthesia is basically the mixing of the senses. My brother said when he was very young, he didn't want a certain blanket because "it smells like red noises!"

While listening this excellent sermon by Baylor RUF campus minister Pete Hatton, I was reminded of synesthesia when Pete said that we can see God's glory thorough a sermon. Sometimes we see God through hearing his word. Sometimes we hear of His Glory by seeing a sunset that tells of that glory.

But this makes sense, because the perfect Word of God that with God and is God, became incarnated and was the perfect man, the perfect Image of God.

The Word is the Image, and we, including our eyes and ears, are made in his likeness. So perhaps synesthesia isn't so unnatural.

abstraction, representation and trinitarian aesthetics

An experiment in criticism.



It seems that abstract art, in not imitating nature, is often imbalanced in regard to the relation of the whole to the parts, the many and the one.

Above you have a painting by Malevich, one by Turner, and one by Pollock.

It seems in imitating nature, representational art naturally inherits a pleasing relation and coherence of whole and part. Minimalist abstraction and Pollock paintings are of course the extremes in this case, but I think it's safe to say that much modern art (and architecture) suffers from a sterile, monolithic, boring oneness. And now much post-modern art suffers from an equally boring, un-coherent, sprawling manyness.

I'm not against all abstract art, but I tend to stick to re-presentation. But I think when abstract art is good, it is in a sense, good because it finds a quality, a proportion, a relationship between things, a coherence that we find in God's art: nature. And thus, while being abstract, it's strength is still coming from representation.

If you draw what is there in the world, you are learning from the Artist from whom all artist get their name.

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.

And our God, in whose image we are made, and whose glory nature proclaims, is the glorious Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. As the Athanasian Creed says: "the Father is God; the Son is God; the Holy Spirit is God: And yet there are not three gods, but one God."

This world we live in, which was made by the Three in One, we call the universe. The creation, like the Creator, is one and many, unity in diversity, and so we call it universe.

Also, in creation, we often see a relation of part to whole, mathmatitions call a fractal: where the shape of a part mirrors (reflects/represents) the shape of the whole. An obvious example is a fern, but you could also take the shape of a mountain and a molehill, or a tree and a leaf, or a solar system and an atom. This too has something to do with the triune God who we know through Jesus.

creativity creation, and originality

"A creature is not a creator, and cannot be. There is only one
Creation, and we are it's members.

To be creative is only to have health: to keep oneself fully alive
in the Creation, to keep the Creation fully alive in oneself, to see
the Creation anew, to welcome one's part in it anew.

The most creative works are all strategies of this health.

Works of pride, by self-called creators, with their premium on
originality, reduce the Creation to novelty-the faint surprises
of minds incapable of wonder.

Pursuing originality, the would-be creator works alone. In lone-
liness one assumes a responsibility for oneself that one cannot
fulfill.

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness."

-Wendell Berry in What Are People For?

thoughts on drawing, glory, beauty and God

"When drawing the model, stay present and in utter awe! When he or she takes the stand, it is as if they are a god or goddess presented to us. They represent you and the rest of humanity. Become amazed and stay open to this fantastic occurrence. Your experience with the model is your drawing... Use the idea of having the richest and most stimulating experience drawing the model's humanity while using your very own as the purpose to drawing. All of the technique throughout the rest of this book is to serve that higher purpose."
-Mike Mattesi in Force: Dynamic Life Drawing for Animators

Drawing is seeing is knowing is loving what you see and know and draw. For we are made to know by loving, and one day seeing, the Holy Trinity, in whose image each of us and all of us are made. An image ultimately that, to quote Lewis, "...one might be tempted to worship". From the above quote : "..as if a god or goddess". As David says: "...crowned with glory and honor." For the One (and Three) we present (and re-present) as we face out into the world is crowned with an infinitely greater glory. And the whole world we face and see is also "full of his glory" as the seraphim proclaim.

Learning to draw is learning how to see the world around you. To know that each face you see is an image of God. To be borne down by the heaviness of the weight of glory. To know that speaking, spoken trees and skies are gloriously declaring glory.

And we too are words made by the Word for speaking.
We are works that work: "For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them." (Ephesians)

We are made things that make things.
We are images that make images.
We are clay that shapes clay.

And yet... perhaps drawing as I described it is not how it is now, but how it was in the old garden at the beginning of the world, and how it will be at the new garden-city at the beginning to the new heavens and new earth.

For all nature's proclamations of glory, she groans (Romans 8) under another weight, the weight of sin, the weight the King of Glory bore for us under a darkened sky on the broken tree of the cross.

"Beauty is there, abroad in the order of things..." as David Bentley Hart wrote, not in the eye of the beholder. In the eye of the beholder is a splinter or perhaps a 2X6. And so we cannot see creation or our fellow images aright. The woman God made beautifully in his image, we lust after. The brother we are given to look after, we kill instead. The glorious creation which tells of God, we mistake for God and worship.

But that is why we must go to the God who heals the blind, and pray "on earth as it is in heaven." For, as sure as the sun rises after darkness, there will come one eternal day when we will see and live with the God who opens eyes with mud and blinds men with his beauty.

Vander Wende and Heade

I was at Barnes and Noble the other day reading (I think) John Updike's Essays on Art. I was struck by how a Martin Johnson Heade painting reminded me of Richard Vander Wende's concept paintings for Willow.

Paintings by Heade:


Paintings by Vander Wende (3 from Willow, one from Aladdin, and one Riven render):



Edit: I remember now, it also reminded me of another concept artist: Doug Chiang. Here is a screen shot form his Robota trailer:


Robota eventually became an illustrated book.

Christianity and the Arts Conference and David Taylor

Check it out! Eugene Peterson, Jeremy Begbie and others will be in Austin, April 2008 for Transforming Culture: A Vision for the Church and the Arts.

Check out David Taylor's (of the excellent blog Diary of an Arts Pastor) announcement.

While your at it check out his previous post:
Beauty Better Save this Tired World:

"The ugliness of this world, ethical or commercial or otherwise, will not be reversed by mere abstention from it, the "Christ against culture" behavior of Richard Niebuhr's analysis. It will be turned around only by gracious, generous, muscular acts of beauty.

We must act beauty out in the stuff of our lives. We must act it out even if it means looking foolish, like the very serious joker, in the eyes of a worldly wise society. We must act beauty out in order to give it a chance to reverse the imbecilic, poisonous effects of sin."

The Spirit must scream
plummet down
like a bird of prey
and sit fierce
talons clenched
in your bleeding lips

and your words become
his Word
and his Words become
your words
that your speech
dead in the agony of self
might be resurrected
in self-extinction

-John Leax in Grace is Where I live (quoted in Eugene Peterson's the Jesus Way)

Neil Gaiman on Lewis, Tolkien, and Chesterton

Due to excessive recommendation, I've started reading Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. Checkout his speech at the Mythopoeic Society on the influence of Lewis, Tolkien and Chesterton.

"Tolkien's words and sentences seemed like natural things, like rock formations or waterfalls, and wanting to write like Tolkien would have been, for me, like wanting to blossom like a cherry tree or climb a tree like a squirrel or rain like a thunderstorm. Chesterton was the complete opposite. I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight"

Art as Work

"There seems to be much confusion about what we mean when art . I have a recommendation. We eliminate the word art and replace it with work and develop the following descriptions.

1. Work that goes beyond it's functional intention and moves us in deep ways we call great work.
2. Work that is conceived and executed with elegance and rigor we call good work.
3. Work that meets it's intended needs honestly and without pretense we call simply work.
4. Everything else, the sad and shoddy stuff of daily life, can come under the heading of bad work.

This simple change will eliminate anxiety for thousands of people who worry about whether they are artist or not. But this is not the most significant consequence. More importunately, it can restore art to a central, useful activity in daily life--something for which we have been waiting for a long time"

- graphic designer and illustrator Milton Glaser in his book Art is Work

Perhaps "a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver" because apples, gold, settings and silver were all created by a Word most fitly spoken.

Will beauty save the world? Solzhenitsyn on Dostoevsky

"So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through - then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar TO THAT VERY SAME PLACE, and in so doing will fulfil the work of all three?

In that case Dostoevsky's remark, "Beauty will save the world", was not a careless phrase but a prophecy? After all HE was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination.

And in that case art, literature might really be able to help the world today?

It is the small insight which, over the years, I have succeeded in gaining into this matter that I shall attempt to lay before you here today."

-Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in his 1970 Nobel Prize Lecture

Why have I not read this short piece before?

quotes and links

“...this is the ultimate aim of all making: to make a thing which does manifest spirit, which shows feeling, which makes God visible and shows us the ultimate meaning of existence, in the actual sticks and stones of the made thing.”
-Christopher Alexander as quoted in
An Architectural Reflection on Sandra Schneiders and Philip Sheldrake’s Understanding of Christian Spirituality (This is what I was thinking about in these posts)

"The main problem with narrative in film is that when you become emotionally involved, it becomes difficult to see picture as picture. Of course, the laughing and crying and suspense can be a positive element, but it's oddly nonvisual and gradually destroys your capacity to see.

-- Michael Snow, speaking to Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema, Vol. 2"

Great discussion on this seeing and film at Jeffry Overstreet's blog:
Are movies increasing your "capacity to see"?

"It's his sincerity that gets Bruce Herman into trouble, the moderation of his temperament, the well roundedness of his craft. His forms are a delicate balance between abstract emotional expressions and realist figure drawings: "Some artists feel like they have to be in one of the two camps, as though there are only two—iconography or iconoclasm, realism or abstraction. And by choosing one side, they feel the need to put down the other.""

-Bruce Herman: Painter of violent opposites

"The whole natural world, in all its glory and pain, needs redemption that will bring shalom. The world isn't divided into a sacred realm and a secular realm, with redemptive activity confined to the sacred zone. The whole world belongs to God, the whole world has fallen, and so the whole world needs to be redeemed--every last person, place, organization, and program; all 'rocks and trees and skies and seas'; in fact, "every square inch,' as Abraham Kuyper said. The whole creation is a 'theater for the mighty works of God,' first in creation and then in re-creation."

--Cornelis Plantinga - Engaging God's World (p. 96)"
-The Native Tourist

"But "Leaf by Niggle" is also about Tolkien's profoundly religious philosophy of Creation and Sub-creation. True Creation is the exclusive province of God, and those who aspire to Creation can only make echoes (good) or mockeries (evil) of truth. The Sub-creation of works that echo the true creations of God is one way that mortals honor God.

...
Niggle's yearnings after truth and beauty (God's creations) are echoed in his great painting; after death, Niggle is rewarded with the realization (the making-real) of his yearning. Or, if you prefer, Niggle's Tree always existed -- he simply echoed it in his art."

-Various Tolkien Fans on Leaf By Niggle (Tolkien's semi-autobiographical short story which deals with the relation of ethics and aethetics, as well as creation and subcreation.)

digital art and the return to a pre-modern notion of art

Self-Portrait by Arseny Gutov


This is an in-progress ramble I'm still rambling on.

From what I've seen the digital art communities like CGtalk.com and Conceptart.org, the digital art movement seems to return a return to 4 things that the 20th century art left to the past:

Story, Work, Science, and Realism

Story
A return to art as primarily storytelling. Through-out history artist were visual storytellers, they illustrated stories from sacred texts, mythology, history and literature. Then suddenly in the 20th century, artist who continued this tradition were named, in a diminutive tone, mere illustrators. (As if Michaelangelo and Rembrandt were not) This is related to the 20th century notion that of Art with a capital A, and the Artist who was someone above the tasteless masses, and who somehow didn't take commissions. In the digital art world (partly because of it's close ties to illustration, concept art for the entertainment industry, and film) we see a return to storytelling. The images that fill books like Expose and win awards at CGtalk are almost always telling a story and usually doing an excellent job of it. This is related to the return to realism, we live in the world of history, the story of stories.

Work
-Work/art/ craft

In the 20th century, art was elevated to Art, and so became something different then it really is, it was puffed up, self-serving, and introspective. It was too important to humble itself to tell a story, it refused to submit to the limits of visual reality. The artist was someone semi-divine, a Creator, not tolkien's sub-creator who must work with the already existing creation (story, nature, and annoying neighbors). And so the endless quest for originality. Artist of previous generations copied their masters and sought fidelity to the visual universe around them. Before the 20th century the artist was a workman, a craftsman, a paid laborer. True originality comes through limitation, true leadership is servanthood.

Digital art is a return to this. Jonathan Hardesty, now a classical non-digital painter, started his education in this atmosphere at conceptart.org. After studying under some tradition classical painters he can trace his artistic heritage back to Leonardo da Vince. This isn't arrogance, it's true humility.



Science
A return to acknowledging the scientific side of art, and using art to advance science,
-Topology Research
-Anatomy
-medical illustration

the empirical world, which leads to realism

Realism
...


www.cgtalk.com
www.conceptart.com
www.goodbrush.com
www.dusso.com

Hopkins and duchamp on beauty and urinals

"I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge
and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty."

-Marcel Duchamp

About a hundred years earlier poet Gerard Manley Hopkins commented on finding beauty in urinals: "...the slate slabs of the urinals even are frosted in graceful sprays."

Duchamp, because he was a modern atheist, didn't understand that we live "...in a world not vague, not lonely, Not governed by me only." (Richard Wilbur)

A world where "beauty is there, abroad in the order of things, given again and again in a way that defies description and denial with equal impertinence." (David Bentley Hart)

Duchamp, like many modernists and atheists, is confused by things like this, for disbelieving in God, he must still live in a God-made world.

Atheism would be easier and make more sense if the atheist did not live and move and have his being in God, but as things stand, he'll have to get used to inconsistencies and the surprising intrusion of beauty.