24 posts tagged “art and faith”
I came across the cartoons of Hugh MacLeod by accident at gapingvoid.com when I was tracking down an image to send as a digital Christmas card [we used 'love begets love']. Hugh has some really thought-provoking images around themes of marketing, new technology and life in general. This one 'Holy Unholy' had me thinking so deeply that I couldn't help but post it...Click on the image for a larger view, then just sit and look at it for five minutes: I guarantee you won't be bored.
This great image of the Crossroads mirror-ball is made up from all the visuals we have used in the past year. A full-size version , on canvas, now hangs in the Ministry Centre. Click on the image to catch more of the detail. Thanks to Jurjen for working on this!
We made a very quick (48 Hours) visit to Dave and Amy Roche in Perpignan this past week. The sun shone, the thermometre almost hit 20, and we could see snow-capped mountains in one direction and the Mediterranean in the other. Beautiful. We walked around Collioure, the fishing port and one-time fortress that is about as South as you can get in France and is famous for having been a favourite haunt of Henri Matisse and a colony for the Fauvists. The local tourist board have come up with this great idea of inviting you to view the landscade through picture frames, then showing you what the artists of the early 20th Centruy made of the same view.
This one is a 1905 work by Andre Derain... I was intrigued and unexpectedly moved by this idea of viewing the world as if it were already a painting. Something here about the prophetic nature of art - the fact that like prophecy true art (and indeed poetry) does not begin by representing the world in a particular way - it begins by seeing the world differently. The eye, not the hand, is the artists most significant tool.
No, I haven't suddenly become a gamer - or for that matter a Show-jumper, but "My Horse and Me" is a new game published by Atari for PC, Wii and Nintendo DS. The development company for the game, W!games, is based in central Amsterdam, and Head of Production JP Van Seventer is a good friend of mine, and part of the Crossroads Community. JP and I had breakfast recently and talked about gaming, imaginative play and Christian worldview, and where they all meet. It was a fascinating conversation, tracing the 'touch-points' of two worlds that are so often seen as entirely seperate. Apart from full-on Biblical games bringing the book of Revelation to life on the screen, how often do you hear a genuinely thought-through theological appraisal of the gaming world? Of the many wonderful moments in a wide-ranging conversation, two stand out for me.
The first is JP's assertion that not only does his faith inform his approach to gaming design (which he also teaches at the Utrecht College of Art), but gaming has impacted his faith. In particular, JP asserts that the very capacity of the human mind to create the worlds on which gaming depends is evidence of the gifts of God within us. We create, in his view, because we are created. The very act of bringing to being an entire virtual world, with its own framework of moral and physical laws, sheds bucket-loads of light on the character of our Creator.
The second moment of light was in the area of play. We create virtual worlds because through them we can learn how to live on the more real world of our daily lives. In play we project ourselves, and in projecting we learn who we are. This begins with the pre-schooler arranging building blocks, toy soldiers and dolls, and continues into our adult years. The crticism levelled at gaming - that it is about escaping into virtual worlds - may not be quite as incisive as it seems. Most of our best work is done in virtual worlds. When it comes to scripture, the virtual worlds of metaphor, story, prophecy and dream are the arena in which the most important decisions are made. Gaming as prophecy? Why not?
"My Horse asnd Me" is a beautiful rendering not just of competitive riding, but of the whole equestrian world. It takes the vast range of human emotions and activities involved in grooming, caring for, training and riding a horse and exresses them in a very 'real' on-screen environment. And there isn't a single explosion in sight!
Game designers are fast becoming the most influential artists of our age. They don't just make pictures, they paint whole worlds. Theirs is a craft that invites us in. We experience their art by becoming incarnate within it. In this new promised-land, that will perhaps eventually take every aspect of human cultural experience and create, for it, a virtual mirror-world, we need to know that people of faith are heading out; pushing deeper; exploring and charting this new God-given landscape of the imagination.
Find JP Van Seventer on the Amsterdam PICNIC network here.
Great news that a group of Christian artists and media professionals in Amsterdam - some of them from Crossroads - have begun to meet to talk about a 'shared space' for creativity in the city. Calling themselves 'Pekel' (Salted), the group want to work towards a Chrtistian 'broedplaats' - literally a breeding ground for creative projects and ideas. Amsterdam City is looking to be known as a creative capital on a world scale, and there is a possibility of redundant industrial and commercial space being made available to collaborative groups.
The dream of 'Pekel' is that such a group could be formed from amongst the city's churches, providing a working environment for artists and craftspeople, as well as space to meet; collaborate; exhibit; talk; eat; work and pray.... The space would not 'belong' to any one church or group, but would be be a hub for creative professionals from many different churches.
Most of the information available so far is in Dutch only, but there are plenty of English-speakers involved, and the group will be to some extent both meta-national and multi-lingual. More informastion can be found on myspace here and you can request information by e-mail here. There will be an information evening on Monday evening December 10th in the 'Living Room' - the basement of the Dwaze Zaken (Foolish Things) Cafe, address here.
"All art points to a transaction between reality of the seen and reality of the unseen." - Makoto Fujimura
I picked up a link to the blog of the Dallas News (visit here; link to the Kimbell Gallery here) with a review of a new exhibition of very early Christian art. Linked to a book of the same title, "Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art" (Amazon link below) features works from the late 3rd and early 4th centuries onwards - when Christians first began to 'picture' their ideas of God.
What is striking about this exhibition is the relationship between faith and art that began so soon after Christ, and has continued to this day. The Dallas News article suggests that:
"After the conversion of Constantine in 313, Christianity became the state religion, with aristocratic patronage. In ensuing centuries, the church would become the Western world's prime patron of the arts and learning. The Kimbell exhibition shows how it all began, and how Christians first visualized, on paper, stone, glass and silver, their stories of redemption."
Neil McGregor commented in the catalogue to the Seeing Salvation exhibition at the National Gallery in London in 2000 that:
"All great collections of European painting are inevitably also great collections of Christian art. In the National Gallery, London, roughly one third of the pictures – and some of the finest – are of Christian subjects. This is hardly surprising, for after classical antiquity, Christianity has been the predominant force in shaping European culture.”
In the contemporary church, those wanting to explore the relationship between art and faith tend to be a minority: often on the fringes of our churches and in some cases in conflict with them. There are perhaps two aspects of the art-and-faith marriage that we need to rise up and reclaim:
Firstly, the enormous heritage of Christian art in the history of Europe (and, more recently, other places). Many of us need to reconnect with the incredible legacy we have, and recognise that, as with science, many of the greatest figures in the history of art were working from the perspective of faith.
Secondly, the reality that among the gifts God has given to his people there are creative talents given to help us 'picture' (literally) our faith. All artists are in some sense prophets, and we are impoverished as a community if we silence the prophets among us. As Andrew Walker asks in Telling the Story,
“Where are our candles, smells, and electric bells? Where are our images of light and shade, our music of splendour, our divine dramas, the sacred dance? We have a story but no one can see it. We tell the story but no one can hear it. … It is not a question of importing light and colour from the outside, but re-establishing a holy liturgy where the architecture and dramaturgy – with its icons, words and music – tell again, and again, and again the old, old story.”
