My coaching assignment from three weeks ago was to reflect on what I’d like people to say about me when I die.

My report on that reflection is due today, and frankly, though I’ve put a good bit of time into thinking about it, I don’t have it done.  It’s a funny question, more troublesome than I anticipated.

My reflection goes in several directions.  Someone in my family said of my father when he died, “He was the best man I ever knew.”  I’d take that one, if someone wanted to say it, no matter how untrue it might be.  My uncle meant it when he said it, and I think it was true.  My father was a good man, a servant, a simple man.   He was a student of the Bible, a man who wanted to get it right when it came to following God.  These are good things to be said about you when you die.   So yes, I’d take all those.

Last night, I watched This Is It, the film documenting Michael Jackson’s preparation for the tour he never got to do.  I think of all the things people say about him.  A superstar who just wanted to be loved, the things said about him at his death are endless, most likely (I haven’t researched this) trending toward his gifts as a performer and pop artist, as well toward the tragic pain he experienced most of his life.  Wonder and sadness, a strange lost light burning intensely for the enjoyment of us all.

We all die, the common and the famous, the tragic and the greats.  I’ll die, far closer to common, and people will gather and talked in hushed tones, I suppose.  That’s what you do at these moments.  What do I want them to say?

How would you answer it for yourself?

Ultimately, I hope they reflect on themselves, and perhaps a moment of connection between us.   A moment of personal connection, or professional, where we encountered each other in either family, friendship, or art-making and receiving, and as a result of that encounter and connection, whether it was for a moment or a long time, they somehow came to understand something different about themselves, their lives, and the love, presence, and beauty of God.   The title of this post came to me as I pulled up to the coffee shop; I  hope someone will say that Jeff always wondered about what it meant to be transformed at the deepest levels of the heart.   That he asked and answered the question, “Is change really possible?”   Perhaps they’ll reflect on the imperfect progress I made on my own personal journey of heart transformation, but it would be really cool, and of far greater importance, if they observed that in Jeff’s life and work, he created spaces and experiences where possibility, hope, and transformation grew tangible, no longer questions but invitations that stand eternally open.

“From glory to glory” scripture says, and at my core, I know that life is dense with glory and possibility beyond our wildest dreams.   The mystery is how it all happens, and the fits and starts we take as we travel.   And at the end, I hope someone says he traveled in risky faith, constantly leaning against his essential brokenness (shared with the world), and found his way to that elusive grace called the compassion of the Christ, and created in life and art images–incarnations–of possibility, of real change, and of love.   Say that he treasured his family, his friends, and his work, and the God whose grace made every moment possible, and that he worked hard to attune himself to the deep beauty of the world.

But after all that, I have to also confess that I don’t really care what people say when I die.   The only voice that will matter will be that of my Father.   How amazing to perhaps have Him say something like what my character in Brooklyn Boy heard at the end of the play.     My character’s father told him, “It was a good book you wrote, Ricky.”

“It was a good life you lived, Jeff.  I liked it.”

If my Father said something like that, that would be enough…

We encounter the world through our senses.   Light hits the eye’s photoreceptors and the optical information starts its split-second journey toward the visual cortex in the occipital lobe, then on to the frontal cortex, and perception begins.   Same with sound, smell, taste, and touch; the various systems involved in each leap into action as stimuli enter our field of experience.

What in the world do we do with all that information?

We “make” a world.

I have questions.   Anyone who knows me knows that I am constantly in a state of questioning, and because of that, am also constantly hovering near crisis.   That’s overstating the discomfort I cause myself with all these questions, but questions are, without a doubt, bothersome.   While they may be doorways to new understanding, opening all manner of new possibilities, they may also be uncomfortable because new answers, or even the suggestion of new answers, can lead to a re-telling of the stories on which we base our lives.   And new tellings of stories call the old tellings into question, and what in the world do we do if the story we thought we were in isn’t the story after all?

What if we’ve been telling it wrong?  Or maybe not wrongly, but poorly?

For over 25 years, I’ve been thinking about Christian faith and the odd activity we call art making.  My thoughts began with experiences in theatre and music, moved on to include painting, sculpture, and other plastic arts, then expanded to include all craft-making, and finally, expanded by implication to the making of anything at all.   The fact that we are “making” creatures (beings that constantly reshape material and spiritual reality to meet ongoing desire and need) is, in my mind, profound.   The expression of the self, the flow of market economies, the connecting of cultures through the study of artifact, the theoretical (as in, built on hypothesis and testing) chase for knowledge in science—all of these are the result of the “making” function of the human.

At least, that’s the story I tell.

We encounter life through experience and perception, and we must make something of it.   Hence we replay the move of Genesis 1, discovering the chaos of this onslaught of information that comes at us each day, and we hover over it, and work with all our heart and mind and body and spirit to might sense of it all, to bring it to light, in some way that causes us to finally exhale and say, “It is good.”

In recent years, “beauty” has risen to the surface of this conversation, catching my attention like a late blooming flower.  I have a vague notion of what I mean when I say the word, but “beauty” too is a confusion, an invitation to all kinds of misunderstanding, perhaps even destruction, depending on who’s calling what beautiful.   But still, the word keeps after me, and I think it’s time to begin to chase it down with more clarity, more heart, and more commitment.   But not just “beauty” but the whole conversation.

I often tell people this is the book I have to write before I die, so I’d better get started.

Maybe I should open-source the whole thing.

Here’s a question:  if you were to pick up a book about Christian faith, art, beauty, cosmos, and any number of other words you can supply here, what would that book have to contain?  I have my own ideas and biases, but I’m sure I’m missing some things. Fields of study that have to be explored, ideas that I ignore to my own peril, and non-negotiable disciplines that must be given their due.  If you’d like to weigh in, please do so.

I’ve got a pretty extensive bibliography (I’m really thankful for all the work that’s gone on over the past 25 years), but I’m sure there are books out there I don’t know about.  If you’ve read a good one, one that maybe even changed everything you thought about this stuff, let me know.

I’ll be blogging about all of this off and on all year, and we’ll see what comes of it.

We’ll see what we “make” of it.   What story will be told.

I like the phrase “original glory”…

So we’re taking one day a month for spiritual retreat and renewal, and I hadn’t gotten to mine yet, so yesterday, I took half a day.  I spent the early morning reading from the prophet Isaiah and from Matthew’s gospel, then went on to Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton, and then to poetry by Rilke.  Then some extended time of prayer, meditating mostly on the nature of God, His immeasurable -ness and the seeming absurdity of our own smallness.   To Him Who Stands Outside of Time as I try to figure out my next paltry move, be all the Glory.

I love going downtown.  I parked on 2nd just outside of Benaroya Hall, and stepped out of the van to confront the long wall memorializing the war dead from WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.  These names, so precious to their loved ones, yet so small in the great hoards of people streaming through the city.  Again, reflecting on the smallness of our -ness next to God’s.   I wandered past SAM (Seattle Art Museum), and realized the Andrew Wyeth exhibit featuring the Helga series was still on.   A huge Wyeth fan, I’d wanted to see the exhibit–I just figured I wouldn’t get the time.   It didn’t open until 10:00, so I wandered up 1st toward the market, heading for a favorite thinking spot I rarely get to anymore.   The Crumpet Shop at Pike Place Market holds many great memories for Anjie and I and the early days of being in Seattle back in the mid-80′s and then later with our kids in the mid-90′s.   A small counter looking out at the sidewalk, a freshly baked crumpet with raspberry and butter and coffee alongside a journal, and you have what I consider some prime thinking real estate.   (It would help if they would move the strip joint directly across the street.)   I jotted a few thoughts about presence and purpose, the blinding nature of sensation, and how Beauty calls to a Christ-essence inside us, even as we realize all is dust and smoke, the “hevel” (smoke) of Ecclesiastes.

Then it was 10:00 a.m., I was headed up the escalator at SAM.  I asked the first person I met to point me to the Wyeth exhibit.  It was down the hall, past the gray room, on the left.

I turned the corner.

These paintings will be marveled over for a thousand years.

Maybe that’s overstating it, but that’s what I kept thinking as I looked at Wyeth’s mastery.  There are 5 paintings from the Helga suite and two others from his other work.  I am no art critic, but I recognize power and mastery when I see it.   I say “power”…what power is there in a canvas covered in watercolor paints?  Or a piece of wood covered in tempera paint?  It doesn’t change the world, really.  It doesn’t remap the health-care system, and no children will be fed by it.  But there it is.  Oddly, civilizations will pass, and these paintings will continue to call to people, coaxing them to reflect on meaning, beauty, humanity, nature, and in my view, even God.   Yes, we can wonder, even lament and complain, over the relationship Wyeth had with Helga, his subject of over 15 years, and those of more conservative bent will cry foul over Helga’s state of undress in some of the paintings, but yesterday, as I looked at Wyeth’s work, I couldn’t help but think “how amazing.”  The painstaking labor of stroking enough lines to create the fine nature of human hair in Helga’s famous braids, the insight and control of material such that light spills across the canvas in such glorious value and contrasts, the capturing of the distinctively American landscape near Chadd’s Ford, Pennsylvania.  There is deep love in these paintings, and Wyeth’s technical skill serves that love well.  No wonder he is one of the masters of our time.

I left thinking of the work still to be done in my own life.  Knowing that every breath is a gift, every day another bit of grace directly from God’s hand, surrounded always by both brokenness and beauty, I wondered how best to spend my days.  The work of making…I’m sure of that.  Making life, making relationship, making moments, making art.  In the heart of God, may we strive to make moments of work and play as masterful as Wyeth’s art.

Then I did two peformances of “Enchanted April”…

The Artist at Work

Last Friday night, Greenwood held it’s monthly 2nd Friday artwalk.  As part of that event, Taproot Theatre staged its own entry: the making of a portrait.  The artist was my good friend Sam Vance, and his subject was another good friend, Nikki Visel.  The impetus for this was a scene from Taproot Theatre’s next offering, Enchanted April (opening a week from Friday.)  The scene calls for an artist, a specialist in portraiture, to sketch a study of a fascinating new acquaintance (Nikki’s character).  The artist is drawn to this woman not only because of her beauty; she reminds him of his recently deceased mother.   Obviously, to stage the scene in the play, an actual portrait is needed.   So Sam and Nikki set up shop in the small, but cozy lobby of Taproot.   There was the easel, the chaise lounge, a few of Sam’s other paintings (water-lilies and landscapes…he does great work), and usually, a couple of people standing by, interested in varying degrees by what they were witnessing.

Sam Vance

We all know the strange fascination that comes when watching an artist bring something into our experience that is unexpected and far beyond our own ability to make.  Aristotle said this delight in imitation is in our nature, and it’s plain to see when observing an artist working, and observing the observers.  It’s as if we were rooting for Sam as he stood there, barefoot and engaged, his body as physically involved as his hand, occasionally lifting one foot as he spread charcoal onto the paper.  (Painting as subtle sport, I thought at one point.)  I stood off to the side, brandishing a camera, snapping away, worrying that I was being obnoxious and distracting, but I didn’t care.  I was hoping to get in on the magic-making.  That’s what I was rooting for after all, for something magical to leap onto the canvas, some captured beauty, some effervescent something (as the character in Enchanted April says)…caught.   For three and a half hours this went on, page after page of studies, Sam finding his way toward what would eventually be the finished work (which I haven’t seen yet).

Nikki Visel

And then, of course, there’s the subject.  Nikki sat very still for a long, long time.  Sam went to her occasionally, said a quiet thing, touched her chin, asked a question, listened, and then drew again, as Nikki later said, as if he had a new understanding, that whatever he’d just heard or noticed had made a marked difference.   It was, literally, a study.  A study of a human face, but a study not done intellectually, as in the study of history or mathematics, but a study done with eye and charcoal and strokes of hand to paper.  What understanding results from this study is hard to say.  Perhaps understanding is the wrong word.  Perhaps it’s more of a knowledge, a connection, an intimate realization of the presence of the other.  Or perhaps the long stillness and move from one dimension to another (from lobby to paper) abstracts things, allows for less humanity.  It’s an old debate.   But something is exchanged between artist and subject, the between artist and audience, and at the end of the day, a new thing exists in the world, a creation to delight and call.

Sam Vance and Nikki Visel

A few of Sam's other paintings

Hats off to my friends, in this case, especially Sam.  It was a pleasure to him work, and a still greater pleasure to know that its not really his artist prowess I’m most glad of.    What’s better than watching an accomplished artist do their work is knowing that that accomplished artist is your friend.

To see Nikki’s work, about which I feel the same, you’ll have to come see Enchanted April.

I like artwalks…

“…for when remorse calls to a man it is always late.”  Soren Kierkegaard

Purity of heart is on my mind this morning.   Not the purity of heart we’ve come to associate with various lustings after illicit things, especially in matters of sexuality, but the purity of heart that suggests clear sight, a lack of delusion.   Purity of heart that suggests clear intention, uncompromising commitment to the faith of the heart, whatever object that faith may have as its subject.  Purity of heart that suggests that the work of the day will be undertaken in ease, knowing that all is settled, intention and effort aligned.  Purity of heart that is unconcerned with results, knowing that “the one thing” will result in that which it will result in, and little more can be said.   To think we are in control of results is to step into delusion, and purity of heart is lost.

All this is abstraction.

And yet.

As I said, I’m thinking of “willing one thing.”  My remorse is that all too often, I will far more than that.  It’s one of the great temptations, the willing of many things.  It’s easy to do these days.  I sat in a classical FM station’s library yesterday, and there were shelves and shelves of CD cases, all lined up, calmly waiting to be chosen.  I thought of all the music, all the willing, all the life that was contained in those little plastic jackets.  I marveled at the poor guy who had to do the programming, having to choose from the vast array of composers, compositions, arrangements, and renditions.  All these choices crowded into the hours of the day, each of them crying, “Will me, will me, will me!”   Even great projects, artistic and humanitarian, clamor at us, grasping, grabbing, like all those stories of orphan children chasing rich visitors.

And finally, in my coffee conversation with my good friend this morning, we talked of the immersion that comes when the mind is given over to one particular thing in creative contemplation: painting, writing, directing.   My own experience is that the creative mind “willing one thing” drops into a place of deep river running, smooth, uninterrupted, powerful, at peace.  Multi-tasking destroys this; more and more research is beginning to suggest, at a brain level, just why this is true.

Turning around, letting things drop, betting eleventh hour remorse makes for new dawns, as willing the many becomes willing the fewer, maybe someday the one.

Long, concentrated creative contemplation and work.   It’s what I do best, where I find flow, where I sense the One’s greatest pleasure.

Do it more…

The mandate is the same: Image-carriers of God, now broken, relationships all out of whack, carry on.  The tasks of ruling and subduing and multiplying and bearing fruit and tilling and keeping and cultivating the ground…all of them still operative, still at the heart of the human condition and enterprise, still connected to the original ideas described in those early Genesis chapters.  Making life, making civilization, discovering possibilities, moving from one state of being to another, increasing knowledge of earth and sky and sea and each other.   There’s pain now in child birth, but birth keeps happening, as it was intended from the beginning.   The ground and other materials are cranky as human beings work them, complaining, pushing back, refusing to give up their fruit without a fight.  Now killing becomes a part of eating, and animals die, but eating, metabolism, life itself–it all continues.    Work, intended from the first of creation, before the fall, continues, but now is tinged with all manner of curses and death, but still, it goes on, still rife with potential for meaning and making a difference, a difference that points to God and hope and restoration and repair.

Relationships continue.  Humans contend with God, haunted by Him, by memories of what the cool of the evening must have been like back in Adam’s day.  Eternity rattles around in our chests like death, and we strive to find the origin of these soul-aches that come as we cast the simplest glance at beauty, wrecked that we can’t drop the curse and leap into the arms of that glory we can sense is just over there.  Just right there.  We reach to each other for comfort, for romance, for sex, for some kind of entry into the oneness that must be out there, the echoes of wholeness resonating inside.  But we repel each other, porcupines all, leaving scars and nettles and broken bones.  Sex won’t do it, touch won’t do it, substance-altered states of consciousness won’t do it, and all kindnesses cave in the end to a sort of moral entropy, fading into nonchalance, dissonance, and finally cruelty.  But still we reach, still we reach, thrusting away, blind, deaf, and dumb, but feeling just enough pleasure to keep after it.

Life goes on.

Life goes on.

Making moments, making civilizations, making deals, making businesses, making art, making mistakes, making love, making things better, making things right again.  Making goes on.  To say it more technically, material is taken and shaped, whether that material be physical, spiritual, mental, emotional, or otherwise.  Shaping leads to form, a word that reminds me of God forming human beings from the dust of the earth.  It’s the potter’s term for taking material and shaping it, God’s initial work passed on to His creatures, intended to be done in joy and freedom, now done in wreckage and sorrow.  But still, seeds push up through the ground, discoveries in the fields of science, physics, art, and human relations continue to push up through the curses of humans minds and hearts, and though incomplete and distorted, meaning continues to tease us as we intuitively grasp that this making of life is the heart of life, but for some reason, it does not satisfy.

There must be something else.

Someone show us, please.

Next, someone does…

That is an example of something familiar in every aspect of our contemporary culture. It is not merely that artists, directors, musicians, and others connected with the arts are in flight from beauty. Wherever beauty lies in wait for us, there arises a desire to preempt its appeal, to smother it with scenes of destruction. Hence the many works of contemporary art that rely on shocks administered to our failing faith in human nature—such as the crucifix pickled in urine by Andres Serrano. Hence the scenes of cannibalism, dismemberment, and meaningless pain with which contemporary cinema abounds, with directors like Quentin Tarantino having little else in their emotional repertories. Hence the invasion of pop music by rap, whose words and rhythms speak of unremitting violence, and which rejects melody, harmony, and every other device that might make a bridge to the old world of song. And hence the music video, which has become an art form in itself and is often devoted to concentrating into the time span of a pop song some startling new account of moral chaos.

I know what Scruton means, and while I can’t quite go as far as he does (I like lots of music video), I love this article for the way he describes the moments of beauty that come at us in regular life.  He describes what he means by the sudden appearance of self-evident beauty.

When does this experience occur, and what does it mean? Here is an example: suppose you are walking home in the rain, your thoughts occupied with your work. The streets and the houses pass by unnoticed; the people, too, pass you by; nothing invades your thinking save your interests and anxieties. Then suddenly the sun emerges from the clouds, and a ray of sunlight alights on an old stone wall beside the road and trembles there. You glance up at the sky where the clouds are parting, and a bird bursts into song in a garden behind the wall. Your heart fills with joy, and your selfish thoughts are scattered. The world stands before you, and you are content simply to look at it and let it be.

Scruton then calls such experiences sacred, and locates the entire discussion of beauty in the sacred realm.

Every now and then, however, we are jolted out of our complacency and feel ourselves to be in the presence of something vastly more significant than our present interests and desires. We sense the reality of something precious and mysterious, which reaches out to us with a claim that is, in some way, not of this world.

I shout “amen” when he claims that when you see the holiness and sacredness of all created things, anything can be, and has been, desecrated.   Scruton calls us to stop desecrating the world, and pursue once again, the beauty of “settled streets, cheerful faces, of natural objects and genial lanscapes.”  That may sound like polyanna, but I know what he means.  Must truth always be ugly?

I just got Scruton’s book simply called Beauty.  This article makes me want to go home and read it.  I’ll let you know when I do.

A long article, but worth the read…

The challenge with possibility is it gets confused with goals, predictions, and optimism. Possibility is not about what we plan to happen, or what we think will happen, or whether things will get better. Goals, prediction, and optimism don’t create anything; they just might make things a little better and cheer us up in the process. Nor is possibility simply a dream. Dreaming leaves us bystanders or observers of our lives. Possibility creates something new. It is a declaration of a future that has thye quality of being and aliveness that we choose to live into. It is framed as a declaration of the world that I want to inhabit. It is a statement of who I am that transcends our history, our story, our usual demographics. The power is in the act of declaring…The future is created through a declaration of what is the possibility we stand for.

Walters then lists some of the questions Block is asking that made him think.  They’re pretty good.

What possibility do you stand for? Block asks, “What is the crossroads where you find yourself at this stage of your life or in the project around which we are assembled?” Or more directly, and to my mind even more powerfully: “What declaration of possibility can you make that has the power to transform the community and inspire you?” And the two “overarching questions” that point to the future: “What do we want to create together that would make the difference?” And “What can we create together than we cannot create alone?”

I’m thinking about possible futures and projects as I look to rekindle my theatrical and artistic ventures, and I find this call to the possible helpful and timely.  It speaks to me of the Kingdom plot of ground, and the “making” function of putting our talents and gifts to work to create the better world of the Kingdom of God.   As you know, this is the core of my theology, the theology of making and creation and the possible.  How odd that even as I know that in my bones, as I look from this new perspective of 50 years, the last couple deep in full-time ministry, there’s a temptation to see the possibilities as smaller than before.

As my study of Proverbs is showing me, God tests the heart.  It’s not always clear what is a test and what is a temptation, but I’m pretty sure the old “more-than-we-can-imagine” clause still holds true.

What possibility will we stand for today?

Girl with a Pearl Earring

After frozen pizza that was better than you’d think, spicy chicken fingers and potatoes, and salad that someone wondered over, asking if anchovy might be in the dressing, we finally wandered downstairs to watch a film only one person besides myself had seen. “This doesn’t have much dialogue, does it?” she said, and she was right. Girl with a Pearl Earring, the film by Peter Webber providing a rich backstory to one of the more famous paintings in the world by the same title, is a quiet movie, which is just fine with me. The lack of auditory input allows the eye to rest more fully on the endless series of gorgeous, painter-like shots. In 17th century Holland, Johannes Vermeer (Colin Firth) finds inspiration and passion in the eyes of a young maid named Greit (Scarlett Johansson) who can see light, composition, and meaning the way he sees them, and recognizing that, the two form an unspoken connection that sizzles, though they never touch.

The discussion after was interesting, exploring the moral dilemmas of making art, and wondering whether the appearance of a great work of art justifies the sometimes destructive actions of the artist. In Girl with a Pearl Earring, Vermeer’s wife is not a woman we particularly like. He seems stuck in a world of philistines who have no sensitivity to the beauty of the world (at least not the beauty Vermeer sees) or to him. All around him are schemers and whiners, begging for attention and affection while he stares at the maid in the corner, not so much with lust (although that can be debated) but with a pull toward beauty and connection. Vermeer, obviously lonely, filled with longing, passionately pursuing something he can barely name…such romantic description begs us to create a sort of cushion for him, as if the choices he makes in service to his art, in service of his very self (is being true to your “self” selfish or age old wisdom?) have a certain moral immunity because of his ability to create such powerful work.

The conversation then broadened, and we saw that these dilemmas face everyone, that we all have “great paintings” that we chase, those achievements that we think will finally give us satisfaction and meaning. And the temptation is always there to pursue such things regardless of what one person called the collateral damage. Finally, a newcomer to the group pointed out the world remembers the people who made deep sacrifices in order to single-mindedly pursue their passions. He was a scientist, and his point hit home with some strength. Maybe if a person makes a contribution that changes the world, then perhaps the cost to his family is worth it–at least that was the suggestion.

It brings us back to God’s perspective of time, achievement, the worth of the person, and the long-term (generational and eternal) consequences of the choices we make.

God does not see things as we do…

Jeffrey Overstreet’s article inspired me to go grab My Kid Could Paint That, a documentary by Amir Bar-Lev concerning one Marla Olmstead, a four-year-old painter whose work took the New York Art Scene by storm back in 2005. (Her painting “Mosquito Bite” is shown above.) The film begins as a celebration of this year child’s genius, her large abstract paintings seeming to show large ideas that belong more to the adult world. The parents seem genuinely surprised by her prowess and delighted by the sudden attention that seemed to come out of nowhere, nothing but serendipity. “Seem” is the operative word, because suspicion arises after a 60 minutes report questioning whether Marla had actually done these paintings, or at least done them alone. Bar-Lev ends up questioning the parents as well, giving voice to the doubts he too experiences. Marla’s swift rise to prominence turns almost immediately, sales of her work, which are in the thousands of dollars, plummeted. The story of this young painter and her family raises huge questions about the validity of modern art, as well as the power of marketing and journalism.

If you go to Marla’s website now, you see a beautifully done web site, and indeed, the paintings are very cool. They also have posted short videos showing Marla painting specific works, so the impression is that she is undoubtedly doing the paintings herself. It’s a fascinating story, and regardless, the paintings being created are certainly interesting and in some cases, quite beautiful.

But it does raise the question “What is art?” The modernists argued that the naturalism of classic work was not the only way to go about making art. They argued for a work of art’s autonomy, and that memesis (imitation) was not germane. The finished piece of canvas and paint was not an imitation…it simply was what it was, standing on its own, an original thing in the world. When I look at certain kinds of abstract art, there are some that are quite stunning and beautiful, and some of Marla’s work strikes me that way. Perhaps my kid could paint that, but more to the point is that my kid doesn’t paint that.

Seems to me the question is this: Line, color, shape, form, composition, and the other aesthetic elements that come into play in putting paint on canvas…can beauty only be made by rational, educated processes or can they simply spill out on the page not in childish randomness, but in childish play led by a sort of uneducated intuition that bypasses the rational process all together, and that some people (who knows why, other that God gifts us all differently) throw paint on canvas in abstraction, and step back and decide whether they like it, or whether they don’t. And somehow, through this process, something visually coherent arises that touches us through inexplicable means, and the lack of rationality about it is no reason not to celebrate the art’s arrival.

In other words, maybe modern art is part sham, part wonder. While I still ascribe to the Greek’s memesis as the basis for much human understanding in terms of naturalistic art I(that which takes “nature” or the “natural world” as its beginning point), I tend to believe abstract art also has a place at the table. Whether or not any painting by any master is worth the millions collectors end up paying is another question.

Enough rambling. Fascinating story about art, family, journalism, and even the nature of faith and doubt.

Check it out…