Trees Walking

Storytelling and Exploration

2010-02-14T21:49:00.000-08:00

I really enjoyed this article by Michael Chabon:
Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood

Chesterton on Obama's nose

2009-10-06T22:08:00.000-07:00

"...just as a boy who has not known much of women is apt too easily to take a woman for the woman, so these practical men, unaccustomed to causes, are always inclined to think that if a thing is proved to be an ideal it is proved to be the ideal. Many, for example, avowedly followed Cecil Rhodes because he had a vision. They might as well have followed him because he had a nose; a man without some kind of dream of perfection is quite as much of a monstrosity as a noseless man. People say of such a figure, in almost feverish whispers, "He knows his own mind," which is exactly like saying in equally feverish whispers, "He blows his own nose." Human nature simply cannot subsist without a hope and aim of some kind; as the sanity of the Old Testament truly said, where there is no vision the people perisheth"

-G.K. Chesterton in Heretics

Borges on reading

2009-03-02T18:49:00.001-08:00

"Few things have happened to me, though many things have I read. Or rather, few things have happened to me more worthy of remembering than the philosophy of Schopenhauer or England's verbal music."

-Jorge Luis Borges

Jim Eliot on the joys of merely being

2009-01-14T15:47:00.000-08:00

"Just finished For Whom the Bell Tools. A most intriguing work and one raising some problems for a Christian. Realistic, psychological, compactly detailed, it presents a literary landmark for me in it's style alone. Would that I could get aroused about experiencing God in life as the modern writers are aroused at just experiencing life. They make no comment, draw no conclusions, point no moral, simply state things as they are in simple words in up-to-date settings. Perhaps it is for this very lucidity that they hold such grip on one. Must we always comment on life? Can it not simply be lived in the reality of Christ's terms of contact with the Father, with joy and peace, fear and love full to the fingertips in their turn, without incessant drawing of lessons and making of rules? I do not know."

-Journals of Jim Eliot
(Thanks Buff for giving me this, so long ago.)

a way of thinking about things

2009-01-14T15:33:00.000-08:00

"What must the world be like, and what must I be like, if between me and the world the phenomenon of music can occur?"
-Victor Zuckerkandl as quoted in Jermey Begbie's Music, Theology and Time.

I like this way of thinking. Left out is 'What must God be like?'.

You can take this and run with it:

What kind of world is a world where everything has it's own smell?
What must God be like if His images spend lots of time eating, sleeping and working?
What kind of God makes millions of species of beetles?
Etc..

Flannery O'Conner on seeing and writing

2009-01-08T16:03:00.000-08:00

"I have a friend who is taking acting classes in New York from a Russian lady who is supposed to be good at teaching actors. My friend wrote me and told me that the first month they didn't speak a line, they only learned to see. Now learning to see is the basis of all arts except music. I know a good many fiction writers who paint, not because they're any good at painting, but because it helps their writing. It forces them to look at things. Fiction writing is very seldom a matter of saying things; it is a matter of showing things."

-Flannery O'Conner in Mystery and Manners

Jonathan Edwards on the fullness of images in the world

2008-12-07T18:23:00.000-08:00

"I expect by very ridicule and contempt to be called a man of a fruitful brain and copious fancy, but they are welcome to it. I am not ashamed to own that I believe that the whole universe, heaven and earth, air and seas, and the divine constitution and history of the holy Scriptures, be full of images of divine things, as full as language is of words; and that the multitudes of those things that I have mentioned are but a very small part of what is really intended to be signified and typified by those things."
-Jonathan Edwards (as quoted in The Supreme Harmony of All )

a rough chronology of obsessions

2008-11-20T17:57:00.000-08:00

pirates
reptiles
islands
treeclimbing
treehouses
hardy-boys
treasure hunts
adventure games
computers
starwars
myst
film music
bryce
riven
textures
lord of the rings
dostoevsky
leithart
concept art
matte painting
beauty
drawing
trees
poetry
theology
seeing
worldbuilding
cathedrals
interactive storytelling
cinematography
film-making
books
visual storytelling
truth, beauty and goodness
trinitarian aesthetics
nature/culture
worldbuilding as storytelling

Kierkegaard on reading

2008-10-13T12:31:00.000-07:00

"I have been reading Athanasius these days-not only with my eyes, but with my whole body, with my solar plexis."
-Søren Kierkegaard as quoted in Kierkegaard and the Patristic and Medieval Traditions

Thoughts on Truth, Beauty, and Goodness #2

2008-09-06T16:46:00.000-07:00

If truth and beauty and goodness are ultimately deeply connected; and if we are physical, emotional beings, as well as thinking ones: can we really know any truth without also finding that truth beautiful or ugly? And, on finding so, are we not moved (sometimes literally) to act on it. (to position ourselves or bodies in relation to this newfound beauty or ugliness)

And is our emotional or physical response to reality a separate thing then our intellectual response? Are they not all aspects or dimensions of the same thing?

old thoughts on truth,beauty, and goodness

2008-09-01T16:11:00.000-07:00

In the end I think everything spoken that is true will be beautiful and beautifully spoken. In the end everything that is beautiful will become true; all truth, all of reality will become beautiful. Nothing can truly be true without being beautiful. And there will be no false beauty, no unreal beauty, no evil beauty, no ugly truth, and no true evil. For then all evil will be shown as ugly and banished as false. People corrupted by ugliness and evil will be beautified, remade in the perfect image of God. All that is evil will be un-made, unreal and all that is will be true, beautiful and good.

I'm not sure if this is orthodox, but it's interesting thinking about the relationship between truth beauty and goodness.

Owen Barfield on C.S. Lewis

2008-08-18T08:23:00.000-07:00

"What he thought about everything was implicit in what he said about anything."

-Owen Barfield on C.S. Lewis

(BTW, if anyone knows the source of the quote, let me know)

Update:

Will Vaus (who also has written books on Lewis) kindly pointed out that the quote is from a book actually called Owen Barfield on C.S. Lewis! Thanks for the letting me know, Mr. Vaus. The only thing better then reading a great author you love, is reading a great author you love write about another great author you love, allowing you to enjoy both simultaneously.

Kierkegaard on being interested in too many things

2008-07-17T11:31:00.000-07:00

"The misfortune of my life is perhaps that I am interested in far too many things and not decidedly in some one thing; my interests are not all subordinated to one thing but are all co-ordinated."
-Soren Kierkegaard as quoted in The Prayers of Kierkegaard (this is passage isn't a prayer)

Walker Percy on Art and Science in School

2008-07-14T11:10:00.000-07:00

"If science is exciting and art is exhilarating, the schools and universities have the achieved the not inconsiderable feat of rendering both dull. As every scientist and poet knows, one discovers both vocations in spite of, not because of school."

-Walker Percy in Lost in the Cosmos

A.W. Tozer on good books

2008-05-20T13:12:00.000-07:00

"The best book is not one that informs merely, but one that stirs the reader up to inform himself. The best writer is one who goes through the world of ideas like a friendly guide who walks beside us through the forest pointing out to us a hundred natural wonders that we had not noticed before.

The writer does most for us who brings to our attention thoughts that lay close to our minds waiting to be acknowledged as our own. Such a man acts as a midwife to assist the birth of ideas that had been gestating long within our souls, but which without his help might not have been born at all.

There are few emotions so satisfying as the joy that comes from the act of recognition when we see and identity our own thoughts. We have all had teachers who sought to educate us by feeding us alien ideas into our minds, ideas which we felt no spiritual or intellectual kinship."

-A.W. Tozer from Man: The Dwelling Place of God

Game Design Lectures by Jonathan Blow

2008-05-10T11:10:00.000-07:00

"If our medium is powerful, we should be have the capability to do things that we should be ashamed of, and then make the choice about whether we are going to do them or not."
-Jonathan Blow

I found these lectures by indy game developer Jonathan Blow fascinating, engaging and applicable to mediums other then video games:

Programming is Easy; Production is Harder; Design is Hardest.
Programming, Design, and ‘Art’
Design Reboot (the above quote is from this one)
Indie Prototyping (.mov) (Why questions over How questions in game design)
Two video lectures on game design
Interview with Jonathan at the Indy Game Dev. Podcast

Check out Jonathan's blog/website here: http://braid-game.com/news/
The game he's been working on for at least 4 years, Braid, is something I'm looking forward to.

Directors Notes Podcast

2008-04-30T18:11:00.000-07:00

There are two types of podcasts I don't enjoy:

1. The guy in his basement ranting and rambling into low-quality computer mike
2 The over-developed, high on fluff, low on content, podcast-wanna-be-radio show.

Thankfully, Directors Notes is neither of these, with interesting, well produced content without a lot of beating around the bush.

Every week, MarBelle posts an audio interview with an independent director (mp3), a large quicktime clip from his or her film, and sometimes the script, storyboards and moodboards. The films range from feature length documentaries to 30 second animated shorts with everything in between. The interviews themselves are engaging and to-the-point, with guests from all over the world who approach film-making from many different backgrounds. The questions in the interviews are researched and specific, making for a conversation both interesting and informative. For someone who is trying to learn film-making on their own, Directors Notes is a godsend. The 85 odd archived shows are well worth downloading.

exploring game worlds and eden as a video game

2008-04-25T20:41:00.000-07:00

This may be obvious, but I think the difference between how we experience a beautiful computer game, (Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis or Riven for example) and the way we experience our world is the relationship we have to that world. The artificial world does not have all the responsibilities that the real one does, and perhaps the newness of the format makes me see it with new eyes. Because I see a videogame as crafted, I notice and marvel at the craft.

Or is it the distance that makes it so attractive? It is that way to some degree with paintings, photos or the grass on the otherside of the fence. Is it the absence of me? Perhaps my driving force is just trying to get to a place free of me. But what is it about game worlds that is so attractive to me? In exploring abandoned buildings I get some of the same feeling. The desire to explore. What is it about horizons that so attracts us?

Relevant texts:
my post on kierkegaard and our relation to nature
C.S. Lewis' Pilgrim's Regress.
John Howe's blog post on Wanderlust

What about drawing? Does that help me get that feeling in the real world? Maybe
Or Photography? Yes and No.

Did Eden feel like an adventure game to Adam? Did life feel like a game? Was there play before the fall?

In many ways the world was like a game. Adam suddenly existed fully formed in a new world teaming with life. I suppose he had no memory. He did not yet know how this world, this life, worked, and what he was supposed to do. What the objective was. But then he was told. It became multiplayer. He got started, and then a things went south. But the games objectives didn't change. It became more complicated, but the rules and ultimate task are the same for us.

texan philosopher film-makers

2008-04-25T20:19:00.000-07:00

I like philosophers turned film-makers who live in Texas.

Like Terrence Malick and Richard Linklater.

If I ever happen to be in the city where Terrence Malick wrote his thesis on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, I'll have to go dig it up in the university library and have a look at it. Malick, one of my favorite film-makers is notoriously silent, never giving so much as a single interview in decades.

If you take math as a branch of philosophy you can include Shane Carruth in the list, but I guess that's a stretch.

New Blog: Modern Christianity

2008-04-25T08:23:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine recently started a new website and blog: www.modernchristianity.org At the moment, there are three of us writing for the site. The goal is to provide "Thoughtful Observations and Discussion on Christianity in the 21st-Century." Feel free to comment, we're looking for discussion.

P.S. I'll continue my personal blog on here.

Utility and Beauty in Telephone Poles

2008-04-22T17:46:00.000-07:00

What if telephone poles were beautiful like trees? What if they were, to borrow a phrase from Moses, a delight to the eye and good for carrying electricity. They have the utility down, but not the beauty. Cars, however, often have both. Perhaps if telephone poles were part of the consumer market they would have both. I suppose poles made from trees (like the one above) retain some of the tree's beauty that the new metal ones do not. At least they have a wonderful texture and particularity. They also have some individuality in that they are sort of put together for a specific location.

Actually, I think after looking at Bernd and Hilla Becher's photography of thousands of water towers and the like, I have come to appreciate each pole's individuality and slightly fantastic look.
Shaun Tan, who I mentioned earlier is similarly inspired by "the pattern of plumbing on the wall behind my local supermarket". I get that from drawing telephone poles.

This is one of the Becher's books, I first found out about them through the amazon wishlist of a favorite digital artist of mine, Matt Gaser, who incidentally, now has a blog. And yes, I make an attempt to stalk all my my fav. artists and authors amazon wishlists.

credenda agenda is now free!

2008-04-04T10:17:00.000-07:00

Whoa! Check it out. You can now subscribe and get hard copies of Credenda Agenda for free!

Shaun Tan on the fundumental strangeness of reality

2008-02-25T20:50:00.000-08:00

"Everything is really fundamentally mysterious. In learning to recognize meaning and familiarize ourselves with our everyday world — to make sense of it all, and manage our lives — we tend to overlook this basic fact. Things become familiar, obvious, self-evident. For me, the practice of drawing and writing is an opportunity to consider what is otherwise, to look at certain objects, qualities, and situations at length and interrogate them to the point where you can appreciate their fundamental strangeness, or uniqueness. Art is about getting to that point of stopping and examining something for long enough that you actually see how unique and weird it is."

-Shaun Tan interview in Locus Magazine

Tan is a new favorite of mine, his recent book The Arrival is an absolutely beautiful wordless novel about a man immigrating to a new place. He does an amazing job showing the reader what it is like to be immersed in a forign culture with a different language, and a different way of life. By creating a world that is slightly fantastic, he lets us realize how strange our own world is when we are new to it.

Related posts:
Richard Vander Wende on the Fantasy of Reality

something about the trees: a pantoum

2008-02-24T12:16:00.000-08:00

Check out this Linda Pastan poem:

"I remember what my father told me:
There is an age when you are most yourself.
He was just past fifty then,
Was it something about the trees that make him speak?

There is an age when you are most yourself.
I know more than I did once.
Was it something about the trees that make him speak?
Only a single leaf had turned so far.

I know more than I did once.
I used to think he'd always be the surgeon.
Only a single leaf had turned so far,
Even his body kept its secrets.

I used to think he'd always be the surgeon,
My mother was the perfect surgeon's wife.
Even his body kept its secrets.
I thought they both would live forever.

My mother was the perfect surgeon's wife,
I can still see her face at thirty.
I thought they both would live forever.
I thought I'd always be their child.

I can still see her face at thirty.
When will I be most myself?
I thought I'd always be their child.
In my sleep it's never winter.

When will I be most myself?
I remember what my father told me.
In my sleep it's never winter.
He was just past fifty then."

I found it in a book of interviews with (my favorite living poet)
Richard Wilbur. Apparently the form is called a Pantoum (wiki).

That is so amazing. It's fun to read over and over. I wonder if that
 form could be used in say, comics, or film or music?

Each line means something slightly different in it's second context,
and as with rhyming, but to a greater degree, you know what is
coming next.

free book on aesthetics of video games

2008-02-08T09:32:00.000-08:00

If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then perhaps writing about video games is like meditating about explosions.

Nonetheless, Steve Poole is giving away his book Trigger Happy: the Inner Life of Video Games for free as a PDF.

He describes it as "a book about the aesthetics of videogames — what they share with cinema, the history of painting, or literature; and what makes them different, in terms of form, psychology and semiotics."

I checked it out from a library once after reading Earnest Adam's article the game designer's library.

prerequisite and reward.

2008-02-06T11:35:00.000-08:00

These are some old notes from James McMullan's High-Focus Drawing: A Revolutionary Approach to Drawing the Figure, which apparently now is out of print.

"Much of this book will deal with the issue of pleasure as a necessary part of perception in drawing."

"The pleasure was contained within the moment itself and not projected out into future hopes of praise. I had stumbled however momentarily, into the state of 'here-and-nowness' that is both the prerequisite and reward of drawing."

-John McMullan

I find that fascinating.

Can something be both a prerequisite and reward?
Is pleasure a necessary part of accurate perception?

If you believe in any kind of objective beauty, then it would make sense that love would be a part of seeing. (Leithart has a couple posts on love and knowledge: here and here.)

This also reminds me of my favorite quote from Hart's the Beauty of the Infinite:

"Thus, for Christian thought, to know the world truly is achieved not through a positivistic reconstruction of its 'sufficient reason', but through an openness before glory, a willingness to orient one's will toward the light of being, and to receive the world as gift, in response to which the most fully 'adequate' discourse of truth is worship, prayer, and rejoicing. Phrased otherwise, the truth of being is 'poetic' before it is 'rational'-indeed is rational precisely as a result of its supreme poetic coherence and richness of detail-and cannot truly be known if the order is reversed. Beauty is the beginning and end of all true knowledge: really to know anything, one must first love, and having known one must finally delight; only this 'corresponds' to th trinitarian love and delight that creates."

-David Bently Hart

After typing out that quote, I now realize that it has been wandering around in the back for a while influencing how I read things.

Gaudi on man as co-creator

2008-02-06T10:51:00.000-08:00

"One of his most significant statements... is that creation continues through the involvement of men, since it is not men that create, but through investigation discover the laws of nature and with them continue the work of their Creator. It doesn't involve inviting anything new, but rather studying what already exists and trying to improve on it."

-Gaudi: The Entire Works

This reminds me of Tolkien's view of man as sub-creator. Also, I like the deep continuity it gives to nature and culture. Culture (done right) is the continuation of nature.

The editor of the book also notes that Gaudi's favorite book on architecture was "the tree he could see through the window of his studio."

fantastic beasts, where to find them, and an inordinate fondness for beetles

2007-11-08T21:11:00.000-08:00

(This was from my art blog, but I decided to post it here too because I started rambling.)

(Modeled in Anim8or, rendered in Bryce, adjusted in photoshop)

I think before I try to create fantastic beasts I should spend a good deal of time modeling created fantastic beasts, like beetles ( and camels, snails, and turtles) In doing so perhaps I can glean some of the Trinity's boundless entomological aesthetic. God seems to have made more beetles then any other living creature. The annie dillard in me says I should ponder this next time I worship at church. What kind of God makes 5,000,000 different species of beetles? Isn't that a bit inordinate? Most girls certainly seem to think so.

While I was modeling this, at one point it was going to be a beetle, so I did some internet searching and found what looks to be an great book:

Also check out this awesome website full of photo reference.

2007-11-04T20:57:00.000-08:00

In addition to making a great film, learning to draw, getting married, growing up, working on a cathedral, making a book by hand, I think I want to add to my list of things to do before I die: discovering a new species of beetle.

storytelling in art history

2007-10-03T18:21:00.000-07:00

James Gurney (author/illustrator of the Dinotopia books) has been blogging the making of the his Dinotopia paintings. In a recent post he writes about the place of illustration, animation and comics in art history, he offers these two diagrams by Dennis Nolan:

"The problem with this analysis is that it doesn’t take into consideration the forms of art that real people—like your great grandparents and my great grandparents—were excited about, namely illustration, comic art, and animation. In art history courses we never heard about these forms, nor about the artists who told stories with pictures."

"Dennis’s diagram puts the storytelling forms squarely in the center of the mainstream history of art, where they directly inherit the legacy of the ages. The modern movement still plays a significant, if culturally marginal, role as agent provocateur."

This makes a lot of sense to me. In the midst of the new mainstream I would add all film matte-painting and concept art. I've always felt that some of the stuff on say cgtalk.com or conceptart.org had much more in common with Rembrandt and da Vinci then most modern 'fine' art.

In addition to the centrality of Story-Telling that Dennis highlights, I would also add that illustration, comics etc have the following in common with traditional art most of which modernism lacks:

Art as Storytelling
Art has healthy relation to Science (Anatomy,Optics, perspective, and now physics)
Art as Work (commissions, making money isn't bad)
Art as Representation
Art that in some way is Beautiful

(more ramblings on this topic here)

So, perhaps modernism will only be an ugly short-lived curiosity in the final story of art.

text, image, and sound relationships

2007-09-14T07:45:00.000-07:00

When thinking of illustrated stories, or music videos based on songs, or animated poems, what is the relationship between the various media?

Should or do illustrations merely or only serve the text of a book? I guess it depends on the book, is it a comic book, novel, or picture book.

Should the visual seek to be unintrusive, humbly self-sacrificial in serving the text?

Should one medium self-consciously contrast or harmonize with it's opposite medium producing some sort of synesthetic polyphony?

Should the visuals of a music video merely be an advertisement for the song or publicity/notoriety of the singer? (here is a good counter-example, on the right side of the page)

This is similar to the form/content discussion, but the textual,visual, and audible all have their respective contents. "Form is the shape of content"
If this is so, perhaps the images, words, and sounds are simply mediated shapes of the same 'content', though this seems too platonic. Visuals aren't simple containers for the message or meaning of a piece of artwork.

This is also similar to the form/function discussion. I like Tim Smith's “Form REJOICES in function” rather then "Form follows function."

How does this relate to film?

In film, I think we have more unity of text/image/sound then say a music video. Where do comic books, graphic novels, and children's story books lie on the spectrum?

It would also be interesting to think about the relationship of text and sound in various musical genres. For example, Country being on the content/text side of things and say, Electronica being on the sound/form side.

Speaking of Beauty

2007-09-10T16:20:00.000-07:00

"Kansas can't be the only place in which a heterosexual man never uses the word beauty except to refer to a dead deer, a new pickup, or Lee Harvey Oswald's prowess with a rifle."

-Denis Donoghue, in Speaking of Beauty*

Donoghue continues:

"Even in polite society, beauty is difficult to talk about, if only because the words nearest to it are gestures, though not necessarily empty ones."

Perhaps architectural theorist Christopher Alexander knows why: "Because you cannot use the word beauty without getting actually somewhere close to the idea of God. I mean, you can use it, but not really, because you sort of shake inside when you do it and realize your at the edge of something dangerous."
-Alexander in this interview.

*If you live near a Half Price Books store, this seems to be making the clearance racks around now.

Notes from John Sloan's Gist of Art

2007-09-07T17:42:00.000-07:00

"If you don't want to be serious about playing, do something of no account. Go into banking. Buy collar buttons at five cents a dozen and sell them for five cents a piece."
-John Sloan's Gist of Art

That may sound harsh, but I think he was getting at something similar to something Tom Peters(author of Leadership) said: "Any company that exists purely for the purpose of making money is likely to fail."

But back to John Sloan:

"A negative, anti-thing can't be great. Anti-bad art, anti-liquor for instance.The kind of art made for anti-reason, anti-war, anti-humanity, and so forth, can't be great art. It can be important propaganda, satire, but not great art."
Would that many a garage band took this to heart.

"No great poet, no great artist ever allows facts to interfere with the truth. Facts are not necessarily truth. Poetry can convey truth more than a statement of fact.The history of the Civil War has more meaning through the book, John Brown's body, then it has through the facts of history."
I think perhaps this has to do with a rationalistic, enlightenment view of history as a non-story, if we think of, and approach, history as an impersonal collection of sequential facts instead of a divinely told story then it will have a sour taste. Stories are personal, art is personal.

"Work for your self first. You can paint best the things you like or the things you hate. You cannot paint well when indifferent. Express a mental opinion about something you are sensitive to in life around you. There is a profound difference between sensitivity and sentimentality."
Indifference. I believe the world was created to demand a response, to be neutral (that quest of scientism) to the created order is to be jaded. This is why nihilist art is not often good, it's indifferent, by definition. The best scientists were never 'neutral', but awe-struck.

"Paintings must have some stimulus. Keep the mainspring of life which gives you the creative urge. Keep your humanity."
Art is about life, art is not about art. Art is about the world, not the 'art world'.

"There is such a thing as looking at nature too calmly, without any excitement." I don't know if he knew why, but I do, nature is all about the Glory of God, and the Glory of God demands a weighty excitement, a heavy awe.

"The artist must get a kick out of something in nature before he can create. If you only get kick out of other works of art you should not be an artist. You should be a connoisseur, or a buyer or a consumer of art." Might I add: Anime fanboy to the list?

All this from the first few pages!

david lynch on worldbuilding in film and nature and culture

2007-08-30T20:43:00.000-07:00

"A sense of place is so critical in cinema, because you want to go into another worl. Every story has it's own world, and it's own feel, and it's own mood. So you try to put together all these things-these little details-to create that sense of place."

"When you see an aging building or a rusted bridge, you are seeing nature and man working together. If you paint over a building, there is no more magic to that building. But if it's allowed to age, then man has built it and nature has added to it-it's so organic.

But often people wouldn't think to permit that, except for scenic designers."

-David Lynch in Catching the Big Fish

beauty and final truth

2007-08-18T18:07:00.000-07:00

"What Capa's photograph shows is a truth-a common, terrible, and therefore important truth. But again, does this mean the picture is beautiful? Is Truth Beauty and vice versa? The answer, as Keats knew, depends on the truth about which we are talking. For a truth to be beautiful, it must be complete, the full and final Truth. And that, in turn, leads me to a definition of beauty linked unavoidably to belief."
-Robert Adams, Beauty in Photography

I like what he says here: beauty is final truth. Beauty is eschatological truth, what all of nature groans after, the world as it should be, and as it shall be.

Simplicity and humility in photography

2007-08-13T22:22:00.000-07:00

(Photo by David D, click to see flickr page)

I recently found the book Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values by Robert Adams. The title alone was enough to pique my interest, but I've heard it recommended somewhere, anyway, I just started reading it, and I highly recommend it.

"To remind ourselves of the significance of grace in photography-of the importance of seeming to do the job easily- we need only to examine a copy of a mass circulation photography magazine. Most of the pictures suggest embarrassing strain; odd angles, extreme lenses, and eccentric darkroom techniques reveal a struggle to substitute shock and technology for sight. How many photographers of importance, after all, have relied on long telephoto lenses? Instead their work is usually marked by an economy of means, an apparently everyday sort of relationship with their subject."

My friend David's photo above is a good example of the 'economy of means' Adams speaks of in this passage.

On the same subject is an essay by the late Ingmar Bergman's Cinematographer Sven Nykvist, excerpts are read in the latest Image Method Podcast. He was a strikingly humble man, though his work is outstanding. This is refreshing to see in the century of the self-deified artist.

Ernest Adams on RPGs

2007-08-01T21:31:00.000-07:00

"You may have heard John F. Kennedy’s joke that Washington D.C. is a city of southern efficiency and northern charm. Well, in my opinion most RPG’s combine the pulse-pounding excitement of a business simulation with the intellectual challenge of a shooter. I play games of medieval adventure and heroism to slay princesses and rescue dragons; I don’t play them to spend two-thirds of my time dickering with shopkeepers. I want to be a hero, but the game forces me to be an itinerant second-hand arms dealer. Earning money by robbing corpses doesn’t make me feel all that noble, either."

-Ernest Adams in his 1998 "Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!" article.

William Whyte on the Joys of People Watching

2007-07-27T17:46:00.000-07:00

"Whatever they may mean, people's movements are one of the great spectacles of the plaza. You do not see this in architectural photographs, which typically are empty of life and are taken from a perspective few people share. It is a quite misleading one. At eye level the scene comes alive with movement and color-people walking quickly, walking slowly, skipping up steps, weaving in and out on crossing patterns, accelerating and retarding to match the moves of others. There is a beauty that is beguiling to watch, and one senses that the players are quite aware of it themselves. You see this, too, in the way they arrange themselves on steps and ledges. They often do so with a grace that they, too, must sense."

-William Whyte in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

The last part of that reminded me of perichoresis, a term that the patristics used to describe the Trinity's life of mutual love and indwelling.

Tolkien to Auden on Allegory

2007-07-27T15:38:00.000-07:00

"...each person is in an allegory, embodying in a particular tale and clothed in the garments of time and place, universal truths and everlasting life."

-J.R.R. Tolkien in a letter to W.H. Auden

Podcasts, etc Part 2

2007-07-10T15:11:00.000-07:00

FxGuide Podcast
Interviews with artists in the visual effects industry. Lots of them, in mp3, I particularly enjoyed this interview "on design issues, the role of titles and the nature of film trailers"

Sword of Gryffindor
Great Harry Potter podcast by Travis Prinzi, who has degrees in theology and literature. Rowling has said in interviews that she believes in God, not magic that her faith is the key to what is coming in the books.

Economics and Culture Lectures

Soundtrack.net Podcasts and ScoreNotes Interviews
I have always been fascinated by, and enjoy listening to film scores. These are some great interviews with composers.

Gamesutra podcast
Game design

ImageMethod Cinematography podcast
This is an excellent video podcast, but I like to record the audio to mp3 (with audacity) and listen to it in the car or while I work.

Podcasts, etc

2007-06-16T10:00:00.000-07:00

Directors Notes
This is an engaging, to-the-point podcast with excellent interviews with independent film directors in every medium from traditional and cg animation to documentary and feature films. The 40-odd episodes, some nearly an hour in length comprise an excellent film school on an i-pod.
(available in flash, mp3 and on iTunes)

LensWork Magazine Podcast

While the magazine is about black and white photography, this is an excellent podcast on art and the creative process that is applicable in any artform. He has discussions on originality, realism, craft, work, art, etc. Again, excellent archive.

Miette's Bedtime Story Podcast
Excellent reading voice, most stories about 45min, check out the hundreds(?) of archived stories for short stories by Dostoevsky, O'Conner, Calvino, Mann, Greene, etc.

School of Visual Arts Lectures
Videos of lectures on graphic design given by famous designers like Milton Glaser, unfortunately they are video only, so they don't work on old mp3 players.

Mars Hill Audio Audition
"...living as disciples of Christ pertains not just to prayer, evangelism, and Bible study, but also our enjoyment of literature and music, our use of tools and machines, our eating and drinking, our views on government and economics, and so on." Mars Hill Audio is a quarterly audio journal, which I've enjoyed for years, this is there new (free) podcast.

Andy Goldsworthy on Nature and Culture

2007-06-15T13:36:00.000-07:00

"The older I become, the more connections I can make between times, experiences and places. I have always felt uncomfortable with the easy categorizations that people sometimes apply to my art. I remember overhearing a comment by a member of an audience waiting for me to give a lecture who was saying that I only use natural materials and no tools. My commitment to what are described as 'natural materials' is often misunderstood as a stance against the 'man-made'. I need the nourishment and clarity that working the land with my hands gives me, but at various times I have made us of light and heavy machinery, and I see no contradiction in using the technology of photography. Pretending I could do without such tools when I need them would be a bit like pretending I could swim to America. Likewise, I live in buildings and should, on occasion, work in them."

-Andy Goldsworthy in his book Time

Flannery O'Conner's cinematic prose

2007-06-05T21:32:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-06-03T22:02:00.000-07:00

"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

2007-05-23T07:57:00.000-07:00

"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

2007-05-17T23:51:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-17T22:36:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-10T17:44:00.000-07:00

"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

2007-05-04T16:13:00.000-07:00

"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

2007-05-02T19:07:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-30T21:32:00.000-07:00

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."

2007-04-29T15:14:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-18T11:03:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-14T14:17:00.000-07:00

"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.

Work that goes beyond it's functional intention and moves us in deep ways we call great work.
Work that is conceived and executed with elegance and rigor we call good work.
Work that meets it's intended needs honestly and without pretense we call simply work.
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

2007-04-14T08:08:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-10T23:05:00.000-07:00

"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

2007-04-03T20:43:00.000-07:00

“...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

2007-04-03T00:10:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-10T13:14:00.000-08:00

"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.

more on looking at vrs. in, seeing, and metaphor

2007-02-20T15:49:00.000-08:00

If we don't know how to read, we can only look at words-pretty shapes of black on white. But when we know how to read, we see through them to their meanings.

So with the book of nature. In modern times, we don't even know that nature is a book where things are written, so we weren't even looking, let alone reading.

Because nature, creation, is a thing spoken into existence, it is something that speaks. It was made by the Word, spoken by the Father, breathed out by the Holy Spirit/Breath/Wind. Creation speaks and can be read (Psalm 19).

This means that literary concepts and ways of thinking (like metaphor, analogy, and symbol etc) are natural to nature. They are there in the things of nature and in the nature of things.

So the things of this world will endure and satisfy a great deal of seeing and looking (unlike modern architecture, which stopped imitating nature). There is intricacy and detail. Like a good painting, you can let your eyes dwell on it for a long time. Like a good book, it invites your eyes to dive deep into it. It isn't flat. You can look through it and into it.

Trees and skies are like good paintings, they invite a way of seeing that is different from how a machine sees. They invite us to look into them and through them. They invite us to listen to what they say.

looking at and looking in/through, drawing and imaging the trinity

2007-02-20T01:15:00.001-08:00

You look at a person's ears.
You look into a person's eyes.
You look at a car.
You look into a book; through the page to the world of the book.
You look at a wall.
You look into a painting or a mirror.
And you don't look at or into lights at all, you look at everything by that light.

When you are looking at a someone and your eyes meet, touch, that is a very personal thing. If you look at someone's eyes who is not looking at you, you are looking at.

When your glances meet you are suddenly looking into each other; and that is inevitably personal, relational, and makes us vulnerable.

That is why when strangers pass each other they often look down or away that their eyes won't meet.

For in meeting, we are faced with an image of God and are aware of our need for love and to love and aware of out sin and shame.

When eyes meet, reciprocal action is required. We must give something: a nod, a smile, a wave of the hand.

Perhaps this is because we are images of the Triune God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who are continually giving and receiving, indwelling, dwelling in each other, loving each other, delighting in ("beholding in joy") each other.

(When you look into someones eyes, you dwell there for a moment)

When I am drawing someone, I am usually looking at them, but if you look at a person long enough, you'll see God, an image of God. The looking at becomes looking through at some point. The same is true to a lesser extent of anything created that reveals God's glory.

This reminds me, in drawing, when you seeks the truth, fidelity to the visual universe, if you keep at it you arrive at a deeply personal (but not less objectively true) vision of what you are seeing.

Because the Triune God is at the back (and front) of everything there is, to know something objectively is also to know it personally. Truth cannot be separated from morality and beauty; Logic cannot be neatly separated from ethics and aesthetics. For when we know something, (some truth) we must act (in love) and speak the truth in love. and be (and do) what we are made for: reflect the beauty and glory of God.

my first (and so far only) foray into worldbuilding

2007-02-15T02:01:00.000-08:00

My interest in worldbuilding and storytelling, my love of reading and drawing and my desire to be a film maker all go back to an old computer game called Myst. These are some images of a myst inspired world I made about 6 years ago.

See more images of Vynclif here in this post at my sketch blog.

Here are my myst related blog posts.

The Foundation for Spiritual Healing

2007-02-14T21:37:00.000-08:00

"Maintaining the illusion that you are a fundamentally well-balanced and relationally sound individual requires one of two things: 1) A rigorous commitment to isolation with the occasionally well-managed public appearance "when you are ready." 2) Or a presenting self that hovers at a safe level, "chipper," "interested," and kiddie-pool shallow. Politicians are not the only ones who need to air brush their images.

But isn't this precisely the kind of soft-core duplicity that Christ calls us to walk away from? None of us are really OK--and that itself is OK, for now, if we recognize it.

This was the first point that Jesus came to make. You won't ever be whole until you admit that you've been fractured. After that, your chances for healthiness get progressively better."

-fellow blogger Ariel Vanderhorst, (see the original post here at his excellent blog Bittersweat Life)

worldbuilding, storytelling and atheism

2007-02-13T01:12:00.000-08:00

"Atheists can write perfectly good and realistic fiction, because there is nothing about being an atheist that prohibits a person from understanding human motivation and the physical world. But being nonreligious does deprive you of the one thing an ambitious fantasy author needs: a plausible cosmology, a myth that tells us how things got to be the way they are. The great religions all provide this. One could even hold, as did Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, that a religion is just a story of the world, which in the case of Christianity (they held) happens to be true. A Christian fantasist in his act of subcreation can borrow heavily from the true mythic world created by the Christian God; the fantasist might change some of the names and other details, but the basic infinitely rich story has already been told.

The nonreligious fantasy author is forced to play the mythmaker twice, as it were. He has to develop a cosmology of the way the world really is, the nonreligious account that re places the account given by the religions he rejects. And he has to write the fantasy story, obeying all the rules of the larger account and then creating his own world within it."

-Daniel P. Moloney, in this article about the His Dark Materials books

Science and the importance of Metaphor

2007-02-12T21:50:00.000-08:00

"Those who think metaphorically are enabled to think truly because the shape of their thinking echoes the shape of the world."

-Jan Zwicky

Van Fundy (who has an excellent blog) pointed me to an article on how metaphor and anology are foundational to science. The author began with the above quote and goes on to quote Kepler:

"I love analogies most of all, my most reliable masters who know in particular all secrets of nature,” Kepler wrote in 1604. “We have to look at them especially in geometry, when, though by means of very absurd designations, they unify infinitely many cases in the middle between two extremes, and place the total essence of a thing splendidly before the eyes."

Mars Hill Audio has a free sample issue (for download) which includes an interview with philosopher Mary Midgley, author of the book Science and Poetry, she talks how most movements in science occur when the metaphors change, and she talks about the attractiveness of the metaphor that nature is a machine.

Wendell Berry has a whole book against that metaphor called Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition:

"The most radical influence of reductive science has been the virtually universal adoption of the idea that the world, its creatures, and all the parts of its creatures are machines-that is, that there is no difference between creature and artifice, birth and manufacture, thought and computation. Our language, wherever it is used is now almost invariably conditioned by the assumption that fleshly bodies are machines full of mechanisms, fully compatible with the mechanisms of medicine, industry and commerce and that minds are computers fully compatible with electronic technology.

This may have begun as a metaphor, but in the language as it is used( and as it affects industrial practice) it has evolved from metaphor though equation to identification."

Chemist-turned-philosopher Michael Polanyi also wrote about this relationship and the impotence of poetic and tacit knowledge to scientific discovery. Mars Hill Audio has an excellent two hour 'report' on Polanyi (Tacit Knowing, Truthful Knowing, second from the top)

"The modernist notion was that the scientist was an objective and disinterested observer, simply following the facts wherever they led, so that reason following the scientific method would reveal the nature of reality and could test every truth claim. Polanyi knew as a working scientist that this idea was false. The best scientists are not disinterested, but passionate. Many discoveries come not by following the facts in a laboratory, but as a burst of insight. And before the scientist begins his work, he assumes certain things are true, meaning that faith always precedes reason. So, after a long and fruitful career in chemistry, Polanyi turned his attention to philosophy."

-A review of Tacit Knowing, Truthful Knowing

In agreement with Polanyi, Mary Midgley thinks that "It is because we hold them [scientific and poetic knowledge] apart that we go wrong on a host of problems, from the relation between the mind and body to global warming and the debate about memes."

Related posts:
notes on science as love of beauty (aesthetics)
Leithart on the centrality of Metaphor
poet Richard Wilbur on metaphors in a God-made world

Through a Screen Darkly

2007-02-11T20:53:00.000-08:00

"I've always had this sense that there is another language I once know, a joy that was mine before I was born. When I get a glimpse of that glory though art, I can feel the memory of it pressing against the back of my mind, and the longing for that peace and resolution wells up inside me. I can't quite grasp it. I can't speak my native language. Not yet... but I'm learning.

If I do the difficult thing and pull myself away from art that is merely entertaining and start searching for those currents of truth that reside within beauty and mystery, I will be drawn off the path of familiarity and comfort. The reality of God is not bound to a particular earthly language, country or style. His spirit can speak through anything. But he is far more likely to be encountered in those things that are excellent rather than shoddy, particular rather then general, authentic rather than derivative. I will find myself investigating art and expression that never played for audiences in this country--art that waits overlooked on the shelves full of foreign and independent films at the video store. And I will be changed, concerned with cares and disciplines that make no sense to Hollywood movie publicists.

It could be a lonely road. But it's a road that leads farther up, farther in, to greater majesty and more transforming truth."

-Through a Screen Darkly by my favorite film critic Jeffery Overstreet

Do I need to say this looks like it will be a good book?

Chapter One of Jeffery Overstreet's book is available online here

Also check out his blog and his an interesting discussion of his favorite movies of 2006

Interveiws Galore!

2007-02-11T00:02:00.000-08:00

I've been browsing the archives (over 6 years) of the Connection, the radio program that interviewed Richard Wilbur in the last post.

All of these are 45 minutes:

film composer John Williams
Interview with the guy who made Gattica and Truman show
photographer Steve McCurry (famous for Afghan Girl)
cinematographer Vittorio Storaro
photographer Zana Briski, who made Born Into Brothels
Animation History
Stradivarius (no he wasn't interviewed)
Umberto Eco!
Return of Beauty (after 20th century)
The Light of Vermeer
Humanity and Divinity in Rembrandt's Art
Children's Book Illustrators
early American painters studying in France
James Elkins on Crying at paintings
Douglas Coupland
Caravaggio
Bobos in Paradise
Brunelleschi's Dome

One of the main points of this blog is to collect links and quotes and thoughts that I want to go back to.

poet Richard Wilbur on metaphors in a God-made world

2007-02-10T16:48:00.000-08:00

"You could say that all poetry, however much it may be irrational, moves towards clarity and order, that it affirms all that is clear and orderly in the world, affirms the roots of clarity in the world. Then, you might say that poetry is given not only to saying that this is like that as in the simile; it's given also to saying that this is that, to affirming rather nervily that prosaically unlike things are to poetry's eye identical, co-natural. I think there is a natural disposition of the poetic mind to assert that all things are one, are part of the same thing, that one thing may be compared to anything else, the ground of that comparison is likely to be divine.

Interviewer: Then poets believe in metaphors?

...I think that in poetry of the highest quality, in poetry of great genuineness and seriousness, the metaphors are believed. I remember that my friend Joseph Beach, ... used to talk a great game of atheism; and in his last book called Involuntary Witness, I was surprised to find a poem of his which ended with a thumping religious affirmation. I took it around to him and I said, " Look, Joseph, I though you were an atheist. What about this?" and he said, "If it says I believe in God, it must be true, because you never tell lies in poetry." I think that's right. It seems to me that poetry is one's way of talking at one's most serious, and that you outdo your prosaic mind. You do better than your prosaic apprehension of things in poetry."

-Conversations with Richard Wilbur (this interview is from 1964)

That first part reminds me a lot of what Doug Wilson says in this credenda agenda:

"All things are therefore cognates. And the wide-eyed Christian should look around at the resemblances. The affinities are necessarily there. If a meadowlark is tied to some aspect of the Creator, and the tidal wave is reflective of another characteristic within Him, and so on, then what follows? All attributes within the Godhead are all internally consistent—He is never at odds with Himself. This means that all things in the universe (the meadowlark, tidal wave, and bamboo grove) are all created cousins at peace. And this is what makes effective "horizontal" metaphor within the created order possible."

The last few sentences remind me of Micheal Polany's concept of tacit knowing, how "We know more then we can tell.", how so much of our knowledge cannot be put into words (knowledge of throwing a baseball, for example)

Edit: there's a nice long (45 min) audio interview with Wilbur here.

40min interveiw with Santiago Calatrava at BBC

2007-02-10T00:47:00.000-08:00

(watercolor by calatrava, out of this book)

Check it out. (realAudio or text)

I love interviews, I've been reading a lot of them lately. A lot of interesting things explored in this one:

metaphor and symbolism in architecture
biomorphic architecture
importance of drawing
his love of Bach

To continue the thoughts of my last post on Calatrava, Leithart pointed out how Calatrava has been criticized for being too natural, too imitative of nature.

Calatrava's architecture is, as he says, symbolic and metaphoric; consciously or not, (and from his familiarity with the Bible, I would guess consciously) part of Calatrava's imitation of nature, (of God's art and architecture) is that it is symbolic and metaphoric, just as trees and mountains are (and they really are) symbolic and metaphoric.

Edit: Also if you're in Dallas, you can check out his kinetic sculpture at SMU, where I heard him speak at my sister's graduation.

"i am not a heterosexual" and thoughts on knowledge without god

2007-02-09T14:25:00.000-08:00

I found this blogpost the other day via Alastair, it sums up some things I've been thinking about:

"i am not a heterosexual

doubtless, this will not come as a surprise to all. i hear there are rumours that i’m ghey. i am not ghey or homosexual either.
being ‘heterosexual’ seem to imply that i am ’sexually oriented’ towards approximately half the human population, and that i am not. w/e sexual orientation i have is limited to a rather small group of people. it is not that i am sexually oriented firstly to a generic category of beings with vaginas and only next to smaller groups therein defined and chosen by means of certain criteria; rather, it would be always towards specific people at specific times. as is the case with a lot of the words in the english language, i do not like the word ‘heterosexual’ and its opposite ‘homosexual’.

To be a heterosexual is something more like this. not only is it a more generic attraction to ‘women’ in general, but it also involves what a t-shirt has said well: ‘i’m in favor of lesbian marriage, as long as both of them are hot’. for whatever reason, i don’t think male ‘heterosexuality’ has much to say against lesbianism. as many jokingly admit, men who are heterosexuals only happen to be male lesbians. whatever the case, Christendom needs some work on sexuality … a philosophico-theologia sexualis."

- blogger Berek Qinah Smith, "i am not a heterosexual"

This reminds me of how arbitrary and ultimately non-nonsensical all knowledge is when pursued without the starting point that we live in a God-made world and that all knowledge is directly related to him.

In modern secular views of things all study of history, society, art or philosophy will ultimately be a division of anthropology which in turn will be a division of biology which in turn will be a division of perhaps geology which is really a subset of astronomy and physics and chemistry.

Where as, if we acknowledge that we live and move and have our being in God and live and think and speak in a God-made world we know that all these areas of knowledge are really subsets or divisions of theology (queen of the sciences), we know sociology isn't simply a complex working out of chemistry and physics, and that anthropology is theology before it is biology.

Eugene Peterson on good storytelling

2007-02-08T22:08:00.000-08:00

"Good storytellers, by enlisting our imaginations, tease us into participation in the story they tell. When storytelling is good we pulled into a world that is both truer and larger then the one we ordinarily occupy;but it is not an alien world. (The exception is escapist entertainment that deliberately falsifies by depersonalizing and manipulating reality--horror stories, harlequin romances, pornography, propaganda.) Good storytelling involves us in what has been sitting right in front of us for years but we hadn't noticed or hadn't thought was impotent or hadn't thought had anything to do with us. Without leaving the world in which we daily work and sleep and play, we find ourselves in a far larger world; we embrace connections and meaning and significance in our lives far beyond what our employers and teachers, our parents and children, our friends and neighbors have told us, to say nothing of what is conveyed by the experts and celebrities with whom we anxiously surround ourselves."

-Eugene Peterson, pg 47-48 of Eat this Book

Wisdom on Worldbuilding

2007-02-05T01:15:00.000-08:00

“The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of old.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth,
before he had made the earth with its fields,
or the first of the dust of the world.
When he established the heavens, I was there;
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master workman,
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the children of man."

-The Lady Wisdom in Proverbs 8

When I read this last week, I was surprised how much it reminded me of something out of Tolkien's Silmarillion. Of course, as as secular Rings fans are always quick to point out, Tolkien "despised allegory", but also in Tolkien's own terms, "We make still by the law in which we're made." Tolkien, like me, you and the secular Lord of the Rings fans live in a God-made world of symbols and they themselves are self-portraits of the Worldbuilder. The connections are necessarily there.

John Howe on seeing

2007-02-05T01:09:00.000-08:00

"I was born with busy eyes.
It’s not my fault, it’s just the way things are.
... Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, it’s just that they are hard to keep up with at times. One ends up doing a lot of explaining, usually about just what exactly the devil one is doing in restricted areas, on the wrong side of high fences or locked gates, at the top of stairwells clearly posted Not Open to Public.

... They always seem to be wandering over textures, judging light and the thickness of the air. Chasing motes and dandelion seeds, calculating the flight of birds. They are continually going astray. I never know where I’ll find them.
They’re a little shy, that’s why they skirt warily around the edges of other eyes, just in case they slip and plummet down to whatever deep waters are awaiting, but otherwise they’re fearless. No sky is too big to scan, no detail to small to focus on.
When in company, I am continually having to explain why I’m so slow. Well, I stammer, there was a statue back there, yes I know it's been there for ages and it’ll be there tomorrow, but that’s just the point. Maybe tomorrow it’ll rain, or there’ll be sun backlighting it or there’ll be different clouds. I just had to make sure I saw it properly today
...
SO much to look at, and only the two of us, they must think. So much moss on trees, so many trees in a forest, such a variety of leaves for all seasons, such endearing smile lines at the corners of mouths, such grace in hands and strides... It’s a full-time job to get all that seen. "
-John Howe

Joseph Conrad on Art and Seeing

2007-01-29T15:35:00.000-08:00

"And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life, what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential -- their one illuminating and convincing quality -- the very truth of their existence.
...
My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see. That--and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm--all you demand--and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."
-Joseph Conrad in Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus

This short preface is perhaps my favorite piece on the nature, aim and purpose of art.

Jonathan Hardesty: A Young Master

2007-01-24T19:39:00.000-08:00

(drawings by Jonathan Hardesty in 2002)
Though I had forgotten, the story of Jonathan Hardesty was definitely one of the main things that has kept me (and undoubtedly many people online) drawing over the past few years.

In 2002 Jonathan Hardy started this thread at conceptart.org saying "I am starting from rock bottom and I am going to paint at least one painting and do at least one sketch every day...probably two on the weekends. The order you see them in is the order that I am painting and/or sketching them...every day starting on 9/15/02. I am bearing my soul to everyone. I will post everything I do...whether it is awful or not. Most of the paintings and sketches, in the beginning, are going to look like crap but hopefully over the days/weeks/months/years they will start to get better."

And indeed he did:

(drawings by Jonathan Hardesty in 2004)
These just after a few years. (and yes the one on the left is a drawing)
You can see how, through persistence and diligent courage, he got there in his thread
(which he still updates:)
Journey of an Absolute Rookie: Paintings and Sketches

He now teaches in Richardson, Tx

an anthology of quotes on seeing

2007-01-23T20:38:00.000-08:00

"What do we see when we go outside and look at the world? Has it become so familiar to us that we pay no attention to it at all? Or perhaps when we look at blue sky do we think of the refraction of light? When we notice the sun, do we think of a nuclear furnace? When we see a fox in a zoo, do we think of what we learned in biology class about bones and organs? And beyond this, when we step back and view the world, how do we see it? Blue sky, green fields, brown earth, blue water-does this set of images mean anything at all, or is it "just the way things are"? How do we view the world?"
-James Jordan

"I looked up and saw sparrows landing on a sign. Suddenly, the whole scene became completely abstract, as though I were seeing it through nascent eyes. I realized I could remove all preconceptions about these birds. That ability was very exciting."
-Richard Vander Wende

"It was less like seeing then like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance."
-Annie Dillard

"We should look at green again and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red."
-J.R.R Tolkien

"And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life, what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential -- their one illuminating and convincing quality -- the very truth of their existence.
...
My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see. That--and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm--all you demand--and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."
-Joseph Conrad

"I have learned that what I have not drawn I have never really seen, and that when I start drawing an ordinary thing I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle: the branching of a tree, the structure of a dandelion's seed puff. "A mouse is a miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels," says Walt Whitman. I discover that among The Ten Thousand Things there is no ordinary thing. All that is, is worthy of being seen, of being drawn."

-Frederick Franck

"I was born with busy eyes.
It’s not my fault, it’s just the way things are.
... Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, it’s just that they are hard to keep up with at times. One ends up doing a lot of explaining, usually about just what exactly the devil one is doing in restricted areas, on the wrong side of high fences or locked gates, at the top of stairwells clearly posted Not Open to Public.

... They always seem to be wandering over textures, judging light and the thickness of the air. Chasing motes and dandelion seeds, calculating the flight of birds. They are continually going astray. I never know where I’ll find them.
They’re a little shy, that’s why they skirt warily around the edges of other eyes, just in case they slip and plummet down to whatever deep waters are awaiting, but otherwise they’re fearless. No sky is too big to scan, no detail to small to focus on.
When in company, I am continually having to explain why I’m so slow. Well, I stammer, there was a statue back there, yes I know it's been there for ages and it’ll be there tomorrow, but that’s just the point. Maybe tomorrow it’ll rain, or there’ll be sun backlighting it or there’ll be different clouds. I just had to make sure I saw it properly today
...
SO much to look at, and only the two of us, they must think. So much moss on trees, so many trees in a forest, such a variety of leaves for all seasons, such endearing smile lines at the corners of mouths, such grace in hands and strides... It’s a full-time job to get all that seen. "
-John Howe

"For John, seeing is knowing (6:40; 11:45; 14:7), and knowing/seeing the Father and Son is eternal life (John 17:3). If there is no way for us to see the Father, there is no way that leads to life. We need some way to behold Him. The good news is that there is such a way, and that the name of that Way is Jesus."
-Peter Leithart

"It gets like that with cameras on vacations...It's because you don't want to miss anything. Just seeing something counts as missing it.

The result is you don't really see anything. You either skim over it because it isn't worth taking a picture of, or you take a picture of it. When you take a picture of it you feel as if you have it forever so you don't have to really look at it. You are free to move on, looking for the next thing you can't afford to miss."
-Thomas de Zengotita

Drawing and Seeing

2007-01-23T10:49:00.000-08:00

"I have learned that what I have not drawn I have never really seen, and that when I start drawing an ordinary thing I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle: the branching of a tree, the structure of a dandelion's seed puff. "A mouse is a miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels," says Walt Whitman. I discover that among The Ten Thousand Things there is no ordinary thing. All that is, is worthy of being seen, of being drawn."

-Frederick Franck

Stange books

2007-01-19T16:29:00.000-08:00

This one I found at Salvation Army today, it's difficult to believe it's not an elaborate hoax.

And then this I saw at half-price books last week, it's a (mostly) normal chemistry reference book

John Howe on drawing, fantasy, and 'making sense'

2007-01-17T12:37:00.000-08:00

"...if something moves you, there's a reason for it... and if you can spend the time trying to transcribe that reason, then I think you can gain a better understanding of not only what the thing is, but also what has suddenly pushed you to receive something from it."

John Howe posted an excellent 20min video of a presentation he did at IdeaCity 2006. Check it out here.

I've always enjoyed John Howe as much for his articulate and poetic language as for his wonderful images.

John Howe on fantasy:

"...I hope and truly believe that mythology, that legend are the arena where humanity has been fighting most of it's prolonged battles and struggles, ever sense we started to think about why we are on this planet.

I find making fantasy means that I have to distill reality, so that means I have to understand what reality is about in order to make fantasy in any way convincing and real."

He also talks about something I've always noticed in old black and white photos, they have a quality that's missing in todays photography, that they share with older painted portraits:
they took a lot of time to make, and you get a sense of a connection between the photographer and the photographee, but now "it's so fast you can just click away, you have a 500mg card, there's a stabilizer, but are you really getting the image or not? I don't know...because you've delegated that chore to the camera... and to sit down and actually draw something...and it doesn't matter what the end result is... to draw something is to sit down and spend time with something."

James Jordan on science and art

2007-01-16T17:25:00.000-08:00

"Before Adam could begin to rework the Garden, he would have to study and understand it. His scientific investigations would be the foundation for his artistic endeavors, just as God's light preceded his actions. The more he learned about the acidity of the soil, the better gardener he would become. The more he knew about the chemical composition of oils, the better painter he would become."

James Jordan, pg 14 of Primeval Saints

Richard Wilbur on nature and culture

2007-01-16T17:20:00.000-08:00

"I don't think I have any feeling that nature belongs to poetry more than urban materials. In fact, I had rather not make the distinction between nature and the city. I'd like to see cities as objects quite as natural as bee-hives. Cities are natural things for men to construct."

-Former Poet Laureate Richard Wilbur

Nature and Culture 2

2007-01-07T19:10:00.000-08:00

Looking at a photograph of the sunset in china, I was utterly struck by how Chinese it was, stylistically, the simplicity of shape and color. I realized that much of the 'Chinese' style in architecture, art and culture in general comes from the style and feel of shape and arrangement of the mountains,tress, fruit -in a word nature- in which the Chinese people as a people and culture were born.

This makes biblical sense because:

Adam, the (first) man whose name means man, was made in the image of God out of the ground, the dust, the earth.
And we share certain characteristics and qualities of that dust/earth. (The number of us will be like the number of grains of sand. From dust man came, to dust he will return, We share the color of dirt, etc.) "And shares man's smudge and wears man's smell: the soil" (Hopkins).

So much of what we think of as cultural is natural... because:

Nature is cultural.
...and...
Culture is natural.

Nature is the artistic creation of Person(s) (the Trinity) and has was made in their uniquely unique style, ie it is cultural.
Culture is the God-ordained completion and fulfillment of the creation (nature) by man who is part of creation, ie it is natural.

It thus makes sense that people made and born onto and into different parts and types of (the) earth, out of different dust should "still make according to the law in which they're made" (Tolkien)

In a sense, Chinese architects design Chinese architecture (man-made natures/environments) because they are made from the dust, the earth, the ground of God-made Chinese architecture (which we call China).

Related posts:
Nature and Culture
Dust Colored People
Trees and Cathedrals
Mythopoeica

The Kindlings Muse

2007-01-04T10:42:00.000-08:00

Interviews with N.T. Wright, Ravi Zacharias, Rich Mullins and the founder of Image Journal.
Discussions on interactive storytelling and the life of Walt Disney.
What C.S. Lewis thought of Fantasia and a discussion of Icons and Orthodox church architecture.

It's all here on my new favorite podcast The Kindlings Muse

2007-01-02T22:41:00.000-08:00

When the child was a child,
..it walked with its arms swinging.

It wanted the stream to be a river,
..the river a torrent,
..and this puddle to be a sea.

When the child was a child,
..it didn't know it was a child.

Everything was full of life,
..and all life was one.

When the child was a child,
..it had no opinions about anything.
It had no habits.
It sat cross-legged,
..took off running,
..had a cowlick in its hair,
..and didn't make a face when photographed.

from The Song of Childhood by Peter Handke writer of the excellent film Wings of Desire.

Barnfloor and Winepress

2006-12-14T14:15:00.000-08:00

And he said, If the Lord do not help thee, whence shall I help thee? out of the barnfloor, or out of the winepress?
2 Kings VI: 27

Thou that on sin's wages starvest,
Behold we have the joy in harvest:
For us was gather'd the first fruits,
For us was lifted from the roots,
Sheaved in cruel bands, bruised sore,
Scourged upon the threshing-floor;
Where the upper mill-stone roof'd His head,
At morn we found the heavenly Bread,
And, on a thousand altars laid,
Christ our Sacrifice is made!

Thou whose dry plot for moisture gapes,
We shout with them that tread the grapes:
For us the Vine was fenced with thorn,
Five ways the precious branches torn;
Terrible fruit was on the tree
In the acre of Gethsemane;
For us by Calvary's distress
The wine was racked from the press;
Now in our altar-vessels stored
Is the sweet Vintage of our Lord.

In Joseph's garden they threw by
The riv'n Vine, leafless, lifeless, dry:
On Easter morn the Tree was forth,
In forty days reach'd heaven from earth;
Soon the whole world is overspread;
Ye weary, come into the shade.

The field where He has planted us
Shall shake her fruit as Libanus,
When He has sheaved us in His sheaf,
When He has made us bear his leaf. -
We scarcely call that banquet food,
But even our Saviour's and our blood,
We are so grafted on His wood.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins

Aesthetics and Eschatology

2006-12-08T08:24:00.000-08:00

"I came across this passage in Norman Davies' epic history, Europe, in a section analyzing the ultimate collapse of European communism. He said: 'Artists and believers were often the only people who could imagine a world without communism.' To the extent that fantasy books paint a picture of a world that is in some way more heroic, more humane, more beautiful and hopeful than this one ... that is something that people really respond to, and I'm all for it. Perhaps the number of people who are willing to wade through a hopeless and depressing book is dwindling."
-Stephen Lawhead in this interveiw

"True art, I suggest, approximates more and more to the vision of the way things are and the way things shall be. We humans know in our bones that we are children of the present creation, which is simultaneously both glorious and shameful, and that we are designed for a fuller creation, a new order, a world flooded with the creator’s glory, full of justice and joy and, yes, beauty. The point of new creation is that it is the redemption and transformation of this present creation, with its shame and horror overcome; that is the way, if I can put it like this, to the reconciliation of Isaiah’s dilemma. And the true point of biblical apocalyptic, as opposed to the distorted and dualistic versions which have been so powerful and prevalent in our day, is that biblical apocalyptic is all about God’s future breaking in to the present, seen in glimpses, known above all in Jesus, and best expressed not in abstract theology or even in preaching but, yes, in genuine and visionary art. Apocalyptic, both in form and in biblical content, is not about the denial of the present creation, but about the overcoming of its sorrows and the realising of its promise. Apocalyptic is the key to understanding, and re-expressing, the beauty of God."

N.T. Wright in Apocalyptic and the Beauty of God, (mp3 here)

This is a sculpture Wright talks about at the end of that lecture, it's called Tree of Life and is made entirely out of "entirely from decommissioned weapons: bits and pieces of old AK47s, bullets and machetes..."
What a great image of swords beaten into pruning hooks!

Edit: From the quotes above, perhaps it's not surprising that Left Behind is aesthetically poor as well as eschatologically poor.

blog links

2006-12-07T23:05:00.000-08:00

Hungry for a Month:
"For the month of November, I’m only spending $30 on food. The only exception will be things that are freely available to the average person (salt taken from restaurants, sauce packets from Taco Bell, free coffee from an office). Buying in advance is fine, but at the end of the month, it all has to add up to $30 or less..."

How to Change Your Mind
"This post contains a four step process that could transform your life by, quite literally, changing your mind.
'...I saw something in his Christian life to which I was a comparative stranger –a peace, a rest, a joy, a kind of spiritual poise I knew little about. One day I ventured to ask him how he had become possessed of the experience, when he replied, “By reading the epistle to the Ephesians.” "

Form Follows Function?
"After noticing that the ugliest buildings in town are at the art gallery, I began pondering modern design. Since modernism is all about shifting blame to root causes, I’ve decided that the poverty of modern plastic design is rooted in a failure of poetic vocabulary.

...Better: “Form REJOICES in function”. This gives both nouns something to do. Function’s work is outside the epigram, in the activity itself that is — let’s say — taking place within the building this architect is drawing. Form’s work is to rejoice in the activity, not just accomodate it, and not distract from it"

Digital Poetics:Film Stills and Third Meanings
"Until then, there is the radical beauty of CGI action sequences of so many Hollywood blockbuster films (The Day After Tomorrow and Spiderman 2 below). These are surrealist still images, experiments with time and space and frame composition whose beauty is lost on us because they go by so fast, and because they are embedded in familiar stories that practically beg to be dismissed. Take them out of the film, blow them up, and hang them in some swanky art gallery showcasing surrealist images and they'd be right at home."

The Book Design Review This is an interesting ongoing reveiw of book covers and their design, and is mostly image bases "I need to see this in person -- I hope the colors are as fantastic as they look here. And as one who very often criticizes tame typography, here it makes perfect sense; anything more than this would have competed with the rest of the jacket."

not for the feigned of art

thoughts in the middle of an all-nighter

2006-12-05T14:32:00.000-08:00

here's what I want to do: take a sketchbook, a notebook, a bible, a good novel I've read and one that I hadn’t, a good art book, a good theology book, and some other non-ficiton book; an mp3 player with an audio book, some of mars hill audio, podcasts and music; Some money, an empty suit-case for books to buy, just enough clothes and some travel food, and travel by train or some other public transportation with plenty of people and time to draw or read. Explore cities, buy books to sell (I could get my brother to ship books from home if they sold), draw, think, and visit friends and family around the US.

perhaps 2 weeks.

But perhaps I would need a camera, but I would have to limit myself, perhaps the natural physical and financial limitation of real film would provide that limit. That way I wouldn't spend the trip looking through the lens of my camera and I would be forced to choose what to take pictures of.

on earth as it is in heaven

2006-12-02T14:24:00.000-08:00

"I'm what is called a "post-millenialist," meaning that when Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is like leaven working in a lump until the whole lump is leavened, and that the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that grows until all the birds of heaven come and nest in its branches, then we are supposed to expect that the world lump will be leavened with the gospel, and that the world birds will find their home in Jesus' kingdom. Jesus said to go and disciple nations, teaching them to obey everything he commanded, and so we can expect that the nations will learn to obey Jesus.

This hasn't happened yet. But I expect it will happen. And I expect it will take a long time. That means that we may now be in the period that will someday be known as the Early Church."
-The next 10,000 years (a blog post by the Presbyteer)

"... it would seem odd if the Lord gave Adam a commission to rule and subdue the earth, sent His Son to die and rise again as the Last Adam to restore humanity to that task, and then ended the whole process after a couple thousand years, just when we were beginning to make a few meager advances in achieving dominion over creation. Humanity – I say it with reverence – would feel more than a little cheated, like a teenager never given a chance to grow up.

Most editions of the Book of Common Prayer has a table for calculating the dates for feast days, and the table can be used up to about the year 6000 AD. I'm with those guys."
-Coming Soon? (Peter Leithart)

"The next thing looks like it will be China, which probably has more Christians now than the U.S. does. And the Chinese don't know from Calvin or Aquinas. They have been insulated and isolated and have grown up with just Jesus and the Bible. Who knows how that will play out.

And then the next thing will be the Muslim world. The West's Christians have been sentimental, revivalistic, and exhibiting an irrepressible genius for the slide into liberal apostasy. Once the Muslim world converts, then the West will look absolutely anemic."

-The next 10,000 years (a blog post by the Presbyteer)

Culture: improving goat intestines and horse-hair

2006-11-29T11:45:00.000-08:00

"Culture that catch-all word to describe the state of being civilized, is not about reading the right books or seeing the right films, knowing which knives and forks to use, or never calling napkins serviettes. It is about taking responsibility to conserve, develop and improve the world which we have been given.

Improve? Yes, God actually gave us marble, knowing that, when combined with those invisible gifts of imagination and determination, it could be turned into Michelangelo's David. God created catgut, horse-hair and wood, knowing that human ingenuity could draw from them Vivaldi's Four Seasons; cocoa pod, knowing that curiosity would transform it into chocolate and mouldy bread, know logic and the quest for knowledge would one day discover penicillin. (Of course, he also created the Grand Canyon and the Amazon jungle in the hopes that we might have the wisdom to leave them well alone.)"

-Hilary Brand & Adrienne Chaplin in Art and Soul: Signposts for Christians in the Arts

The Universe as the Living Image of God

2006-11-19T14:48:00.000-08:00

"How then did Calvin teach us to regard the world in which
we live? We should be attentive spectators in the theater of
God's glory, who seek to recognize the actor on the stage by
means of the powers revealed in his actions. We should
contemplate and meditate on the world as the living image of
God, in which the invisible God renders himself somewhat
visible, so that the powers we behold, feel, and enjoy in this
image might lead us by anagoge to the God representing
himself to us in this image. We should be ravished with
amazement and astonishment at the beauty of the fabric of the
universe, which reveals the goodness of God to us and sweetly
allures us to seek God."

-Randall C. Zaclunan in the article:
The Universe as the Living Image of God:
Calvin's Doctrine of Creation Reconsidered

two of my favorite artists on inspiration and notes on sub-creation

2006-11-15T22:03:00.000-08:00

"Imagination cannot function in a vacuum...The value of information and knowledge, visual or other, is the time it spends kicking around inside one's head. Despite the mice and the abandoned nests under the eaves, the mind is not an idle place, where things are stored away collecting dust. They talk to each other, exchange information, get together, make groups and friends, and eventually are there when you are doing the one thing you can NOT do consciously - be inspired."

-John Howe in RAVENS, RHINOS, RUINS & RUST*

*(this is a blog post where he talks about his artist's morgue, something I was first introduced to in the excellent book Digital Texturing and Painting)

"For an artist to create something completely original is impossible; there really isn't such a thing as something that is completely original, but it's very possible and sometimes very powerful to combine existing elements into a new whole. This is what an artist does: Ingest the world around him or her and regurgitate it, putting it back together into something that is familiar, yet unfamiliar; normal yet magical. I can cite examples of resources that proved to be an inspiration for us, but really those resources inspired us in very superficial ways. We've been "ingesting" since we were born, and what comes out now is the sum of our entire lives."

-Robyn Miller in an interview in Digital Space: Designing Virtual Environment

Besides inspiration, Miller refers what Tolkien (who influence both of these artists) called sub-creation: our created worlds are secondary within God's created world, thus never truly original. Ignoring this I think is why so much modern art is so ugly and poor. (edit: I have a post on this here.)

Also, the other day I stumbled upon this excellent article that sums up and explores a lot of things I am interested in about Worldbuilding as Storytelling, etc:

Sub-creation of Secondary Game Worlds:

"In order to sub-create a vivid world, I suggest that the game designers need to focus more on the philosophical, mythological, and religious cultural aspects of their world, rather than focusing on naïve quests. Not neglecting quests though, a believable game world requires naïve and epic adventures as well as cosmological inter-linkage between ideas. The game designer as sub-creator must want to say something with their world, and these messages are the basis of the cosmological level of the game world. They do not have to be didactic or moralizing, but the content ought to move the players emotionally as well as sensibly or rationally."

-Lars Konzack,
(who incedently has a blog I just discovered here.)

...and in order to make this post sufficiently ramblesome, there are many parallels between that essay and Ernest Adam's Will Computer Games Ever be a Legitiment Art Form.

a video game designer on Mythopoeia

2006-11-06T23:18:00.000-08:00

I occasionally read Gameustra , a game developer's magazine. I recently discovered that most of the articles I enjoyed were by one man: Ernest W. Adams. Take this article for instance, on the Silmarillion and Beethoven's ninth:

"Tolkien's creation myth irresistibly brings Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to mind, so much so that I sometimes wonder if Tolkien was inspired by it. The Ninth Symphony consists of five movements. In the first three, the orchestra explores three very different themes. But in the fourth movement, a conversation takes place between the cellos, which are clearly a teacher, and the violins, which are the pupils. One after another, the violins start to play each of the themes of the first three movements. Each time, the cellos cut them off with an emphatic negative. Finally, timidly, the violins introduce a new theme. The cellos encourage them, and the theme expands into the soaring Ode to Joy that is the fifth movement."

-Tolkien, Beethoven, Vision

Who would expect to read that in a game designers magazine?
Some of his more interesting looking articles are:

Will Computer Games Ever Be A Legitimate Art Form?
The Role of Architecture in Video Games
In the Beginning Was the Word
Dogma 2001: A Challenge to Game Designers
What’s On the Designer’s Bookshelf?

Besides quoting Tolkein, he's a fan of my fav. writers on architecture, Christopher Alexander.

Anyway he pointed me to this book which I quote:

"A beautifully designed videogame invokes wonder as the fine arts do, only in a uniquely kinetic way. Because the videogame must move, it cannot offer the lapidary balance of composition that we value in painting; on the other hand because it can move it is a way to experience architecture, and more than that to create it, in a way which photographs or drawings can never compete. If architecture is frozen music, then a video game is liquid architecture."

-Steve Poole, Trigger Happy: the inner life of videogames

But, to link this to the previous post, I think video games can often help us appreciate nature as art, because you are suddenly aware that everything in that enviroment is designed and controlled and crafted for beauty, and it's not different in our world.

Kierkegaard on seeing nature as art

2006-11-06T22:51:00.000-08:00

"The Reason I cannot really say that I positively enjoy nature is that I do not quite realize what it is that I enjoy. A work of art, on the other hand, I can grasp, I can—if I may put it this way—find that Archimedean point, and as soon as I have found it, everything is readily clear for me. Then I am able to pursue this one main idea and see how all the details serve to illuminate it. I see the author’s whole individuality as if it were the sea, in which every single detail is reflected… The works of the deity are too great for me; I always get lost in the details. This is the reason, too, why people’s exclamations on observing nature: It’s lovely, tremendous, etc.—are so frivolous. They are all too anthropomorphic; they come to stop with the external, they are unable to express inwardness, depth."

-Søren Kierkegaard, Sept 11 1834 (Journals and Papers, Vol 1)

In modern times, I think surely this has to do with the loss of seeing the world as the free creation of God. Seeing it and knowing that it does not have to exist, and is held in existence by him. I have another post on this here, about the feeling of exploring a beautiful computer game vrs the real world.

notes on science as love of beauty (aesthetics)

2006-11-02T15:06:00.000-08:00

Because the world is the free, unnecessary, artistic creation of God (for the display of his beauty and glory), when we study the world and how it works (science) we are analyzing and exploring art. We are finding connections between different parts of the art-work that are not visible at first glance.

Because we can immediately see how beautiful, diverse and unified his work of art is, we know that if we look for symbols; search for meaning; and ask how it all holds together, we will find answers to these questions.

It is the beauty of the stars and cells that compel us to invent the telescope and microscope.

It is the wonderful coherence, the fitting-togetherness of creation that leads, attracts beckons scientists like Einstein to discover (to uncover more beauty) theories of unification.

It is because Kepler knew and heard the beautiful music of the spheres that he was able to scribble down a few bars in his descriptions of the motions of the planets.

The history of science is the story of the uncovering of the glory and beauty of God in his art of creation.

It is because the world is beautiful and that it fits together as a whole that we know things like mass and energy or gravity and electro-magnetism will ultimately make sense together. In it's diversity we will find unity.

And we know that from that sublime unity of natural laws will come the infinite diversity of physical forms in snowflakes, leaves, trees or galaxies.

This is in part inspired by this passage by David Bently Hart in The Beauty of the Infinite:

“...our knowledge is first of all worship, thanks, awe, and desire before it is rational reflection: to know the world truly is achieved not through a positivistic reconstruction of its sufficient reason, but through an openness before glory, a willingness to orient one’s will toward the light of being, and to receive the world as a gift, in response to which the most fully adequate discourse of truth is worship, prayer, and rejoicing. Or, the truth of being is poetic before it is rational, indeed is rational precisely as a result of its supreme poetic coherence and richness of detail.”

Peter Leithart has several posts about that book (with quotes and summeries) here.

2006-10-27T13:51:00.000-07:00

I think one of the bad things about man-made (cultural) architecture is that it renders the wind invisible. In God's (natural) architecture the wind is very visible.

more on trees and cathedrals

2006-10-24T07:44:00.000-07:00

While walking by the Library the other day I snapped this photo with my phone:
It reminds me alot of stained glass window tracery found in gothic cathedrals.
I'm continually amazed at gothic architecture and at trees for that matter.

A few weeks ago I came across this quote:

"The cylindrical pillar is always beautiful, for God has so molded the stem of every tree that it is pleasant to the eyes. The pointed arch is beautiful: it is the termination of every leaf that shakes in the summer wind, and its most fortunate associations are directly borrowed from the trefoiled grass of the field, or from the stars of its flowers."

-John Ruskin

Here are my previous posts on the subject:
Trees and Cathedrals
The Gothic Enterprise
Chesterton on Gothic and Greek Sculpture
Tree Column
Architecture and Music, Goethe and Augustine

Light as Glory

2006-10-21T14:18:00.000-07:00

It's interesting how light can make even ugly things look beautiful.

Perhaps this is a helpful way to understand how the glory of god plays over and bathes even things that are ugly or evil in themselves.

So much of beauty, visual beauty, is because of light and how it plays over things. And it that makes sense if you see light as the glory of God. All light is light from his glory. The world is lit with it. We see by it and through it.

So when light shines on some object, it not only makes that object visible, but beautifies that object or person. (Jonathan Edwards called the Holy Spirit the beautifier) It is beautiful only because it is reflecting a light that is the glory of god.

One ugly thing, and perhaps the ugliest thing in history is the cross of Christ.
But in the light of God's glory, it is the most beautiful thing in history.

Perhaps this is why photographers so often delight in taking pictures of ugly things bathed in beautiful light.

Nicholas Wolterstorff

2006-10-19T21:31:00.000-07:00

I read books slowly, non-fiction books that is. I started reading this book several years ago, read 40 pgs or so, and I just now picked it up again, but anyway, it's an excellent book "towards a christian aesthetic" (the subtitle) and a good critique of modern western notions of art and the artist. Also a good critique of gnostisim:

"This world of colors and texures and shapes and sounds is good for us, good for us in many ways, good also in that it provides us with us with refreshing delight. It is the Platonist and not the Christian who is committed to avoiding the delights of the senses, to take no joy in colors, to avoiding the pleasures to be found in sounds. Delight in the colors and textures of the eucalyptus seed pods, as well as in the scultures of Henry Moore; delight in the sound of the sea, as well as the music of Debussy's La Mer; delight in the rhythms of John Donne's poetry as well as the movements of flowing streams-all contribute to human fulfillment. The Tragedy of modern urban life is not only that so many in our cities are oppressed and powerless, but also that so many have nothing surrounding them in which any human being could possibly take sensory delight. For this state of affairs we who are Christians are as guilty as any. We have adopted a peitistic-materialistic understanding of man, veiwing human needs as the need for a saved soul plus the need for food, clothes and shelter. True shalom is vastly richer than that."
-Art in Action

Here is an excellent lecture by Wolterstroff from the Image 2005 Conference: http://www.ecclesiahouston.org/mp3/ImageConference1.mp3

I want this T-Shirt!

2006-10-19T14:04:00.000-07:00

These are sold by Image (a journal of a Arts and Religion)

It sort of sums up alot of things that I've read in the last year or so: mainly a lot of Dostoevsky and books on theological aesthetics( the Beauty of the Glory of God).

Apparently the quote is from one of Dostoevsky's journals, and is explored in The Idiot .

Also, I read a very good short essay/story by J. Mark Bertrand today on Beauty of God:
Beautiful & Supernatural