Notes from John Sloan's Gist of Art

"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!

thoughts on drawing, glory, beauty and God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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