A small world, Robyn Miller, and the Nature of Order

A few days ago I clicked a link on my friends blog (http://anneofgreengbles1.blogspot.com/) to another blog (http://www.paulabecker.com/blog/index.php) and clicked a link there to another blog (http://drawn.ca) which had a post that had a link to Robyn Miller's blog. A blog I visit several times a week! How odd. What a small world! And His and my friends blog are completely unrelated.

Speaking of which, Robyn Miller has an excellent blog on all things odd and aesthetically interesting. He's the creative mind behind Myst and Riven, and has always been something of an 'idol' for me. One of his latest blog entries is on Theo Jansen's wooden creatures (powered by the wind) that stroll beaches in herds. Be sure to check out the videos: http://www.strandbeest.com/

I also found in my nightly procrastination, a very interesting architect named Christopher Alexander who wrote 4 books in a series called the Nature of Order:
The Phenomenon of Life
The Process of Creating Life
A Vision of a Living World
The Luminous Ground
If the weren't so expensive, I'd buy them for their elegant covers and interesting titles alone! But seriously, they look incredibly interesting. He seems to be something of a theist, given this quote:
". . . I believe he is likely to be remembered most of all, in the end, for having produced the first credible proof of the existence of God . . ."
Probably not a Christian, but still. Here's a quote from the overview of book 4

"The book begins with a critique of current cosmological thinking, and its separation from personal feeling and value. The outline of a theory in which matter itself is more spirit-like, more personal in character, is sketched"
He seems to be longing for the Trinity, and for the accurate view of the world, where Persons and not things or stuff is most fundamental and basic. In the summary of book 1 it says:
"Starting with an analysis of the arbitrariness of present-day architecture.." That also is comforting. Modern architecture and its daughter Post-modern architecture are arbitrary because they are based in an arbitrary philosophy, where knowledge is based in an arbitrary arrangement of bits of information and matter. In truth, thankfully knowledge is grounded in personally knowing the Trinity who created everything; And nothing in the universe is arbitrary. In an amazon review of the 2nd book the reviewer says
"The processes of nature can make an infinite number of human faces, each one unique, each one beautiful. The same is true for daffodils, streams, and stars"
Wow! That is the one and the many, the infinite originality, the old newness of our God! Processes of nature, baloney!

beauty and nihilism.. animals and people.. trees and vegans.

In a previous post, I mentioned that I discovered Christopher Alexander and the Nature of Order, I don't remember exactly how I found it, but I think it was a link off a blog that had something to do with literature, but definitly not Architecture or aesthetics. Odd thing is, like 3 days later George Grant recommended the same Author/book to me, after I commented on a post at his blog . Odd how connected things are on the internet.

Anyway, I've been reading a very interesting interview with Christopher Alexander, here's a quote:

"That is because there was a nihilistic view of living organisms, earth, and stars. There was really a nihilistic view of all that, of course in the second half of the 20th century...So then, architects living in the 2nd half of the 20th century, by and large, in effect, being educated to believe all that, could not use the word "beauty." 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 "

and a little bit later:
"It was cool, really, to be scientific and nihilistic, to look down your nose at things that mattered, or even at the idea that anything mattered."

I've watched Harry Potter 3 again with my siblings. It's my favorite of the 3 movies. I was just thinking about how much like humans, animals are. Not to spoil anything from harry potter, but it's interesting the animals certain characters turn into, and how like them they tend to be. My sister got to puppies earlier this year, and it's amazing how animal's personalities and looks can be like people's. I've always had a debate with my sister that dogs always seemed masculine and cats feminine. Anyway, if man is the image of God, perhaps animals are images of us in a sense. They, after all, have eyes and ears and hands (or hooves) and faces. There are big birds around the harbor here (rockport) that impeccably remind you of old men. Reminds me of another one of my favorite digital artists, who did a series of portraits of the Bird family, here's two of them:





On the subject of animals, I was thinking about an uncle of mine who lives on a ranch and hunts dear and everything, but he also raises deer. He has lived with them in his house. Now, no animal rights activist truly loves or knows deer the way he does. Yet they see hunting as murder. I love oak trees, our yard (the one I grew up in) has about 13 (all at least 150 year old) Live oak trees. So beautifully shaped by the coastal wind. They make the perfect climbing and treehouse trees. Now, any environmentalist would probably think it wrong to climb trees, let alone 'rape' them by building tree houses in them. Yet, I know and love trees all the more because I have climbed them and build treehouses in them, and cut them down and warmed our house in the winter with them. That it what it means to know a tree and to love a tree. Interesting.

I've been listening to some Renaissance music lately, namely "Renaissance Flemish Polyphonists" (I get most of my music now from www.allofmp3.com, which is apparently legal, and very cheap about 1$ for an entire cd). I've always loved listening to choirs sing in languages I cannot understand. I'm not sure why, maybe it's just the pure beauty of the human voice, without the intellectual content of the words. Makes great music to read by. You here bits and pieces of this sort of thing in a lot of modern film music. LOTR, Starwars, Hans Zimmer.

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.