Category: Art & Artists
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Hollywood’s artistic problem
There is no plot without a protagonist, and the protagonist is not interesting unless he is a hero. He cannot be a hero if he is not good. Hollywood long ago rejected the idea of objective moral law, and severed its own artistic nerve when it did so. The corpse twitched awhile and so moguls…
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Form Follows Function?
One day I noticed that the ugliest buildings in town are at the art gallery, so I began pondering modern design. How could the people most aware of the Beautiful veer so forcefully into making things ugly? Since modernism is all about shifting blame to root causes, I wanted to be fair to the artist…
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We Know the Garden In the Act Of Drawing It
The first proper object of our knowledge is the Creator. He made it all, including my organ of knowing, and this “all” that He made is the Garden. The entire world here below is the Garden, seen from from far away, in exile. Normally, we observe the world via reason but we do not…
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On Talking About Creativity
Before “Let there be light” there is only “without form, and void”. What precedes God’s Creation ex-nihilo implies that it is impossible to talk about the creative process. You can stand outside it and talk about appearances, but you can’t stand inside it and talk about it. The “meta” mode of discourse instantly loses touch…
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Drawing, by John Berger: “how has… [the face]… become the face it is”
All creation is in the art of seeing – Times Online But now, because you asked me what drawing was to me . . . when you are drawing, anyway when you are drawing something which is alive, you are drawing the traces of what has happened to it until that moment at which you…
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“Sabi”: The Value I Like To Draw
Sabi by itself means “the bloom of time.” It connotes natural progression-tarnish, hoariness, rust-the extinguished gloss of that which once sparkled. It’s the understanding that beauty is fleeting. The word’s meaning has changed over time, from its ancient definition, “to be desolate,” to the more neutral “to grow old.” By the thirteenth century, sabi’s meaning…
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Artists make pretty things for friends
In the West the creative impulse has come to reside, for the most part, in the space between the artist and his world. By “world” I mean all that is outside what Martin Buber called an “I-Thou” connection. That world can be urban or rural, it can be empty of people or can be a street…
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Alice Walker’s distraction
You remember that book “Intellectuals”, by Paul Johnson? The one where he studied these famous ideologues to see how their private lives were so narcissistic and destructive, despite their public theories for re-arranging everyone else? (Think Karl Marx.) Well, add Alice Walker to the list. Seems like a pattern for famous artists in particular. How…
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Pomegranates in the Tabernacle
The little carved pomegranates in the desert tabernacle, described carefully by God in Exodus, give us a liberating theory of “Christian” art. The little fake fruit are there, apparently, because it’s a dry and spare land and, well, they are fruit. And they’re pretty. We are never taught that they “stand for” something else more…
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David Hart: Delight As A Mode Of Knowledge
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…