Introduction to the work
My work is presented in three distinct forms that together give an accurate sampling of my current output. On the left side of the room are works executed in mixed media on canvas that are both figurative and abstract. The grouping in the middle are portraits done in charcoal, depicted black-and-white and of various people I know and care about. The grouping on the right are smaller works on paper, some executed in watercolor and some done in pastel, but all created observationally from life. When the work is displayed together it represents my current oeuvre- the day to day ebb and flow of subjects, materials, modes of expression, size differences, styles, and artistic concerns.
Larger Works on Canvas
The first grouping of artworks include three mixed media paintings on canvas. These are the largest and most experimental of the works. They are experimental in medium, but the subject is traditional. All of the pieces were taken from photographs that I took of people that I care about, in the home or at church in some capacity. The first one, “The Baptism of Josephine,” comes from a candid image that I snapped during the baptism of my second daughter. The second piece “The Red Book”, was taken during worship at an outdoor church service. The third one “Madonna and Child”, is an interior with my wife sitting and reading to my daughter. If you look closely you will see that a red prayer book, or book of similar size is in all three of the works. In the second one, the red book does not actually show up as an object, but as a shadow of the object, and it’s shadow becomes object-like in the painting. I’m calling attention to the life of prayer as being objectified in the lives of the people. The prayer vivifies a persons life and brings about a corporeal expression in the actions of the people. Material expression is related to the immaterial and is brought forth through the material of the prayer book. The prayer book is full of prayers that when prayed create an immaterial form which takes shape in the interior life of those praying. This interior form shapes ones exterior life in many ways, but some of those material expressions are acts of kneeling, bowing, folding of the hands, gathering of bodies around a book in community, etc. The tension between spirit and objectivity or materiality and immateriality is depicted and hinted at in the paintings and their titles. It is important that material and immaterial is depicted upon the surface of a painting, because it highlights the importance of the object that displays both material and immaterial. Material and immaterial are tied together and inform one another. Contemporary society seems to assume that the material of things is not related to their immateriality; these mixed media paintings stand in contrast with that assumption.
Portraits
The Second selection of artworks is a series of portraits executed in charcoal on paper. Portraiture for me has been a point of artistic and emotional output, but it’s also tied to work for me because I paint portraits for commission. This sometimes poses certain restrictions on the style and carries with it pressure that I feel when working with portraiture. I was trained in portraiture from life and spent years consistently working observationally from the live model. These works are a bit of a departure from that in both process and in what I’m trying to express or present.
These are usually done after several hours sitting with the model drawing and sketching them. The sittings start with small sketches and several larger ones to get a feel for the person. After long observation and a mix of extended conversation that has time to ebb and flow between casual and intense interaction, there usually comes a point when the sitter stops being self-conscious and just settles into themselves. It is this moment of naturalism that I’m searching for. It is a glimpse of what Thomas Aquinas calls intellectus. Aquinas explains, “Intellectus is not here taken to mean the intellective power itself, but a particular habit by which man naturally knows indemonstrable principles in the light provided by the agent intellect. And the name is well chosen, for principles of this kind are known immediately once their terms are understood. As soon as one knows what a whole is and what a part is, he immediately recognizes that the whole is greater than the part. It is said to be intellectus from the fact that it reads within (intus legit) by grasping the essence of the thing". To put this into my own words and then to apply it to the capturing of a portrait; drawing intellectus is to draw “understanding embodied in action.” So for the portrait of Dr. Aly Barnes, she was in a moment of teaching when I caught this glimpse of her and it was apparent— from my intuition—that this was a moment of intellectus.
Landscapes and smaller portraits.
These works are the ones that for me are the most fun to do. I am constantly drawing the people and places around me, and similar places and people populate my pictures. What I depict in these landscapes and portraits is a vignette of the world that I inhabit- and that world was in some ways shaped this year by the Covid-19 pandemic. So, the sampling may be a bit smaller than what would have otherwise been there, but nevertheless I am still constantly drawing and painting the things and people and places around me. It is the place and people who give structure and meaning to my life and painting them seems to be some sort of long meditation on the created world. Observation and interpretation is important for the work as I am literally painting things that objectively exist, and they are being filtered through “the artist’s eye” and depicted on paper or canvas and a new object is created. The object contains a subjective perspective of an objective reality. Also, I just like to draw and paint. Drawing and trying to draw well is an extremely important part of the artistic practice for me. I consider myself to be a draftsman in the old sense of the word and think that the practice and discipline of drawing is an important one to preserve, both in my own work and in my teaching practice.
On Divine irresponsibility
***Divine Irresponsibility is the disparate thread of a philosophical idea that holds these paintings and drawings together in a single body of work.
In a 1994 address to the students of Roxbury Latin in Boston, Father Washington Jarvis references Sartre’s “the divine irresponsibility of the condemned man” as being a liberating force that has the potential to shift our perspectives and consequently how we live. When one knows that one will die, it reframes our experience in such a way as to help us understand what is of ultimate value and to act in accordance with that. I don’t think it is necessary to be condemned to death in order to live as if you are, because having an eternal or even transcendent perspective on your life can produce something similar.
The divine irresponsibility of the condemned man is a liberating experience brought on by the realization that one is going to die. I think this can be achieved by other means such as practicing Memento Mori. Memento Mori is Latin for “remember that you will die.” This is popularly associated with the tradition of Memento Mori paintings, or “Vanitas” paintings that are remembrances of death. They refer to the book of Ecclesiastes, which says “vanity of vanities all is vanity.” The admonition is to remember ones death by putting reminders before ones eyes— in the form of paintings (in this case)—in order to help you keep your ultimate end before you and to affect your actions today. So much of our time as moderns is spent distracting ourselves from this fact and habituated distraction prohibits us from living in light of our reality. Perhaps the divine irresponsibility I’m speaking of is more of a shift in perspective and subsequently the shift in one’s life and actions. This happens when a person dies to the world.
One of my favorite examples of a person dying to the world is from the story of the life of Moses in the Old Testament. Moses’s death to the world happens when he leaves Egypt to live in the desert and to identify with the people of Israel. This leaving Egypt signifies a loss of worldly power, pleasure, and material success. While he once lived in the greatest palaces of Egypt as a prince, visible and powerful, with no carnal desire un-granted, when he leaves he is likely living in a tent working as a shepherd, marrying and living a quiet life. He does the opposite of what our contemporary society tells us so very often about what we need for a good life. Our world tells us that life is merely class identity and struggle with structures of power, that we must overcome in order to gain personal agency for the ability to make and remake ourselves into whatever we will. There is a primacy placed on the physical/tangible/material world over and above the spiritual as if to obliterate it altogether. To reduce all of reality to the material and then dominate and alter the immaterial in order to control the material and make it give us what we hope for. Representation is found on social media, which is an entitlement to fame and honor. This perceived entitlement is often accompanied by an attitude that assumes the right to have no one tell you anything other than what you want to hear or believe. The mechanism of “big nudging” in social media makes it easy to achieve this by walling ones self off in an echo chamber. I mean to say that as a prince of Egypt, Moses had the equivalent of all of this and so very much more, but instead of clinging to it he leaves it and eventually dies to it.
As the letter to the Hebrews puts it “By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward. By faith he left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king, for he endured as seeing him who is invisible.”(Hebrews 11:23-27)
He downgrades his class, and thereby loses his power, his influence, his platform as well as his riches, which means he also loses his autonomy, his foot print, and he goes into obscurity and silence for 40 years and it barely gets mentioned.(Acts 7:29-30) This is the death I mean, it is the death to the world, the death to its structures and its values. And this death leads him to something far greater and incomparable with being prince of Egypt.
There is another layer to dying to the world and it has to do with the way time is counted by our society and the way that a few stories from the Old Testament challenge it. I am reminded again of when Moses leaves Egypt after killing the Egyptian and goes to the desert. I don’t think it gives an exact length of time but it is something like 40 years and that time is only signified with a few sentences.(Exodus 11:23) Or perhaps call to mind when Joseph has been thrown in prison and while in prison he interprets the dream of the cupbearer and when the man leaves, Joseph says to him,“Only remember me, when it is well with you, and please do me the kindness to mentioned me to Pharaoh, and so get me out of this house.”(Genesis 40:14) Then the cupbearer forgets and two years pass before anything happens. “Yet the chief cupbearer did not remember Joseph, but forgot him. After two whole years, Pharaoh dreamed..”(Genesis 40:23 - 41:1) To my modern sensibilities this is horrifying. What does he do for two years? Time here is not counted like it is for me, I constantly look at the clock and count time, striving to make the most of every minute. The kind of time mentioned here in the Bible is the time of gestation like where seeds go into the earth and break apart and start to grow. Sometimes it takes quite a while before we see evidence of the seed working on the surface. But the work done in silence is work that brings forth fruit.
Father Washington Jarvis in his address on divine irresponsibility says that we all have a faith- a belief in something about the meaning of life. And most people have faith in this: “work hard get good grades get into a good college get a good job get rich then you will be happy.” He argues like Socrates to the Athenians that there is much more, a far broader, more realistic faith that comes to us in the Judeo Christian heritage.
Socrates says to his fellow Athenians, “gentlemen I am your very great and devoted servant but I owe a greater obedience to God than to you. And so long as I draw breath and have my faculties, I shall never stop exhorting you. I shall go on saying in my usual way, my very good friend, you are an Athenian and belong to a city which is the greatest and most famous in the world for its wisdom and strength. Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible,”(Page 192.) This is similar to what Jesus said, “for what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world yet forfeits his own soul?”
Thus, the question of my heart and the pieces in this show, “Divine Irresponsibility,” is a question about my vocation as artist and about the types of works in this show (landscapes, portraits, and figures). I’m recognizing the values and assumptions of my world and finding that my work and my calling are not in step with it. I feel like a foil to the values of our world. It could hardly be called a popular thing to make representational paintings, to make landscapes, portraits, and figurative paintings. It’s out of step with contemporary art and is out of step with the political and aesthetic concerns of the art establishment and it’s underlying assumptions. It is, however, in step with what I perceive to be important to my own soul which I have only discovered by knowing God and through Him, knowing myself. There is a particularity to this work (I HOPE!) that comes from what Pope John Paul II calls “a properly ordered subjectivity” and is part of the mystery of the human person. Somehow these works are about a challenge to what I perceive are the gods of our world and our time. I believe our world is hostile to the human person and to the subjectivity of the artist- his free will and his impulse to create images. When the destruction of images occurs, it is not long after that the desecration of human bodies occurs. My work seeks to proudly proclaim the value and human dignity of its subjects and of the act of creating images.
References
- https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/understanding-intellectus
- "Esquisse du problème contemporain de la raison," in La Crise de la raison dans la pensée contemporaine (Paris 1960) 61–116. j. peghaire, Intellectus et Ratio selon Saint Thomas d'Aquin (Ottawa 1936). p. hoenen, "De origine primorum principiorum scientiae" Gregorianum 14 (1933) 153–184. p. rousselot, The Intellectualism of Saint Thomas, tr. j. e. o'mahony (London 1935).
- Jarvis, F. Washington. With Love and Prayers: A Headmaster Speaks to the Next Generation. Jaffery, New Hampshire, U.S.A. David R. Godine, Publisher. 2001