Lenten Painting

As the economic downturn prompts calls for self-discipline and self-sacrifice, the Church herself, uninspired by shrinking 401(k)s, pinks slips, and mortgages, prepares to enter into its own intense forty-day period of self-denial, a period it has honored for two thousand years. It is a period in which the Church in her wisdom has developed to teach us that it is the Father that sustains us, not food and drink or any other thing in which we give comfort to our flesh. It is this period that the Church urges us, as Christ urges his disciples in Gethsemane, to be alert and awake, on edge, as it were, because we live as exiles in a foreign land. Our hope is not found in our bellies, retirement accounts, or the American way of life, but in the Cross. The Church uses this time to remind us to avoid the wide gate of selfish indulgent destruction and choose the narrow gate, the one of self-sacrifice and love of our neighbor. This period of Great Lent, or, as the Russian Orthodox priest Alexander Schmemann called it, “bright sadness,” is a period that is not to be confined to these forty days.  It is the standard to which we in the Church aspire to live each day. Our goal, then, is to strive to make our entire lives Lenten, to be always alert and awake. (continued below)

But Lent is not confined to the Church. It exists in the world, perhaps as an inarticulate urge, a faint intuition. It finds its most articulate voice in some poetry, philosophy, and painting. The artist Enrique Martínez Celaya has a new exhibition of work on view in New York that I am tempted to describe as Lenten paintings. They seem to embody Schmemann’s notion of a “bright sadness.” They are dark but not dismal; the basic forms, most usually the landscape and the solitary human figure, are stripped down but not destitute. The figures seem to evoke a quest, a journey that requires sacrifice and self-transcendence. They are at once about death and life, despair and hope, darkness and light—yet it is life, hope, and light that might have the upper hand in the end. These paintings are icons of thoughtful introspection, the fruit of an ascetic life of denial in the search for Truth, a search that makes these works vibrate with slight tremors of dissatisfaction and discontentment, of homelessness and exile. In both form and content, they suggest a life in which only what is necessary remains, as the self-indulgent idols that often plague painting, from the physicality of the painted gesture to the too easy satisfaction with the pleasures of the moment, are, through struggle, scraped and scrubbed away.

True art, like true life, is found in fasting. 

(Image: Enrique Martínez Celaya, The Painter, 2009)   

Comments

[Mike]

Excellent post. I like how you've captured the "dual nature" of Lent and seen it in this man's art.

[Bruce herman]

"True art, like true life, is found in fasting. "

Having read your entries for Studio Practice I & II, and just now reading your "Lenten Painting" entry, I'm reminded of a statement Steiner made in REAL PRESENCES (paraphrased): "it takes an uncanny degree of abstention to read the world as it is, and not as it has been previously encoded for us."

Of course, the self-denial implied in this call to purity may be actually impossible to achieve in real terms (yet the attempt may be the whole point). This makes me wonder (even as I did while reading God in the Gallery) if the modern notion of the artist as free agent constitutes a fundamental teleological confusion. Like Steiner's gamble on transcendence accomplished by resisting the "previous encoding" (that, incidentally, is also free from the contagion of secondary critical literature), this may result from an inflated notion of the role or purpose of art, locating it in a supposedly autonomous relation to the rest of human life and action. A sort of Promethean "originality"...

This seems to me to be part of the inheritance of Romanticism and its imagined freedom from convention or religious constraint.
In certain ways, the liberation of art from its more utilitarian status in former eras has been a terrible loss -- both for artist and for art -- in that the telos of art, by being freed from its servant posture has taken an impossible trajectory. The landscape of modernism is littered with the corpses of casualties from this forced heroic role. (Pollock and Rothko come to mind in their search for purity and self-actualization.) On the other hand, this very loss may be the occasion for a refreshing of the tradition because of the radical experimentation that this autonomy has afforded. But I can't help but feel the weight of melancholy that attends the very real economic manipulation that resulted from the mythos created around these men -- and the meaninglessness that threatens the whole enterprise of radical autonomy.

Your call for artists of Christian faith and Christian educational venues to serve as a place of refreshment and equipping for a lofty calling of art and artist is compelling, and I'd like to think with you more about this. Yet I confess that the older I get, the more I question the hyperbole and the rhetoric of transcendence and the more I look for a simple honest day's work. Less self-invention and more humble craft.

I think Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, and Dante would hardly recognize the status accorded the arts in our rhetoric -- and likewise they'd be struck with the ironic loss of funding that accompanies this state of affairs. Perhaps there is an inverse relationship between the rhetoric of autonomy and money. I guess its really only common sense: if you insist on utter artistic freedom, you're then set free -- economically as well as artistically. You earn your freedom and literally work yourself out of a job.

That's where the machinery of commercial mystique must be invented to keep the artist financially solvent. (Or its alternative in the academic ecosystem of art.) All that said, I resonate with your hunch that Christians may actually be able to offer something in this next era, and my own hunch that it must be issued as an invitation to "dine" -- a kind of artistic and intellectual hospitality in which the guests are our secular neighbors (from whom we can learn a lot -- just as we do when we entertain angels).

[daniel a. siedell]

These are helpful observations. Anyone working as an artist today, anyone who has a BFA and an MFA, is participating in the living tradition of modern artistic practice. There are certainly options available for an artist to make work in a more artisan-like way, especially for Roman Catholics who make liturgical furniture and Eastern Orthodox who make icons. For the rest, various myths of the modern artist, including transcendence, freedom, etc. can be believed or disbelieved in varying degrees. But such belief or disbelief of those myths take place within the tradition of modern artistic practice. It is possible that many modern cultural practices, art among them, are in various ways impoverished, including the practice of Christianity.

I like the image of dining.

[Bruce herman]

Right. Point taken about the "living tradition of modern artistic practice". The infrastructure of modern art practice supplies, in a way, the patronage that supports the practices. My concern above is more about the inheritance of Romanticism -- which amounts almost to an entire weltanschauung. It's influence may in fact be inescapable -- but I honestly think we need to resist it -- as forcefully as the anti-war generation of the 1960's resisted corrupt authority. Resisting radical autonomy causes sparks because it is the cultural bedrock with which we work. To imagine a way of recovering a sense of answerability to the "dead poets" (vis. Eliot) seems to me to be essential in a time where mere novelty passes for authentic newness. And this seem to be the result of the narcissism of radical artistic autonomy.

[ben malick]

Great to hear your thoughts on art and faith Dan. I enjoyed this interview you recently did with one of my professors, Dr. Paul L. Metzger, here at Multnomah Biblical Seminary in Portland, Oregon.

http://new-wineskins.org/blog/