Tuesday, June 18, 2019

“visual arts that have influenced my life and faith”…

I was asked to be one of three panel members at the next Resonate evening (the brilliant bi-monthly Tuesday evening gathering in Saint Stephen’s ‘Secret Café’, Bristol). The subject was to ‘present and discuss visual arts that have influenced our lives and our faith’…
No pressure then!
Coming up with examples of visual arts that have influenced my life was relatively straightforward (although ‘influenced’ is perhaps too strong a word?) – except that, of course, my ‘selection’ one week would be entirely different to my choices the following week! I duly started to add examples to a folder on my desktop… easy peasy. The problem was merely ‘when to stop’!
But then I received a message from one of the lovely organisers, suggesting that each of us panel members just come up with two examples. Just TWO! Blimey… how on earth will I be able to limit my choice to two, for goodness sake?

Image #1: Visual arts that have influenced my life?
So, of ALL the images I’d amassed, I had to pick just one. It’s ridiculously difficult and, like anyone’s ‘Desert Island Disc’ selections, the top-pick would change all the time:
FALLING WATER/FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT:
This sketch (by Wright, 1935) encapsulates my growing interest (and awareness) in architecture when I was still at school. It hasn’t influenced my faith (I wasn’t a Christian until I was 24)… but it started me off on a journey…
I was just starting A level Art, aged 15 (because I was in the ‘fast stream’ at school, I’d been forced to drop Art at the end of first year - but managed to persuade the powers-that-be to allow me to take O level Art in my final pre-sixth form year), and decided to take the ‘history of architecture’ option (for no special reason). I subsequently became fascinated by the likes of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Frank Lloyd Wright… and also found myself REPEATEDLY taking out a book of architectural illustrations by Helmut Jacoby from our local public library (I swear I was the only person who EVER borrowed the book – and it felt as though it was really ‘mine’!). I later went on to study Architecture at university and, subsequently (in the days before computer-aided design etc!), tried to emulate the skills of Wright(!) and Jacoby in my own architectural practice – well, my work did include quite a few sketch perspectives for clients. So, it seems entirely appropriate for Image #1 to be an architectural illustration by Frank Lloyd Wright.

And then of course was the ‘other’ question: ‘visual arts that have influenced my FAITH’?
Well, the straight answer is: I can’t think of ANY art that has specifically influenced my faith… I REALLY can’t. I’ve attended talks by artists who have waxed lyrical on similar subjects but who, frankly, merely managed to wind me up by their somewhat gushing views (or maybe I was just simply jealous?)!

Image #2: Visual arts that have influenced my faith?
A couple of weeks ago, I came across this comment by a writer from Yale University’s Divinity School: “The urgent needs of the world force artists of faith to ask what truly matters in each note, paint stroke, or stanza”.
Whilst I’m sure this is true for some artists, this DEFINITELY doesn’t apply to me…
The trouble is that I simply draw what I see.
I’m NOT trying to send any sort of message out to the wider world. I don’t try to produce ironic (or iconic!), meaningful, passionate images conveying subliminal statements.
I do admit that taking photographs is somewhat different – frequently trying to ‘capture the moment’ (people, action, clouds, sunrises, sunsets …) – stuff that has gone forever within milliseconds or minutes.

It might be more relevant to ask: “is what I draw or photograph influenced by my faith?”. Perhaps the nearest I come to combining visual art with faith is encapsulated in Mary Oliver’s poem ‘Upstream’, when she writes: “attention is the beginning of devotion” (the poem issues a warning about “looking without noticing” – which has been my mantra for perhaps the last 25 years).
I found it incredibly difficult to come up with an appropriate image… but this piece of work perhaps comes close:
ANOTHER PLACE, ANTONY GORMLEY, CROSBY, 2005:
100 cast iron identical figures on Crosby beach.
It hasn’t influenced my faith, but it feels like something of a metaphor for my spiritual journey… All the figures look out to sea; there’s a sense of awareness, of looking, of seeing; something about man’s relationship with nature and the world; the challenges; the ebb+flow of the tide; things constantly changing (weather, night+day, water levels, barnacles, grafitti etc).
Gormley said this about his ‘Another Place’ artwork and I think it fits in with my own perception of the work: I want to see whether it’s possible for art to be everyone’s, in the same way that the sky is and it still seems to me, that that is the most exciting challenge in art. Can you make the conditions that surround us all the time, into an arena for a kind of awareness that wouldn’t exist before, and I guess Another Place is a good example of this, where we have a beach, we have tide, we have changing conditions of weather and night and day and into that you insert these works, but adequately spaced, to allow for people to walk between them and in fact it’s the space between that is critical always in the work.”

Has my appreciation of the visual arts changed as a result of becoming a Christian? I’m not sure. What is true perhaps is that my faith has helped shape the way I see the world – its beauty, design, colour, creativity, tolerance, wonder, simplicity, peace, connectedness and humanity.
For me, the visual arts play an important role in stimulating imagination and creativity, reflection and perception; they open one’s eyes to new possibilities, they question and they reveal… and those are also the characteristics that I want my faith to have.
PS: The images I’d originally ‘highlighted’ included work from the following: Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Charles Rennie MacKintosh, Joseph Southall, Grayson Perry, Turner, Pre-Raphaelites, Stanley Spencer, Bauhaus, David Hockney, The Bloomsbury Group, Habitat, Modigliani, Richard Long, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Helmut Jacoby, Antony Gormley, Hugh Casson, Eric Ravilious, Tirzah Garwood, Don McCullin, Eric Gill, Fred Taylor, Frida Kahlo, Laura Knight, Michelangelo, Raphael, Jane Bown, Albrecht Dürer, 2001 Space Odyssey, Twiggy/Ronald Traeger, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Si Smith… but it could easily have been DOZENS more.

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