K. and I had an exhilarating experience last Friday. It was a beautiful day and we went over to Fairhope to check out the new Windmill Market. It is a crafts and farmer’s market that has been designed to be earth friendly…recycled water, solar and wind power…hydroponic plantings all around…everything made with recyclable materials. It looked like something you’d see in Austin or in California. It was in the morning and most vendors hadn’t shown up yet, so we decided just to walk around the area. We discovered that this market adjoined another building that fronts Section Street in which there is the studio of the internationally acclaimed artist Fred Nall Hollis, known around the world as Nall. Usually the studio is locked because he travels extensively, and usually we just press our faces to the window and peer into this other world…so we shielded our eyes against the glass…and a voice out of nowhere said… “Would you like to come in?”
“Hello, I’m Nall,” the voice said…and before long we found ourselves in a dreamland….portraits of Alabama artists with animal bodies, whimsically framed in rusted out, cracked found material; china he’d designed with exquisite camellias dancing to some hidden rhythm; broken dolls in yellowed lace streaked and spattered with color; landscapes from this dream world, most familiar, but decidedly new; metal sculpture looking as if Salvador Dali’s flat surreality had stepped into our own third dimension…He took us under his arm and showed us marvel after marvel…walking in the garden of Eden…pieces done in a new digital technique called giclee… piercing color alive and in motion. He told us about designing the sets and costumes of the Puccini opera La Rondine (the swallow), commissioned by the Puccini Society of Italy. It was performed to sell-out crowds in the Italian lake country in 2007…He told us there was to be a screening of it the next night at a theater in Fairhope… “you should come”…he said. We did…and we wept at the sheer beauty of this dazzling work of art….Our hearts pounding…It was all just too much.
Our artists are our saints in truth…they are our philosophers…our theologians…the truth tellers…sometimes with words….but always through the senses, the means of imagination…They speak what is in the soul of humankind…It is as if they have cracked the proverbial code of the universe…and are compelled each and every day to tell its story…a memory of another world, that is in truth our world seen for what it truly is…a story of love and loss and joy and pain and life and death and hope, of betrayal and reconciliation, of despair and renewal and transformation…this grand infinite story wheeling through time and place that finds its expression in the common found things of earth and ordinary life…and it is just too much, this beauty.
Artists beget artifice which are sacraments of the beautiful…beauty the luminous source of all reality…these the found glowing images out of what Yeats called Spiritus mundi…the great collective unconscious alive in the mythy mind of God…bursting dreamlike with creativity…beauty for the world’s sake…We share that mind…all of us…all of us, made in God’s image, artists for the world’s sake…bearing symbol, sacrament to the world:…Justice, a symbol, a sacrament of the life of God’s gracious and generous commonweal; sacrifice, a symbol of loving the way God loves; mercy and compassion, symbols of found hope…goodness, artifice bearing witness to the way the world is rightly ordered. Shelly named artists the un-named legislators of the age…Indeed art transforms; beauty changes things for the better, for its own sake, and that is the true story, and that is a beautiful thing to know…and it’s just too much.
What a wonderful world it could be if we valued our artists and their contributions more than our desire to wage war on one another.
Van Gogh only painted for seven years before taking his life but his magnificient and beautiful creations inspired all of the following generations of artists. Harper Lee changed how a whole generation felt about racial prejudice with a single book. John Lennon’s music still inspires us to work towards peace and to think about others.
Prophets, messiahs and avatars come in many shapes and sizes. Their messages aren’t always verbal and straightforward. Words are the most ineffective means of communication. God talks to us through the feeling experience. The experience having our breath taken away when we see a Monet or a Nall. Or the feeling of pure joy at the sound of Rachmaninoff’s Piano 3rd Piano Concerto or U2’s Joshua Tree album. This is when we should be paying attention to what we are feeling and what that experience represents.
Our times are changing. People are tired of war and political lies. Perhaps this is the dawning of the Age of Peace. I hope and pray that it is. I’d like to live in a world that valued artists and their contributions to humanity.
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
And speaking of that, Truth and Beauty: A Friendship, by Ann Patchett. The memoir of Patchett’s friendship with, Autobiography of a Face, author Lucy Grealy .
A/The definition of Christian friendship – discussed, but rarely attained.
Today, the church we attended in Lansing is celebrating the 40th anniversary of Steve Lange’s tenure as organist and choir director. I was asked to contribute a poem, and this is what I chose. It seemed fitting for here too.
Resident Beauty
for steve lange
the work of the artist is to construct authentic
beauty out of artifice but such beauty doesn’t
reside in what is palpable it exists in insinuation
in what is imaginable just as the magnificence
of a landscape is no more in the brushstrokes
of the artist than the splendor of a poetic line
is in the stroke of the pen or choice of typeface
beauty is about the response the consequence
not shape symmetry or loveliness it is the interactive
juxtaposition of aesthetic response with the unknown
with what some have called the transcendent
and others the abyss the beautiful finds its place
in a belief that there is something bigger than us
beyond us and whether that something is
a warm and loving god or a cold empty nothingness
we can only really guess but we find comfort
in knowing authentic beauty happens in
interpreting implications of artists’ lines
not the lines themselves so whether it is
a sunset over smoky mountains a painting
of water-lilies an incomparable tenor aria or
even a particularly poetic turn of phrase beauty
inhabits its impression just as the beauty of a smile lies
not in the curve of the lips but in the light of the eyes
“…the beautiful finds its place
in a belief that there is something bigger than us
beyond us and whether that something is
a warm and loving god or a cold empty nothingness
we can only really guess…”
………………………….
if it is the latter, am I wasting my time at South Ann Street from 8 to 9 on Sunday mornings?