If people looked at good pictures more,
they would learn more about meditation,
and if they meditated
more,
they would learn
more
about looking at pictures.
-The Secular Journal of Thomas Merton, p. 15)
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If people looked at good pictures more, they would learn more about meditation, and if they meditated more, they would learn more about looking at pictures. -The Secular Journal of Thomas Merton, p. 15)
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 Lately I've been reading the sermons of Martin Luther King. Yes, he was a pastor and minister of The Gospel. I think that is sometimes forgotten. This is the beginning of his ninth sermon in the book, Strength to Love, a book I've had since high school, but never began to really appreciate until this year. I was happy, and a little bit surprised, to come across this sermon based on a verse about the geometry of heaven. But I really shouldn't have been surprised at all. Dr. King's legacy is all about justice, and "justice" (as I mentioned in a recent blog) is defined as "right relationship." And after all, what does geometry describe, but right relationship? Justice. "...ideal humanity...life at it's best is complete on all sides." Where "the length and the breadth and the height of it are equal."
 Carmen Metty is an artist who worked at the same school where I teach. I didn't know her well, and didn't even know she was an artist until she quit. Then I found she had left this behind, a painting on foam core. I love it! Thank you, Carmen, wherever you are!
 G - 201 This week my friend John called my work "futuristic" and "utopian." He is right, of course, but perhaps not quite on the mark. Although I've called my work, "The Geometry of Heaven," it is not the heaven of wishful thinking to which I refer. I do not see heaven, as it is usually represented, as merely something in the future to look forward to after death, I see it as eternally present. It's here with us all the time, underneath the struggle of war and death, the structure that holds the whole mess up. And it's visible. I'm just doing what any other artist is doing, drawing what I see. Only it's a little harder to see on some days than others.
 The thing about geometry is that it just makes me so happy. Everything about it is just right, just the way it is supposed to be. Like the moon is round, and the sun is round, and in our sky they are exactly the same size of roundness... Maybe that's why I've always liked this image of "God as Architect of the Universe." In this messy suffering world, full of war and strife of every stripe, the underlying structure is still visible, still beautiful, still right there in front of us, just waiting to make us happy.
"Just." ...I am reminded of the definition of the word "justice." It doesn't mean punishment, much less revenge, whatever the movies might tell you. No. It means "right relationship." Just like we see in the lovely intricacies of geometry. Has everyone by now seen this story that hit the news yesterday? 31 October 2022, By Olivia Logan The curator of a new exhibition in Düsseldorf has discovered that one painting by the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian has been hanging upside down for more than 75 years. Mondrian painting hanging wrong for decades, curator says The curator, who works for the Kunstsammlung art gallery in the city in North Rhine-Westphalia, argued that the 1941 artwork, New York City I, has likely been displayed the wrong way around for more than three-quarters of a century. The abstract painting by Mondrian, who was born in Amersfoort in 1872, is made up of a series of interwoven red, yellow and blue tape lines on a white background, said to represent the New York skyline, and so while it is not immediately obvious which way round it should go, curator Susanne Meyer-Büser did stumble upon some clues while putting together the new exhibition. “The thickening of the grid should be at the top, like a dark sky,” Meyer-Büser told The Guardian. “Once I pointed it out to the other curators, we realised it was very obvious. I am 100 percent certain the picture is the wrong way around.” In a similar painting by Mondrian, which hangs in the Paris Pompidou Centre and is also called New York City, thickening lines gather in the painting's top corner. But it is a further observation made by Meyer-Büser that may provide the best proof of her theory. In a photograph of Mondrian’s studio, taken a few days after his death in 1944 and published in Town and Country magazine,New York City I can be seen pictured the other way round on an easel. Dutch artwork tells a story After Mondrian died, his painting was put on display at the famous MoMa gallery in New York City. According to Meyer-Büser, MoMA curators also placed the picture the wrong way round. In 1980, it was transferred to the Düsseldorf Kunstsammlung where the error continued. Meyer-Büser is still unsure why this happened: “Was it a mistake when someone removed the work from its box? Was someone being sloppy when the work was in transit?” she said. “It’s impossible to say.” One obvious explanation for the confusion is that the abstract work does not bear the artist’s signature, most likely because he did not consider it a finished piece when he died. Despite her discovery, Meyer-Büser has decided that the work of neoplasticism in primary colours should continue to hang upside down, fearing that it could otherwise be damaged. “The adhesive tapes are already extremely loose and hanging by a thread,” Meyer-Büser told Reuters. “If you were to turn it upside down now, gravity would pull it into another direction. And it’s now part of the work’s story.” https://www.iamexpat.nl/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/painting-dutch-artist-piet-mondrian-has-been-hanging-upside-down-77-years Of particular interest to me is that final paragraph, where it is reported that the painting will continue to be hung upside down, as if it is not so much a work of art as a document of a work of art -- and consequently an object not so much to be seen as to be studied and appreciated as an historical marker. Mondrian's work is now valued more for the story it tells than the visual experience that it offers. This is not unusual, I think. Art museums, curated not by artists but by art historians, have a tendency to treat their collections in exactly this way. Fortunately, since there is a great deal of agreement between these two viewpoints, a healthy overlap, most work is hung respectfully. There is minimal conflict. However, in this case we see, where the two are found to be in sharp contrast, we find the artist's intention and the viewer's experience summarily dismissed. It has been decided that viewers will continue to be offered an upside down painting because the story -- the story offered by art history -- is considered to be more important than the visual experience.  The image on the left is historically correct -- that is, upside down --the one on the right, visually correct.  G - 204 Many years ago the sculptor Augusta Rodin said, "Art is contemplation." I grew up thinking the same thing. I didn't know there was anything else. However I have by now learned better. If that statement was true a century ago, in Rodin's age, it is not anymore. Or mostly not true anyway. Here in the 21st century most art I come across is not contemplative. In this, the Age of The Glance, when all one's visual resources are so insistently called upon just to function in the driving of cars and the sorting process required to deal with the fast moving images of television, computers, and the ubiquity of advertisements, art may be valuable in other ways, as "statements" of one sort or another, but it is usually a-contemplative. It tends not to be conducive to deep and serious spiritual attention. Contemplative art can still be sought out, of course, and discovered in the nooks and crannies of our busy world, for anyone who has a mind to look. So I offer my work, which is not intended to be taken in at a glance, but to be engaged with a quiet eye.  G - 201 In a short story I read recently, called, "Easy Street," by T. Jefferson Parker, a character was experiencing a harsh trauma, and it nearly paralyzed him. As he sat, Parker writes, "Objects passed his vision like words in an unknown language." Well, I thought, that's how the world looks to me every day. I have to continually make the effort to place things I see, and interact with them as merely useful, or somehow practical, objects. It takes work just to function in this world of strange objects that continually pass me by "like words in an unknown language."
These are the only two images from my grad school days (c.1991) that I still have hanging in my studio. They are oil stick on rag board, in the neighborhood of about 18 x 24 inches. I haven't worked this way in a long time, but one day, when the time is right, I plan to apply myself to expressing my visual experience in this way again, to depict what the world looks like when objects pass my vision "like words in an unknown language."
The short story appears in 2001 Best American Mystery Stories.  I find many people think crop circles are a fad from the '90s when they were in the news. Additionally they are under the impression that since a couple of young men claimed to have made them all with boards and string then that's the end of that. But there are an average of 150 of them that still show up every year with complex and perfectly executed geometry, and there have been thousands to date. And they are all exquisite (like this one from earlier this summer) not to mention huge. And we still don't know who is making them or why. I, for one however, am very grateful to whoever is making them. They are absolutely stunning, aren't they? (Photos by Stonehenge Dronescapes) 
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AuthorI am an artist. I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Categories |
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