Thursday, February 26, 2015

Art's inner beauty

What most people don’t know about me is that I was influenced from a young age by the artistic skills of my mother, a multi-faceted artist who obtained a degree in fine arts in the '50s from the University of Akron.

While she never pursued a career in art, instead marrying my dad a year after graduation and then immediately starting a family with him, her works of art, from big oil portraits to water-colors and wood carvings and even a cement-sculpted rhinoceros that sits on my bookshelf today, could be found all around the house.

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A key thing I was taught by a favorite art history teacher at Ohio State (where I earned a minor in art history along with a double-degree in journalism and political science in 1987) is that inner beauty is what’s really behind true creativity and it only exists when the artist feels real love for people and the God-created things of the earth—love that develops in the person sensitivity, consideration, patience, the ability to notice and watch details of life that escape others, etc.

An artist can exhibit perfect technique as a painter, musician, singer, poet, writer, etc., but without this inner beauty their talent has considerably less significance, even as much as it might obtain “success.”

The pay off in developing inner beauty is a highly coveted simplicity and abandonment of resistance and fear and the desire to impress others and have their approval.

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While others go for colors, design, structure, etc., my thing has always been for inspirational people. My long-loved framed work is a print from the Detroit Institute of Arts of an 1887 Vincent van Gogh “Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat,” in which he gives an intense, sad, anxious-looking stare.

I guess for sentimental reasons, I always list Irving Stone’s translation of van Gogh’s private letters to his brother, Theo, as my favorite non-Bible related book.

This paperback of mine from the ’70s, which I first read in my mid-20s after just moving to Chicago and finding myself incredibly lonely, is so worn out from use, the pages are loose and the cover hangs on only by triple scotch tape along the spine.

In one passage--and it’s one I just flipped to and give no particular emphasis to--Vincent writes:

“What shall we say as to the fact that there are times when one feels there is certain fatality that makes the good turn out wrong, and the bad turn out well?

“I think one may consider such thoughts as partly a consequence of overwrought nerves, and if one has them, one must not think it one’s duty to believe that things are really as gloomy as one supposes; if one did so, it would make one mad.

“On the contrary, it is better to strengthen one’s physique, and afterwards to set to work like a man, and consider that melancholy as a fatal thing. One must always continue to use these two means. In the long run one will then feel one’s energy increasing and will bear up against troubles.

“Mysteries remain, sorrow or melancholy remain, but that everlasting negative is balanced by the positive work which is thus after all achieved. If life were as simple and things as little complicated as Goody Goody’s story, or the hackneyed sermon of the average clergyman, it would not be so very difficult to make one’s way. But it’s not so, and things are infinitely more complicated, and right and wrong do not stand separately, any more than black and white do in nature.”

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One of my favorite photography works of art is a black-and-white portrait of my great aunt Audrey Stone (my grandmother’s sister on my mom’s side) when she was 90 years old and sitting in her rocking chair on the front porch of the Kanawha River cottage house she shared with her sister, Nel, in the small West Virginia mountain town of Sutton, pop. 1,100.

Audrey, a long-time beauty salon owner in Philadelphia who was married to a prominent doctor, was a voluminous poet in her retirement years and her work was frequently published in the local paper, The Braxton Democrat-Central. (The other thing to note about her, I think, is she was a good Christian woman who didn't smoke or drink, etc., and suffered from depression and once had a full-blown nervous breakdown in her 30s where she threw an antique, very expensive Cello out the second-floor window of her Philadelphia brownstone, shattering it in pieces.)

Accompanying this particular photo from 1991--in which Audrey’s wearing a summery polka-dot skirt and a wide white French beret with a star pin anchoring it to her thick and wavy Irish-Scottish white hair--is her poem “The Vagabond Lover,” said to be dedicated “in memory of P.M., a war veteran of Dublin, Ireland.”

The love poem reads, in part, “When my street is draped in snow, I know where to go to find the lover, The Vagabond Lover, a man of the road. A man of the highway life. Old Rocky Bywatt, just a man of the road.

“He will keep you warm come a blizzard or storm. He will kiss away the tears and smooch away the years—that’s the lover, the man of the highway.

“You can love all your doctors, merchants or chiefs, but I will take the man of the road. His words might be compared to the prettiest bird. His voice echoes sweetest sounds ever heard. His kisses divine were sweeter than wine. His warm, soft and tender smile would thaw the frost of age and add new extinguishable fuel to a cold woman’s heart . . . ”

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As a writer, I always find it heartening the tremendous emphasis God, a writer Himself, places on the craft of writing and getting His message out in written form.

One of my favorite Bible verses, in fact, is John 21:25: “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.”

A great old hymn I’m often reminded of, entitled The Love of God, and written by Frederick Lehman, starts out, “The love of God is greater far than tongue or pen can ever tell.”

The last of its three verses goes, “Could we with ink the ocean fill, And were the skies of parchment made, Were ev-’ry stalk on earth a quill, And ev-’ry man a scribe by trade; To write the love of God above Would drain the ocean dry; Nor could the scroll contain the whole, Tho’ stretched from sky to sky.”

When you truly internalize the fact God is the author of the Bible, and intended for every single word to be just what it is and where it is, it’s unfathomable to think He would be behind a bunch of varying versions of His Book that have differing words, contexts and meanings. I mean, can you see William Strunk or E.B. White being that way with their Elements of Style?!

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A book I came to appreciate after hearing my preacher, Richard Jordan, once refer to it as one of “the great books written outside of the Bible,”
is Alexander Hyslop’s 1858 classic The Two Babylons.

It is truly unreal how jam-packed it is with amazing facts, revelations, insights, analogies, etc., regarding history’s pagan-satanic underpinnings and origins from Nimrod on. It’s such a complex read I feel I will never complete its 323 pages!

Here’s just a taste of Hyslop’s extraordinary ability evident from his first introductory paragraphs:

“There is this great difference between the works of men and the works of God, that the same minute and searching investigation, which displays the defects and imperfections of the one, brings out also the beauty of the others.

“If the most finely polished needle on which the art of man has been expended be subjected to a microscope, many inequalities, much roughness and clumsiness, will be seen.

“But if the microscope be brought to bear on the flowers of the field, no such result appears. Instead of their beauty diminishing, new beauties and still more delicate, that have escaped the naked eye, are forthwith discovered; beauties that make us appreciate, in a way which otherwise we could have had little conception of, the full force of the Lord’s saying, ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these.’

“The same law appears also in comparing the Word of God and the most finished productions of men. There are spots and blemishes in the most admired productions of human genius. But the more the Scriptures are searched, the more minutely they are studied, the more their perfection appears; new beauties are brought into light every day; and the discoveries of science, the researches of the learned, and the labours of infidels, all alike to conspire to illustrate the wonderful harmony of all the parts, and the Divine beauty that clothes the whole.”

(new article tomorrow)

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