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.
*****
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.
*****
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.”
*****
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 . . . ”
*****
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?!
*****
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)
(new article tomorrow)
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