Tuesday 26 June 2012

Natural Art

"Within a generation, the Greeks stopped making realistic statues. Why? The answer reveals something fundamental about us as human beings - we're driven by something else - the need to exaggerate".

How Art Changed the World (BBC).

"The entire human race is profoundly and desperately religious. From the dim beginnings of our history right up to the present, none of us have been immune to thinking that the relationship between God and humanity can be repaired from our side, by what we do". 

Robert Farrar Capon.



It's always interested me how so often what is popular is invested with various yet apparently essential exaggerations. Heros, villains, even locations where key events are played out have to be larger than life to convey a sense of special weight and occasion. It's not just in block-busting films that this is so. Popular plays, novels, operas, myths and poems often equally echo this sentiment, as does painting and sculpture - it seems that the 'real' world is often just too small scale for anything special to really be happening within, and yet, this is where you and I reside - here, in fact, is the canvas on which such grand ideas are fashioned, because it is the 'small' domain of our spinning little planet that all of the virtues and failings we write large on stage and screen are to be found and are given true meaning.

The reason for our 'necessary fictions' is because it often allows us to be a step removed from intimacy.




There are some wonderful moments in the film, Nell, where the two physicians entangled into the life of this strange, astonishing woman, realize that to truly help her, they will have to come out from behind their detached professionalism and deeply become involved in this life, this person, at great cost. Meaningful Art and genuine spirituality require us to make that same journey - to engage with the heights and depths of life, but to do so in such a fashion that we become wholly entangled in its demands, even to the point of having to give much of ourselves to become true participants of the beauty and richness it calls us, demands us to see and totally encounter.

Such inter-action will wound and heal us deeply, but it will also mean we cannot be content with peripheral, bland uses of artistic or religious means (however ornate the external trappings) - we will long for something more.

There is a beauty, a wisdom, which calls us, like falling in love, which we deny at our greatest loss. The deepest songs, words, and images will always flow from those fathomless depths - the river which still flows to us from Eden.




Images: Natural Beauty. Model: Joceline.  Serenity Model:Alena.  Tapestry Model:Peltigera.