In February I offered a reflection on Jonah 4: 1-4 at a chapel at Knox Seminary. I explored our anger at God’s grace and our refusal to allow God to be the subject of our existential sentences. Watch it here. Video Platform Video Management Video Solutions Video Player [Read more…]
Life and Death in the Artist’s Studio
April 2, 2013 by Leave a Comment
In a few weeks I’ll be participating in the sixth annual Mockingbird Conference in New York City. The mission of Mockingbird Ministries is to connect the Christian faith to the day-to-day realities of life. And culture in all its diverse forms is the means by which we life out our daily lives. This year’s conference [Read More…]
Go in Peace: A Holy Week Meditation on Vocation
March 27, 2013 by Leave a Comment
The confrontation between Elisha and Naamen in 2 Kings 5 is one of the more provocative texts in all of the Scriptures. In this short chapel devotion given at Knox Theological Seminary in December, I reflect on perhaps the most difficult and often-overlooked aspects of this story ( v. 15-19), in which Elisha blesses Naamen’s vocation. [Read More…]
Space
March 20, 2013 by Leave a Comment
A painting is not its interpretation. At the moment it encounters me in the art museum, a painting exists for me. But it does not need me. It exists for me in a particular way, a way that challenges my control, rendering me receptive (i.e., passive). T.S. Eliot once said that the meaning of a poem exists [Read More…]
A Man Had Two Sons
March 13, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Envy is as old as humanity itself. In the first utterance of the word sin in Scripture, a man had two sons; two brothers who come to grief over, of all things, an offering given to God. “Cain brought to the LORD an offering of the fruit of the ground. Abel brought the firstborn of [Read More…]
“You Will Make Bells & I Will Paint Icons”
March 12, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Rublev Fasts Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic film, The Passion of Andrei Rublev (1966) is a Lenten film par excellence. It depicts the spiritual struggle of one of Russia’s great cultural heroes, the painter of icons Andrei Rublev (1360-1430), who is most famous for his stunningly original, The Holy Trinity (c. 1420). Although I wrote about the [Read More…]
The Poetry of an Erased de Kooning
March 5, 2013 by Leave a Comment
One of the more notorious and inexplicable works of art of the last sixty years is Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Influenced by a resurgence of interest in the work of the Dada artist Marcel Duchamp and performance art, Rauschenberg [Read More…]
The Futility of Painting
February 27, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Yesterday my review of a new monograph on the Spanish realist painter Antonio López García, entitled “Jousting the Quince Tree,” appeared over at Books & Culture online. Although I was aware of his work, my respect for López García increased dramatically in the process of studying his paintings. In addition, I stumbled upon a documentary film, [Read More…]
Vocation and the Artist’s Studio
February 21, 2013 by 1 Comment
Last week I was in Pittsburgh to speak on modern art and grace at the annual Jubilee conference, an event that brings 2,000 college students together to connect their faith to their work. After my presentation, a person working in campus ministry asked me how he could support two students who happen to be artists. [Read More…]
Cézanne, Inventing Abstraction, and the Glen East Workshop
February 11, 2013 by Leave a Comment
One post on the paintings of Paul Cézanne’s is not enough and so I explored his relentless engagement with nature in “The Creaturely Work of Paul Cézanne” over at ThinkChristian, where I blog from time to time. Cézanne was relentless in his desire to do one thing: paint nature. Yet it was by returning the artist and [Read More…]
