All the classic elements are there – baby, Mum, (adoptive) Dad, ox and ass, shepherds, wise men and angels.  In fact, the painting is covered in angels, framing the action in the centre of the painting.  They circle above in the golden dome of heaven, and they stand around below pointing men toward the new-born Jesus.  Dressed in white, green and red, the traditional colours of faith, hope and charity, they carry olive branches and banners proclaim peace to men of good will.

So far, so nativity.  But as you look closer there are some strange and unexpected details.  Botticelli’s version of the nativity is sometimes described as a “double painting,” because Botticelli was painting two realities at the same time.  At the bottom of the painting, the angels awkwardly embrace men; they’re lifting them up from their suffering as hope enters the world.  Around their feet, seven demons (apparently – I could only find six) flee for their lives as God-made-man makes his entrance.

And there are hints that point to how he will bring about the peace the angels promise.  The baby lies on a sheet that suggests the burial shroud his body will be wrapped in a few years later.  And behind him, the donkey’s back clearly displays a cross in dark fur.

Botticelli paints the boy who is Immanuel, “God with us,” born in obscurity to humble parents.  But he also paints Jesus, “God saves,” whose birth is announced by choirs of jubilant angels, but which is also overshadowed by the death he’d die to save the world.

As I’ve read and spoken on the Christmas story again this year, I’ve been really struck by the choir of angels who appear in Luke 2.  As a group of shepherds tend their flocks, an angel appears and announces the birth of the Lord Jesus.  And then…

Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”  (Luke 2v13-14)

At the announcement of the birth of Jesus the air is filled with angels all praising God.  Then as quickly as they appeared, they’re gone, and the shepherds head off to find the baby, with little more to go on that the fact he’ll be lying in a feeding trough.

The angels sing a song of two parts.  They sing glory to God as He steps in among His people to bring them back to him, and they proclaim peace on earth to those on whom God’s favour rests.  It’s a song of heaven and earth reconnecting.  The peace they sing about isn’t a ceasefire or an end to family arguments – it’s peace with the God of the Universe as sin is paid and the world is offered a way back to him.  No wonder they sing!

The next time a choir of angels like this turns up is in Revelation, in John’s glimpse behind the scenes of heaven.

Then I looked and heard the voice of many angels, numbering thousands upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand. They encircled the throne and the living creatures and the elders.  In a loud voice they were saying: “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!”  (Rev 5v11-12)

A hundred million angels circle the throne singing glory to the Lamb looking as if it had been slain.  They’re praising Jesus again.  Only this time, His mission is finished and his work is done.  Instead of lying in hay and cow spit, he’s seated on the throne at the centre of heaven.  And although most of the world missed it the first time, this time the rest of creation joins in as every creature in every corner of creation sings his praises.

The choir of angels, appearing over a field of sheep to a handful of shepherds, point to the two realities of what’s going on just like Botticelli.  The humblest and most human of births delivering the Son of God to save the world.  And that’s worth celebrating this Christmas.

Happy Christmas.

"I'll be home for Christmas" by Thomas Kinkade, whose work is mentioned by the Gospel Coalition guys.

It’s about time I posted something Christmassy, or in fact anything at all…  I’ve got a Christmas post ready to go up in the next day or two, but for now I thought I’d point you to this great video conversation at The Gospel Coalition: Bad Art and the Tortured Beauty of the Cross.

The discussion between Scotty Smith, Mike Cosper and Greg Thornbury focusses on the way evangelical Christians can often be pretty unrealistic in the art they create.  The results are often at best inauthentic, and at worst just plain bad.  And they usually fail to connect with the real experiences of either Christians or non-Christians.

These guys don’t say everything they could, and it’s a bit annoying that they all just agree with each other, but it’s a really helpful starting point.  Here’s the video:

For what it’s worth, I agree with them.  It’s tempting to just create nice things, but which don’t really capture or connect with the world around us.  But it’s a fine line to tread.  While I think we have to avoid kitsch art that ignores the reality of life in a fallen world, we shouldn’t revel in it either.  As Christians, we have a good news which is honest about reality as it is, but which also offers hope for the future in the Lord Jesus.  If we didn’t have that, then of course we would want to pretend everything is already lovely.  But we can be real about the world now because we can be real about what the world will be like, thanks to Jesus.

Also, I love what Greg Thornbury is wearing.

At a conference a few weeks back, a friend of mine had generously made some excellent brownies for the staff team.  What I should have said was, “thank you Lewis, for generously making these excellent brownies for the staff team.”  What I actually said was, “good crumb structure.  Crisp on the outside, soft in the middle.  That is a good bake.”

Why?  At the time I was more than a little bit hooked on The Great British Bake Off, a TV show where 10 amateur bakers compete to be crowned ‘Great British Baker.’  Week by week the hopeful bakers have their efforts dissected and critiqued by Queen of Baking Mary Berry, and fabulously-named baker Paul Hollywood.

Now my devotion has switched from TGBBO to the X-factor and Young Apprentice, while I also keep an eye on Strictly Come Dancing.  Every year we have a nearly-continuous cycle of competition shows like these, with an annual autumn glut as predictable as the falling leaves and shortening days.

When these shows first appeared on our screens, the assumption was that we liked them because they offered all of us a chance, however slim, to be famous.  Week by week we watch a group of people flaunting their worst character traits for a brief stint in the public eye.  But is that really all that’s going on?

Maybe that was true, but I think the real appeal of these shows is not that I get to imagine myself as a contestant, but that I get to be the judge.  I don’t imagine myself trembling infront of the panel; I sit between Gary and Kelly every week, deciding who should stay and who should go.  I can sit in judgment, safe in the knowledge either that I could do better, or that I’d never be stupid enough to have a go.  And that soon spills out into the rest of my life.  If I’m in the wrong mood I’ll judge your singing, your dancing, your outfit, your cooking, your skating, your baking, your haircut… pretty much anything.  I’ll make myself the arbiter of good taste or skill, and rate you accordingly.

I’m sure it’s not just me.  When we think like that, we’re essentially using other people to make ourselves feel good and secure, aren’t we?  We look down on those we see as inferior because it reinforces our superiority.  As I point out someone’s flaws, they make me feel good.  Relationships become all about me and what I can get out of them.

As a Christian, I know I live my life before the Judge, the only one who really matters.  So is life just like the X-factor?  Is the quality of my performance being rated?  Do I need to make sure impress else face eviction?

The brilliant answer is no, I don’t.  If I trust Jesus, then I’m loved and accepted by God completely based on what Jesus has done.  If I trust Jesus, then I’m completely forgiven for the way I’ve rejected God, and I’m welcomed into His family with open arms.  It’s not based on anything I’ve done, but wholly on what He’s done.

And that should change everything for the way I relate to people.  I’m already accepted by God – that’s where my identity and security should come from.  And that frees me up to love other people.  Relationships don’t have to be about me – I have everything I need already.  Being completely loved and accepted frees me to love and accept others.  So I need to work out what this looks like.  How can I love the X factor contestants, even though I’ll probably never meet them?  Can I talk about them in a way that shows this, even though they’ll never hear me?  And how will this flow out into the way I judge (or, hopefully, stop judging) the people I do know?

I’ve been reading a lecture by Paul Klee called, On Modern Art. And I think Klee expresses that there’s something very God-shaped about the way an abstract artist paints. Let me explain what I mean…

Paul Klee was a German artist working at the beginning of the twentieth century.  His art and his work on the theoretical underpinnings of painting had a big influence on Modern art, and now there’s a whole museum, the Zentrum Paul Klee, dedicated to him in Bern. In the lecture, Klee deals with an issue that often troubles people as they look at modern or abstract art: how can an artist end up with a picture that looks so different fromwhat it’s supposed to be, or from anything else in nature?

Here’s part of Klee’s answer…

First, he does not attach such intense importance to natural forms as do so many realist critics, because for him these final forms are not the real stuff of the process of natural creation.  For he places more value on the powers which do the forming that on the final forms themselves.

He is, perhaps unintentionally, a philosopher, and if he does not, with the optimists, hold this world to be the best of all possible worlds, nor to be so bad that it is unfit to serve as a model, yet he says:

“In its present shape it is not the only possible world.”

The deeper he looks, the more readily he can extend his view from the present to the past, the more deeply he is impresses by the one essential image of creation itself, as Genesis, rather than by the image of nature, the finished product.

Then he permits himself the thought that the process of creation can today hardly be complete and he sees the act of world creation stretching from the past to the future.

Genesis eternal!

…Such mobility of thought… had the power to more the artist fundamentally, and since he is himself mobile, he may be relied upon to maintain freedom of development of his owm methods…  Your realist, however, coming across such an illustration in sensational magazine, would exclaim in great indignation: “Is that supposed to be nature?  I call it bad drawing.”

It’s tempting to look at a painting and judge it based on how closely it resembles what you can see.  But Klee is suggesting that an artist is free, or even driven, to go beyone the physical reality you see before you to the process and forces that formed it.  That’s what’s important – the finished result, either in creation or on the canvas, is incidental, because a whole host of other possibilities were possible in our everchanging world.

What I hear Klee saying here is that in trying to get beneath the skin of the reality of an object, an artist is trying to get past what has been created to consider the Creator.  He calls this impersonal, philosophical quantity “Genesis eternal.”  I call it the Lord, the Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth.  Every inch of creation does indeed declare his name.  But the results are not incidental – each rock and animal and plant was crafted by Him and placed in His world.  And as an artist experiences the inspiration and freedom to create, he follows in the footsteps of the Artist.

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.

They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them.

Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.

Psalm 19v1-4

]]> http://garethleaney.wordpress.com/2011/10/11/on-modern-art-and-the-search-for-god/feed/ 0 gleaney Paul Klee Around the Fish Paul klee http://garethleaney.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/life-through-a-lens/ http://garethleaney.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/life-through-a-lens/#comments Tue, 04 Oct 2011 07:00:21 +0000 garethleaney http://garethleaney.wordpress.com/?p=1173 ]]>

Apols for not posting recently – things have been uber busy!  I have about 4 posts on the go, but have found little time to sit and finish them properly.  As soon as I do they’ll be straight up here.

In the mean time, my good friend and colleague Peter has written a brilliant series of posts on how to use films to get people talking about what they believe.

Films are great for starting discussion, once you realise that someone is very deliberately telling you how they see the world.  Then it’s just a matter of working out whether you agree or disagree.

As a Christian, and as a human being, there is usually something I can affirm or resonate with, even if it just a search for hope and meaning, however misguided that search becomes.  But I can also offer an alternative.  If they’re used well, films can open up some really big topics, and raise the questions our friends didn’t realise they were asking.  And if you follow Peter’s advice, you’ll be well on your way…

Hosting a film discussion (Part 1): Setting expectations

Hosting a film discussion (Part 2): Which film?

Hosting a film discussion (Part 3): What format?

Hosting a film discussion (Part 4): After the credits roll

This is a painting I made during some days off last week.  It’s called Blood and Ash, and I painted it as a response to the opening chapters of Leviticus.

You can read the first few chapters here; read them, and try to imagine the scenes they describe.  Leviticus is a book concerned with how an impure, rebellious people can have a relationship with a pure and holy God.  God graciously set up a series of sacrfices so that His people could come to him.  The sacrifices mean that their sin and stubbornness is painfully obvious – these rituals are performed repeatedly to cleanse the people and the priest who represent them.  They’re a powerful remind of who God is – they must come to give thanks to God when things are going well, and they must come and offer sacrifices when they fail.  The problem is serious, because the solution required blood.  Fire speaks of the wrath of God and his righteous judgment, but it also speaks of purification and cleansing.  Blood and fire cleanse God’s people so that they can be forgiven and have a relationship with Him.

Imagine what it would have looked like.  Imagine what it would have sounded like, what it would have smelt like.  The ground running with blood as the priests offer sacrifice after sacrifice, and the piles of ash by the altar.  The air thick with smoke from the constantly-burning fire, and the meat and bones and flour and incense that burn on it.  The rich, gold-covered furnishings of the tabernacle, splattered with the blood of countless sacrifices, but blazing in the fire light.

I think it would have been pretty overwhelming, chaotic even, and I tried to capture some of that.  I think there’s a bit of Rothko’s influence shining through here – I was aiming for a big field of red to bring out the emotional effect of the single colour.  The dark area is painted with ash (from burning wood in my back garden) mixed with clear acrylic.  I wanted to create a difference in texture, as well as referencing the fire and ashes that repeated sacrifices would create.  It’s almost as if the ash spoils the picture, and this was kind of the idea – I wanted to disturb the effect of the red with something that looks messy – there was nothing clean and tidy about the tabernacle sacrifices.

But underneath all all the blood and smoke and ash, there’s grace and hope.  There’s welcome.  The blood and ash of Leviticus are a powerful picture of our need – we have no hope of standing before a holy God without help.  But if we just talk about judgment and law, I think we miss the point.  At it’s heart, Leviticus is soaked in the gospel.  It’s about God’s outrageous grace in making it possible for people to come before him.  And it points us forward to the perfect sacrifice, the once-for-all sacrifice who would render all other sacrifices unnecessary.  It points us forward to the Lord Jesus, God the Son, who took God’s burning, righteous wrath upon himself and spilled his own blood, so that we could be forgiven.

The gold is supposed to capture something of that.  It refers to the gold in the temple, but it also points to the hope and beauty shining through the blood and ash of sacrifice.  And the blood and ash make it shine all the brighter.

I’m not sure how I feel about it – some days I get up and look at it, and I’m happy with it, others I want to start again.  But I’d be interested to know what you think…

One thing I love about it is that it’s open for anyone to enter.  And that means you get a wide variety of artists and a wide variety of styles side-by-side.  So one minute you might be looking at a member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters one minute, and a recent art graduate the next.  And portraits of the famous and influential share a wall with parents and children and ballroom dancers.  I have to resist the temptation to rush to find out who’s coming up next.  As it is, I have to go round twice.

The winner of the 2011 award was Distracted by Wim Heldens.   The portrait is of a young man the artist had known since he was a boy, and Heldens had painted him several times.  Distracted captures him as a thoughtful-looking philosophy student, hesitating in a doorway.  In some ways, the portrait could be considered unremarkable – the subject, the setting and the pose are nothing spectacular.  But among this year’s exhibition, that’s probably what makes it stand out.  I felt like a lot of entries wanted to be making a point about something or add more significance to their work, beyond simply capturing something about their subject.  Although Heldens’ portrait is straightforward in some respects, there’s an intensity in the simplicity of it that I’ve grown to really like (and, I’ll admit, I wasn’t really convinced on the day!).  I’m also really intrigued by the light switches on the side of the painting.  The artist could have easily removed them, but he chose not to.  I wonder why?  He might have been thinking of the composition – a blank wall would have left the picture a bit lop-sided.  But there may also be more to it.  Maybe something to do with enlightenment and the study of philosophy?  Or maybe they balance out the solemnity of the young man, dressed in grey and black, but with the possibility of brightening things up?

My favourite painting in the exhibition was slightly more colourful.  I really liked George O’Dowd by Layla Lyons.  O’Dowd is better known as the singer Boy George, and this painting captures him sitting at home in a thoughtful pose.  There are lots of reasons I like this portrait, not least the title.  The title deliberately refers to him by his real name, rather than his far better known alter ego.  The portrait isn’t of the celebrity, but of the man, although the two sides of his identity of clearly on display.  He’s wearing his trademark hat and flamboyant outfit, but his crossed legs bring his ankle tag right into the front of the picture (O’Dowd was sent to prison for the false imprisonment of a male escort in 2009.  He was released after 4 months, but was required to wear an ankle monitor for 90 days).

The chair he’s sitting in adds something interesting to the portrait too.  While we were in the gallery, I lingered while a few other people looked at the painting, including a mum with her daughter, and some old ladies who were obviously on an outing.  As far as I could tell, no-one else realised that the arm of the chair is a massive penis.  Or they were just too polite to mention it…  It’s a cleverly subdued shock element, which you don’t really notice to begin with, and then you can’t help but notice it!  And it’s a clear reference to O’Dowd’s sexuality, but I think it’s more than that.  Although the portrait is of an older, perhaps calmer Boy George, there are still plenty of surprises left…

I love the use of colour in the painting too – it’s painted in bright colours, but Lyons managed to give the painting a thoughtful and serious tone – perhaps another reflection of the different sides of O’Dowd’s life and personality?  And surely it can’t be a coincidence that it’s mainly painted in red, gold and green?

I think I should also give a mention to Six Decades by Matthew Schofield.  This small work, almost dwarfed by some of the other entries, features six small portraits of the artist’s father from 6 different decades.  The first 5 were painted from photographs, the sixth from real life.  With a portrait, you’re restricted to capturing a single moment (without some complicated trickery).  But here, Schofield has taken a collection of moments and presented a whole lifetime.  The warmth of the painting also stood out for me.  Having painted my own Dad already, I think I’d like to try something like this.

On a similar theme, James’s favourite was Father and I, Life Size by Elie Shamir.  The painting depicts the painter and his father on their family farm in Israel.  The two men are very physically similar, and they are similarly dressed too.  On one hand, there’s something here about the inevitability of growing up to be like your parents.  But the younger man has become an artist (and his studio is in the background) – he’s become his own man.  And although the two men stand apart, you can still feel something of the bond between them, the artist proudly painting his Dad, and the older man (perhaps slightly grudgingly) indulging him.

If you’re anywhere near the National Portrait Gallery (just round the corner from Trafalgar Square), you should definitely check out the BP Portrait Award.  Admission is free, and it’s on until 18th September.

Also, can I recommend the Japan Centre for lunch?  Amazing.  You can thank James for that one.

(Firstly, can I apologise for my use of the word Relay in the title?  I promise to try to do better next time…)

One of the highlights of my job is getting to spend time with our wonderful Relay Workers.  They spend a year working alongside one or two Christian Unions, living and speaking for Jesus as they help the students to do the same.  And it amazes me every year what a talented bunch they turn out to be.

Here are a couple of links for you to follow so you can see for yourself.

Jamie is in the process of “falling in love with drawing again.”  My favourite part is that he’s having fun with it, and it shows.  Check out his new website and follow his journey.

www.jamiehaxby.com

Lindsay makes, quite simply, amazing shoes.

www.artandsole.me.uk

It’s been a strange week.  A week full of loss in one way or another.   People I never met, some I never knew and some who influenced me a lot.  Some lives well-lived and well-used, and others that seemed to end far too soon.  Amid so much loss, the death of Amy Winehouse seemed to generate fewer headlines than it might have.  Having said that, plenty has still been written about her, and it’s hard to add anything else.

Responses to the news have basically been the same – a lack of surprise, given the things we read about Amy’s life over the past few years.  Some have phrased it as a harsh, “I told you so”, others have been kinder as they’ve expressed shock, but a lack of surprise.

When celebrities die, particularly someone like Amy Winehouse, it shocks us.  It cracks the glossy veneer of fame that we’re so familiar with, and which so many of us want.

In life, we dehumanise celebrities, don’t we?  We either deride them or we worship them, but rarely do we want to think they’re like us.  We may want their life, or we may not, but we want it to be different.  They become either a source of inspiration, something to aspire to, or they become living cautionary tales that allow us to feel better about our own lives.  Either way, we stop thinking of them as relational human beings, created in God’s image and loved by him, and we treat them as something to be consumed while we enjoy it, and then rejected.

It’s no surprise that in death, we dehumanise celebrities too.  Again, we either sneer, “it’s her own fault,” or we worship as we mourn.  And it’s fascinating how we so often forget how we talked about about the dead while they were alive to hear us.  This has happened to Amy in equal measure, and both are sad to watch.

I wonder if at least part of this is because we feel a lingering sense of guilt.  We watched it happen.  We laughed at Amy as she stumbled drunkenly through performances, or as she rolled out of another taxi.  We even sang and danced along as she sang about Rehab.  It was funny while she was alive, but it’s uncomfortable now she’s gone.  Maybe we feel better if we reassure ourselves that it was all her own fault, or it was the fault of the crowd she attached herself to?

But I think there’s something else going on.  We like our celebrities different from us, because fame and celebrity offer us an escape; a different, more exciting kind of life that dangles an unreachable promise of better things in front of our faces.  But it’s a fragile dream, and the cold, hard reality of death demolishes it.  To preserve the dream we have to respond in one of two ways: we elevate them to sainthood, as though we grant them some kind of immortality by declaring that their memory will live on, or we shake our heads and say, “what a waste.”  “I’d never make those mistakes.”  “I could have used their fame and money so much better.”  Either way, death isn’t allowed to interfere.

Celebrity promises all kinds of things: significance, acceptance, escape.  But, in the end, it’s just an illusion, and death is the ultimate reality check.  We don’t need someone else to promise much but never deliver.  We need someone who can show us what it really means to be human, someone who really can dignify our humanity and really liberate it from the power and ever-presence of mortality.  We need Jesus.

Good bye Amy.

So now the wine is syphoned off into another bottle to ferment a bit longer if it needs to, and then hopefully to clear…

And during the syphoning process, I accidentally got a mouthful of what will eventually become wine – and it actually tastes like wine!  Still a bit fizzy, but definitely on its way to becoming wine…

To follow the story from the beginning, have a look at The Art of Wine Making (Part 1).

Update:  I also started making peach wine yesterday, which requires a very exciting array of substances, and some peaches.  And a bucket.  It should be ready to drink in June…