Thinking with a Compass and Straightedge

I wouldn't say geometry was my best subject in high school, but it was certainly the most appealing!  Not the axioms and proofs but the fact that geometry required putting pencil to paper and drawing!  Imagine my astonishment (and delight) twenty-five years ago when I discovered via Pere Igor Sendler's book, "The Icon: Image of the Invisible" chapter after chapter on proportions and the underlying geometry of icons!

For iconographers probably the most useful aspects of geometry and proportions is gaining the almost miraculous ability (using only proportions and simple multiplication and division) to make a drawing larger (or smaller). And, by establishing a set of proportional relationships, based on the proportions of the panel (or wall) that serves as the support for the icon, being able to construct the figures within the icon.

Although I'm behind on the studio - mea culpa! - I've taken the first steps in designing a new work for the upcoming solo exhibit at the state museum (the first of  several icons that I hope to complete in time for that exhibition.)  The starting place is thinking through, with a compass and straightedge, the proportions and proportional relationships of a triptych icon (a central image with two hinged panels that are half the width of the main image.) 

Having laid the foundation, I'll be putting it aside to complete the icons that I have promised those who have commissioned them.  Thank you for your patient forebearance!   

   

Drawn and Quarto'd

 

I've been reading David Talbot Rice's "The Appreciation of Byzantine Art", a 1972 contribution to a series of books from Oxford University Press on the appreciation of various types or periods of art.  He referred in passing to the Wolfenbuttel Muster Buch (pattern book), a 13th century book of pattern drawings depicting figures from various Byzantine  icon compositions.  Drawn on parchment(?) and bound together into a folio, art historians believe the artist was a Venetian working around 1260.  Parchment being quite costly (papermaking, although known in Spain, was just beginning in Italy and France), and it appears that the drawings are rendered over letterforms (or was repurposed and written over.)

They are quite well done, drawn presumably with a brush.  Thin washes of diluted ink(?) were used to lightly model the forms and the shadows.  There is  much that can be learned studying these drawings, especially the drapery, which is si beautifully rendered.  These figures are from the icon of the Anastasis ("Descent Into Hell"), including, it appears, the Prophet Isaiah, Abel the Just and Moses.   

Despite the title, I can only guess at the size of each page! 

Below are some additional plates from the patternbook, the first two related to the Anastasis icon, the last, figures of the evangelists.

 

 

 

Vita Brevis, Ars Longa

Choosing to be undistracted by the candidate debate tonight and the impending presidential election, I am posting, as promised a week ago, the remaining portfolio slides that I submitted to the Alaska State Museum in my (successful) application for a solo exhibit in 2017/2018.

The Conception of Mary the Mother of God

The Risen Jesus and St. Mary Magdalene at the Empty Tomb

St. Justin Martyr with Scenes from His Life

The Holy Face (Icon of Christ-Made-Without-Hands)

The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph

Pass the Hotteok, Please!

From the very beginning of the Christian era, the intention of persecutors (that would be them)was to terrify, intimidate and ultimately get rid those they were persecuting (that would be us).  But in the long run (and sometimes even in the short run), attempting to stamp us out just contributed to them becoming part of us.

For at the heart of the Good News is this: that the love of God is stronger than hatred, violence and even death.

Which I suppose explains the distinctive manner in which our Catholic tradition honors the memory of the martyrs. Solemnly, yes, with the Mass, hagiography, icons, stained glass and statues but cheerfully, even playfully with distinctive food, drink and other festivities.

Feast of St. Agatha or St. Lucy?  Pass the 'minni Sant'Agata' or a 'lussekatter'  (St. Lucy Cat) pastries!  Feast of St. Lawrence?  Fire-up the grill!  Even Good Friday has its own (delicious) pastry: hot cross buns!

Today is the memorial of the Korean martyrs St. Andrew Kim Taegon, St. Paul Chong Hasang and companions.  They were put to death during a persecution in the mid- 19th century and their courageous witness was and continues to be the foundation of the Church in Korea.

I don't know if there is a particular food yet associated with the Korean martyrs, but my vote would be for hotteok.  Its a kind of dough-cake, filled with chopped nuts and cinnamon, browned in hot frying pan. In Korea hotteok is a popular street food.  I was introduced to them a few years back by my Carmelite friends from Korea at the Terre Haute Carmel. They are delicious (particularly on a cold winter day)!  

So on this feast day of St. Andrew Kim and his companions, remember with gratitude their courage and sacrifice and perhaps celebrate with a hotteok or two and a hot cup of tea.    


 

Much Thanks!

I'm grateful for all of the kind words and congratulations I have received on the occasion of being selected (along with seven other Alaskan artists)for a solo exhibit at the Alaska State Museum.  Thank you!  

A special word of thanks to Beth, Henry and Tom Melville, who resized the electronic files of the slides I submitted for my solo show application.  I know that without their help I'd have stalled out on this application, since moving  pixels around is as incomprehensible (for me) as quantum physics.  So, as in so many things, I relied on the kindness of friends.  Thank you! 

Below are the first five of the ten works that I submitted in my application. (I'll post the rest tomorrow.)

 

 

 

 

 

Solo Exhibit Artists Chosen

 

I received the news this afternoon that I'm one of eight Alaskan artists selected by the Alaska State Museum for a solo exhibit sometime in 2017/2018.  No other details yet -- who the other artists are, for example, but I'm sure I'll learn more soon.

In the meantime I'm honored and humbled that my work has been chosen.

Mater Misericordia

 This mother is a refugee from Syria, just one of the 65.3 million people around the world that the United Nations estimates have been forced from their homes as of 2015. There are so many mothers like her who are burdened by grief, anxiety and fear for their children and who wonder what kind of future they will have.

For Roman Catholics, today is the memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows.  Like tens of millions of others, Mary was forced to flee with her little family and seek refuge in a foreign land.  In this vale of tears, we call her, Mater Misericordia, Mother of Mercy for her heart, pierced by suffering and grief, is a heart of compassion, love and mercy.  

Through the intercession of Our Lady of Sorrows, may we imitate the Mother of Mercy and open our hearts, our churches and our nation to all those crying out for refuge, shelter and safety.

The Enduring Paradox of the Cross

 “May [Fr. Jacques Hamel] from heaven—because we must pray to him, he is a martyr, and the martyrs are blessed, we must pray to him—give us meekness, brotherhood, peace and the courage to say the truth: to kill in the name of God is satanic.”    
                                                                  Pope Francis, Homily for the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross

Pope Francis, celebrating today the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross in Rome declared the French priest Jacques Hamel a martyr and blessed in the presence of his bishop and the faithful from his parish in Normandy.  It's yet another instance of the enduring paradox of the Cross: the kenotic humiliation of the Word made flesh that accomplishes our salvation from the violence, hatred, lust for power and pride that tragically corrupts every human heart, by dying ignominiously on the Cross.  

Armed only with the weapons of self-giving, self-sacrificing love and obedience to the will of the Father, Jesus by the Cross overthrew forever the powers of sin and death, so aptly characterized by Bl. Jacques as "satanic".   How apt to remember Bl. Pere Jacques on this feast day.

Bl.Pere Jacques's killers were misguided, not only in their evil and hateful actions, but in their mistaken idea that hatred and violence made them powerful.  Yes, they had the transitory power to frighten and hurt and kill, but as the martyrdom of Bl. Pere Jacques testifies to, the self-giving love of Jesus, who died on the Cross, even, (or especially) for his murderers, is where true power resides.  The love of Jesus and of those who make up his Mystical Body, is a love which can never be overcome, never defeated, never killed, for it is the life-giving, eternal love of God.  

It is to that undying and inexhaustible love that Bl. Pere Jacques Hamel was a faithful witness, in his life and in his death.

Blessed Pere Jacques, pray for us!

Take Me To The River

When I was about twelve I fell in love with Chinese landscape painting. I discovered the "Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting ( reproduced in translation in the "The Tao of Painting:A Study of the Ritual Disposition of Chinese Painting" , published by the Bollingen Institute at Princeton with commentary by Mai-Mai Tse) and never looked back.

This weekend I wanted to spend some time looking at my favorite Chinese painting, "Spring Festival Along the River"by the Northern Sung painter Zheng Zeduan/Chang Tse-Tuan,  Its not exactly a classical landscape painting of lonely mountains, clouds and waterfalls.  Instead, Zheng's painting is filled with people on their way  to the Sung capital of Kaifeng during Ch'ing Ming, the spring festival honoring the dead.

Its a leisurely journey along the river through the outskirts of the city, past large and small boats,  over a bridge, through the city gates and into the city itself.  It depicts people of every class and occupation engaged in every possible kind of activity as they come and go alongside the river.  Or listening to a storyteller or minding their storefronts or drinking tea in a teahouse. (Love those camels coming through the city gate.)

I never tire of looking at this masterpiece (which of course, I've only seen in photographic reproduction.)  I have a book at home that has a twelve-page spread of the entire painting in black and white, but its a not very high resolution reproduction.    So I went on line and accidentally stumbled across a site at the University of Chicago that reproduces Chinese scroll paintings.  The viewer can literally "scroll" through the entire scroll while making the very high resolution images larger (to see detail) or smaller (to see the details in their larger context.)

To take a look, go to:  
https://scrolls.uchicago.edu/scroll/spring-festival-along-river

Take Me To The River

When I was about twelve I fell in love with Chinese landscape painting. I discovered the "Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting ( reproduced in translation in the "The Tao of Painting:A Study of the Ritual Disposition of Chinese Painting" , published by the Bollingen Institute at Princeton with commentary by Mai-Mai Tse) and never looked back.

This weekend I wanted to spend some time looking at my favorite Chinese painting, "Spring Festival Along the River"by the Northern Sung painter Zheng Zeduan/Chang Tse-Tuan,  Its not exactly a classical landscape painting of lonely mountains, clouds and waterfalls.  Instead, Zheng's painting is filled with people on their way  to the Sung capital of Kaifeng during Ch'ing Ming, the spring festival honoring the dead.

Its a leisurely journey along the river through the outskirts of the city, past large and small boats,  over a bridge, through the city gates and into the city itself.  It depicts people of every class and occupation engaged in every possible kind of activity as they come and go alongside the river.  Or listening to a storyteller or minding their storefronts or drinking tea in a teahouse. (Love those camels coming through the city gate.)

I never tire of looking at this masterpiece (which of course, I've only seen in photographic reproduction.)  I have a book at home that has a twelve-page spread of the entire painting in black and white, but its a not very high resolution reproduction.    So I went on line and accidentally stumbled across a site at the University of Chicago that reproduces Chinese scroll paintings.  The viewer can literally "scroll" through the entire scroll while making the very high resolution images larger (to see detail) or smaller (to see the details in their larger context.)

To take a look, go to:  
https://scrolls.uchicago.edu/scroll/spring-festival-along-river

Let Us With Confidence Come Before the Throne of Grace

 

Its been fifteen years this Sunday since the terrible events of September 11th, 2001.  The anniversary falls on a Sunday this year, which means that for us as Christians we will be gathered at the altar on that heart-breaking anniversary.  Yet the altar is such an appropriate place to gather, a place where God, who loves us with such infinite compassion and mercy, wants us to confidently lay down our deepest fears and hopes, joys and sorrows before the throne of grace. 

We gather to celebrate the Eucharist, which is the sign and the reality of the measure of God’s love for us, revealed in Jesus who offered himself completely and without holding back for our sake.  Having lived a life for others, his body was broken for us and his and his lifeblood was poured out to break down once and for all the walls of hatred and malice that separate us from God and from each other.    

Remembering this anniversary, it is impossible to ignore the human family’s alienation from God: the fire and smoke only made visible the anger and hatred burning in the hearts of those who would do such a thing to their brothers and sisters.    

Yet in those same places and on that same day, we saw too the creative power of love.  For me,  the image of those doomed firefighters dragging their hoses up the steps of the World Trade Tower as they passed those fleeing the building,  is such a profound image of the Eucharist.  Do this, in memory of me, meant then and continues to mean for us, to be men and women for others, to live lives poured out in loving service without counting the cost. 

Jesus, in the simple acts of eating and drinking revealed God’s power to heal us.  In Jesus, at the Eucharist, enemies become friends, injuries are forgiven and peace is possible.  The Eucharist reveals to us our power in Christ to cast out hatred, to forgive and be forgiven, and to love even our enemies.  The sacrificial love of Jesus, which appears to be weakness itself, is always more powerful than hatred and killing, of violence and revenge.  

May we open our hearts to the mystery of the mercy of God revealed to us in the One who forgave his executioners from the Cross, confident that each day that we will be transformed more and more profoundly into the image and the pattern of Jesus.    

Longing is the Core of Mystery

Longing is the core of mystery

Longing itself brings the cure.

The only rule is: Suffer the pain.

Your desire must be disciplined,

and what you want to happen

In time, sacrificed.

                                                Rumi

 

Its been two weeks since my wife Paula and I were in Sitka for the Sitka Rumi Festival.  ( Due to the ferry schedule we  only made Day Three of the festival.  But we did have the chance to listen to Coleman Barks, Rumi's best known American translator/interpreter read from his poetry.  Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi-Mevlana or Rumi, was a 13th century Sufi mystic, Islamic scholar and poet. He lived and wrote during an amazing flowering of Christian, Jewish and Muslim mystical writing and poetry.  

In our own time, Rumi (in Bark"s modern translations) has reportedly become the most popular poet in the United States.  The increasing enthusiasm for this Persian mystical poet has been occurring during a marked decrease in religious observance/identification by Americans, as more and more people, especially millenials, identify as 'spiritual but not religious.'  It would be easy to dismiss the popularity of a mystic like Rumi as yet another example of the desire for individual mystical experience, for ecstatic experience without the demanding discipline and self-denial required of anyone serious about the spiritual life.

But I wonder if the compelling attraction of a mystical poet like Rumi can be attributed more to amazement that religion has a mystical dimension at all.  I wonder if for too many Christians, faith in Jesus has been presented more like a series of philosophical propositions or moral regulations than as a deep and unquenchable longing for friendship and communion with God filled with paradox, wonder, ecstatic joy and perplexing unknowing.  Unfortunately, our own rich and abundant mystical tradition embodied in the writings of mystics such as St, Bernard of Clairvaulx, St.Francis of Assisi, St.Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross and many, many others is unknown to too many followers of Jesus.  

St.Teresa of Kolkata, Pray for Us

Life has only one tragedy, ultimately: not to have been a saint.

                                                                                        Charles Peguy

 

With the canonization of Mother Teresa today in Rome by Pope Francis amid widespread rejoicing by all who loved her and her inspiring example of compassionate love for the poorest of the poor, there are of course, the (inevitable) attacks being made on her charactor by her critics.  Most of notable of whom was the late Christopher Hitchens, who charactorized her as a "fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud", who not only failed to make the lives of the poor better but actually made their lives worse.  

Her fanaticism?  She opposed abortion and euthanasia.  He fundamentalism?  She wholeheartedly accepted the teachings of the Catholic Church.  Her fraudulance?  She appreciatively accepted donations from all comers to support her work on behalf of the poor.  

Was she perfect?  She'd be the first to acknowledge her frailty and sinfulness.  Was she ever mistaken in her judgements and decisions?  Yes, of course.  Did she live a holy life, worthy of emulation?  Absolutely.

What I think her past and present critics miss is that she took literally and radically the words of Jesus, that as often as you perform the works of mercy for the poor, the despised and those who suffer, you do them to me. (Mt.25:31-46). The love she showed those whom she served was, for her, love lavished on Jesus himself.  And just as importantly, she believed that what she and her sisters had to offer the poor was the love of Jesus.  This love wasn't and isn't a program to eradicate poverty or improve medical care and  public health (as laudable and necessary as those kinds of cooperative efforts are).

  Instead, her purpose was to personally go to those who were at the most extreme margins of society and love them. To take in those so poor and abandoned that they were literally dying in the streets, and show them great love  in their final days or hours.  To relieve their physical hunger and thirst, of course, but also their spiritual hunger and thirst for acceptance and welcome, for reassuring and kind words, for a gentle touch, for a smile, for love.

The charity that she exemplified is always a sign of God's presence.  Not as an act of religious propaganda, nor to convert the vulnerable and suffering people she served to Catholicism, but because God is revealed in Jesus as Love.  The divine love that transforms us from enemies into friends and from strangers into brothers and sisters.  The divine love that transforms our hearts so that we can love as He loves.  The love that transformed the heart and the life of Anjeze Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, known to all as Mother Teresa.

St.Teresa of Kolkata, pray for us!

 

A New Work of Mercy for the Year of Mercy

"Everything a baptized person does every day should be directly or indirectly related to the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy."                                                                                           Dorothy Day

Wood engraving by Ade Bethune 

In his message today “Show Mercy in Our Common Home”, for the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, Pope Francis recommends that we add to the seven traditional works of mercy an eighth work:, care for our common home.

(See the entire message at this link below)

 http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/pont-messages/2016/documents/papa-francesco_20160901_messaggio-giornata-cura-creato.html

Referring to his encyclical Laudato Si, he explains that “as a spiritual work of mercy, care for our common home calls for ‘grateful contemplation of God’s world’ which allows us to discover in each thing a teaching which God wishes to hand on to us (LS 214)”

He goes onto further propose that “as a corporal work of mercy, care for our common home requires ‘simple daily gestures which break with the logic of violence, exploitation and selfishness …and makes itself felt in every action which seeks to build a better world.”(LS 230-31)

And as always, he urges us to pray:

O God of the poor, 

help us to rescue the abandoned 

and forgotten of this earth, 

who are so precious in your eyes... 

God of love, show us our place in this world 

as channels of your love for all the creatures of this world.

God of mercy, may we receive your forgiveness 

and convey your mercy throughout our common home.

Praise be to you!

Amen 

 Today in Juneau, Alaska there will be two prayer events for the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation

-- Holy Hour with Benediction  5:30pm-6:30pm at the Cathedral of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

-- Interfaith Prayer Service, 7:00pm-8:00pm at Northern Light United Church, sponsored by Alaska Interfaith Power and Light.

Everyone is invited, everyone is welcome, at both events.