Month: August 2011

The I and the Eye

~ Christopher J Ellis ~ 1 Comment

I had ordered it long before publication so I opened the book with relish and anticipation when it finally arrived. The old adage tells us that ‘Those who can’t, teach!’ I want to offer a variation: ‘Those who can’t, buy lot’s of how-to books instead’ and so spend their time reading about the activity rather than doing it and learning from their mistakes. Shelves full of books on how to pray compete with shelves of books on how to paint and draw!

Anyway, the book in question was Painting Light in Oils by Peter Wileman and Malcolm Allsop (Batsford 2011). Peter Wileman is currently president of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the book is stuffed full of his impressionistic, mainly landscape and people, paintings. He is a fine painter and has a lovely knack of using a narrow range of tones and colours to frame an area of bright light which sings (or zings) as a result.

In answer to the question ‘What shall I paint?’ he offers this observation:

Novice artists often feel that for a subject they must find something that is beautiful or dramatic in itself. The problem for many people is that they’re more experienced in taking a photograph than choosing a subject for painting. A photograph tends to be the classic ‘view’, whereas an interesting painting usually shows a much less obvious take on a location.

In fact, your subject may be completely mundane; it may just be a collection of interesting shapes, a certain light effect, or a pattern of colour and tones that has made you want to create a painting.

I write on the last day of my sabbatical study leave and I have been reviewing the last three months – both the long trip to Italy and the drawing, painting and reading I did both there and on my return. As I leaf through my sketch books, I seem to feel more satisfaction with the pen and ink studies than with the pen and watercolour paintings. This may of course have something to do with my relative (in)competence in each media. However, I think it’s more likely to do with subject matter.

The watercolours have tended to be less experimental and more concerned with grand views of well-known landmarks – like some of my photographs. The ink drawings tend to be on a smaller scale and capture some aspect of a street or building which has interested me. Pen, sketchpad and water-brush are, after all, more portable than the full watercolour kit and a drawing may only take ten or twenty minutes. As a result, the drawing is more responsive and less predictable. What oil painting I’ve managed since my return has also tended to be the grand view – and grand view in the middle of the day when  I took the reference photographs rather than a well-known scene transformed by dramatic morning light or stormy weather.

Two things follow for me. First, a practical agenda. I must continue to paint from my travel sketches and photographs, but must look for those views which reflect my personal impressions and experiences rather than  grand views – more chamber music than  grand opera! I achieved this in some of my photographs, now I need to move to a stage of synthesis in my painting.

The second thing is more a line of reflection. Wileman’s comment, about the mundane and less obvious ‘take’, chimes with other thoughts and readings. Frederick Franck, in his The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as Meditation (Wildwood House 1973) presents drawing as a way of seeing which apprehends the reality of what is before us. He suggests that drawing is

a way of focusing attention until it turns into contemplation, and from there to the inexpressible fullness, where the split between the seer and what is seen is obliterated. Eye, heart, hand become one with what is seen and drawn, things are seen as they are – in their ‘isness’.

This was a road travelled by Thomas Merton who in the photography of his later years gave attention to very ordinary things but in a way which showed their extraordinary wonder. John Lane, in his The Spirit of Silence: Making Space for Creativity (Green Books 2006), writes,

The beginning of seeing lies with the rapt attention of unpretentious, everyday things; things ignored, mundane, unexceptional, commonplace; things lying about in rooms, things like the wrinkled sheets of an unmade bed, the refracted stems of a bunch of tulips in a glass pot, the rust on a sheet of corrugated iron, the pattern of porridge left at the bottom of an unwashed pan.

Giving attention is akin to prayer. It is relating to the world in such a way that the ‘I’ doesn’t get in the way of the ‘eye’. It is an openness to God’s world in its infinite richness and variety – not just the big picture, but the  intricate detail – what we might call ‘the calligraphy of God’.

Eat this book!

~ Christopher J Ellis ~ 1 Comment

…the self is the sovereign text for living, the Bible is neither ignored nor banned; it holds, in fact, an honoured place. But the three-person Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is replaced by a very individualized personal Trinity of my Holy Wants, my Holy Needs, and my Holy Feelings.

Eat This Book: The Art of Spiritual Reading

by Eugene H Peterson (Hodder & Stoughton 2006)

Surveys tell us that bible reading is on the decline in all parts of the Christian community. Eugene Peterson is not only concerned to encourage the reading of the bible, but of reading it on its own terms as God’s word to the reader.

This is the second book  in Peterson’s five-volume series on Spiritual Theology. It’s style clearly indicates Peterson’s approach to Spiritual Theology as being in the form of a conversation rather than  a tightly focused textbook. The material is wide-ranging, illuminative and entertaining. It is a highly personal approach which offers fruitful reading and, as usual for Peterson, a gold mine of quotable quotes.

The book is in three sections. The first offers a theological introduction which includes reflections on, for example, how the reading of scripture can mediate the presence of God, scripture as revelation, the importance of story in an incarnational religion and the connections between bible reading and Christian living.

The second section shares reflections on methodology of spiritual reading. However, while it is structured around the classic four stages of lectio divina, it does not offer a standard explanation of these stages. Instead, it shares a number of fertile reflections about the process of reading and praying. In fact, Peterson diverges from the usual treatment of the fourth stage, contemplation, as a mystical resting in God, by seeing this stage as a working out of the reading and praying scripture in daily living and the forming of a Christ-like life.

In the third section we are treated to some fascinating observations about the process of translating biblical languages into contemporary English – a veritable feast for enthusiastic readers of The Message.

There is, however, an overall thesis to the book – that healthy Christian spirituality requires an appropriate method of regular and meditative scripture reading in order to form Christ-like character and obedient living. This thesis is not developed in a linear way but  conversationally, through a series of reflections which focus on different aspect of spiritual reading and the best way to report this is through a series of quotations or summaries.

Reading scripture isn’t enough. How we read it is vitally important. The title Eat this Book expresses this and is based on the Revelation 10.9-10. Peterson suggests this phrase should be regarded as a key text alongside such injunctions as ‘Love the Lord you God with all your heart’, ‘Repent and believe’, ‘Give thanks at all times’ and ‘Follow me’. Why is ‘Eat this book’ so important? Well:

It is the very nature of language to form rather than inform. When language is personal, which it is at its best, it reveals; and revelation is always formative – we don’t know more, we become more. Our best users of language, poets and lovers and children and saints, use words to make – make intimacies, make character, make beauty, make goodness, make truth.

The authority of the Bible is derived from the authorial presence of God. This is not an impersonal authority, a collection of facts or truths, it is not a bookish authority like a textbook:

This is revelation, personally revealed – letting us in on something, telling us person to person what it means to live our lives as men and women created in the image of God.

This personal revelation means that the reader should approach scripture as one ready to be addressed by the personal God we meet when we read in the right way. Peterson describes this right reading as ‘participatory reading’. This participation is helped by much of scripture being in the form of ‘story’. After all, story is an incarnational genre. God’s revelation is incarnational – and his presence in our lives is to be incarnational as well. So,

Spiritual  theology, using Scripture as text, does not present us with a moral code and tell us ‘Live up to this’; nor does it set out a system of doctrine and say, ‘Think like this and you will live well.’ The biblical way is to tell a story and in the telling invite: ‘Live into this – this is what it looks like to be human in this God-made and God-rules world; this is what is involved in becoming and maturing as a human being.’…

When we submit our lives to what we read in Scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God’s. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.