Category Archives: art

Leonid Ouspensky

art, history, icons,

ouspensy bookIn church to commemorate St. Herman of Alaska today, we also remembered the iconographer Leonid Ouspensky who died in 1987. He was born in Russia in 1902 and while still a teenager began to be an activist for the cause of Communism, going about preaching atheism and destroying icons. He joined the Red Army in 1918 and was captured by the White Army and forced into their service; after the war he ended up in Paris in a community of artists. The following tells what happened there that changed the course of his life:

“Looking at [a collection of icons], Ouspensky understood that the icon was something that had no equivalent whatsoever…. Ouspensky…made a bet with Krug that he could easily paint an icon even though he was a non-believer. He painted an icon of the Mother of God in a fortnight. But while he was working on it, he understood that it was holy and could not be the object oChrist+the+Savior ouspenskyf a bet and burned it. From that moment, he would regularly settle down at Grinberg’s place to contemplate the icons at length, trying to penetrate the mystery and understand how they were made. This is how little by little he became a Christian and an iconographer. We can rightly say that the icons themselves led him to faith.”

His life story has many twists and turns with elements of suffering and adventure, and obvious interventions of God’s grace and mercy. He went on to paint many icons and to teach others, and write books on the subject. You can read more about Ouspensky here: orthodox wiki and here: iconeorthodoxe .

leonid-ouspensky-full

Gleanings – The Vocabulary of Artists

art, culture, quotes, ,

Fr Patrick pantocrator domeTo convey to our imagination an abiding sense of the world’s goodness and givenness, artists require a vocabulary capable of such representation. Many of the conventional aesthetic resources of the contemporary arts are well suited to expressing anxiety, alienation, chaos and violence, but are not as capable of evoking innocence, simple purity, or quiet delight. (I’m more and more convinced that the omnipresence of relentless rhythm sections, even in love songs, is an expression of the mechanistic and brutish presuppositions of a culture convinced that all life forms are the end-result of a mindlessly competitive process of mere survival.)

–Ken Myers

“From Heavenly Harmony” in Touchstone Nov/Dec 2014

Roses on My Path – flaming white

art, nature, quotes, ,

I’ll let G.K. Chesterton’s comments accompany this rose
that was on my path through the neighborhood:

rose white floribunda em av 2

“White is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so to speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows white-hot, it draws stars.

“And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity, for example, is exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.

“In a word, God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.”

-G.K. Chesterton, “A Piece of Chalk,” in Tremendous Trifles

rose white floribunda em av 1crp

Kinds of Poetry – Tolkien vs. Jackson

art, books, quotes, , , , , , ,

Jackson apparently thinks the characters Tolkien gives us are too simply good to be fully believable to modern audiences, and so he feels obligated to “complicate” them, to give them internal conflicts other than the ones they actually have, in the hopes that we will better be able to relate to them.

I’m quoting from this article in the Nov/Dec 2013 Touchstone Magazine, in which Donald T. Williams explains how literature, while delighting us with its art, is more powerful than history or philosophy to nurture our moral vision, or to corrupt us with false images.

With the help of quotes from Sir Philip Sidney, who wrote Apology for Poetry in the sixteenth century, he shows how “Tolkien was very consciously and deliberately following the literary tradition that flows down to us from Sidney through Dr. Johnson and C. S. Lewis.”

Peter Jackson the filmmaker seems to be flowing in a different stream. But he is an artist, and of course will impart his own soul to his work. I wouldn’t expect him to give us The Rings, because that has already been done, and he is not J.R.R. Tolkien. But it is unfortunate that he has changed things to the degree and in the directions he has. Williams points out specific ways in which the characters who inspired us in the books disappoint us in the movies, and makes these general remarks:

By this process of negative moral transformation, in other words, we reach the place where beloved characters are unrecognizable to Tolkien’s fans, and those fans feel betrayed. And they are right to feel so, though mostly they do not understand why. It is because the difference between the books and the movies is not just one of necessary adaptation to a different medium. It is that the author consciously followed the Sidneyan tradition while the adaptor is either ignorant of it or doesn’t understand it or has rejected it.

Read the whole article here.