Let there be ART!

Original Artwork: Daniel Mitsui

Gleanings....

I had coffee with a young artist friend this past week. Something she verbalized has been rummaging around in my own brain since. It is a thought that had up to this point only been an uneasy feeling on my part - a feeling that was given expression by her comment. “There IS beautiful modern art, you know!”

This is the crux of the matter: we need to find what is beautiful in the modern world and draw it out. This is the age lived in by the younger among us; a world, for better or worse, that they have inherited. This is the era in which God has created them quite specifically to dwell; to bring His love and truth and beauty to this modern, internet, machine-aged world filled with the same man made errors in new and sometimes terribly distressing disguises. BUT also a world filled with much beauty waiting to be discovered and translated in a modern way. We need to believe it is there or else, quite truthfully, we deny that God is among us anymore. He does not just live in the past. He lives here now. And He still calls artists to translate His beauty to the world they encounter. This world and no other.

Modern. This word gives me the willies if I am honest. I am a person who finds a great and comforting foothold in the art, the poetry, the liturgy, the literature of the past - mainly Medieval and Renaissance music, art, and Victorian literature. I am not a lover of the modern world and what it seems to offer. I immediately say in my own Nathaniel way "Can anything GOOD come out of the modern world?" And my young friend's comment filled me with a mea culpa. Of COURSE it can, or truly our hope is in vain.

I think we cling to the past because there is, admittedly, a lot of ugliness and falsehood in the world we live in. But make no mistake there was a lot of ugliness and falsehood in all those generations we find so pristine. Alchemy, pagan practices, brutality of Lords to servants, Pedaphilia, the irrational demands of Kings - all those Victorians dabbling dangerously in the occult.

But it should be a sign of hope to us that what surfaced from those somewhat messy ages past was the beauty: in art, in music, in literature. We might be tempted to think then, that ALL of it was beautiful and that we have been shortchanged in our modern wasteland. All we see in our age is the ugly - we do not have the luxury of hindsight. This brings on a desperate kind of feeling sometimes and we turn and grasp too tightly to the past.

We cling tenaciously to the William Morris, to the fantastical Church designs of Pugin, to the Medieval tapestries that fill us with such warm and noble thought. We are transported by the music of Byrd, Palestrina, and others. And we do not want to leave. Understandably! We want this to be the standard. We have struggled with a noble effort to raise the Tridentine Liturgy like a phoenix from the ashes of the careless and neglectful 40's and 50's giving it back with our devotion its full, deliberate, and majestic beauty once again. This is a noble endeavor!! We do not want the deep treasures of the past to be lost.

But we cannot always have our faces turned longingly to the past. This tells the young that they have inherited nothing. That the world is void of God, that He is not calling, not speaking beauty to the young and He can only be found in ancient ages. Do they wonder if true creativity has languished in our time, these young people? This can only lead a budding artist, filled with ideas and shapes and color and music and poetry to a kind of despair and feelings of resentment that they have been born to such an age where the elders do not expect them to do anything new and beautiful for the world of art. We are not here to depress the young. We are here to build them up.

The Church itself can be our inspiration. The Church's liturgy moves in a spiral. Meaning that it returns to the same place each and every year but it makes a new spiral from the old. So, in art, can we not see the same sort of thing. We double back to the Medieval age, the Victorian age, the Renaissance, and we take what is beautiful there and then we incorporate it into our more modern art, poetry, architecture, literature. The tradition is unbroken but it is given something from our age to pass on to the age that spirals above us in the future. And the modern age DOES have something to give.

For one wonderful example, Daniel Mitsui, Artist creates the most intricate, jewel colored, metaphorical and symbolic paintings to warm the heart of any die hard Medievalist and yet they are a new take, with modern lines and shape. He does not throw away the Medieval. He builds upon it with something we all are familiar with in our part of history. This is a hopeful thing. A grace filled thing.

Every time I visit my Alma Mater Thomas Aquinas College I marvel under the ceilings of Duncan Stroik's architecture in the chapel. It is a modern and gorgeous twist on the past but clearly modern. It fills me with delight and hope.

Nori Fahrig and her Polyhymnia Catholic Women's Choir of Saint Louis in my hometown sing the ancient hymns of a St Hildegard or a Byrd. But Nori always includes more modern compositions that are beautiful in their own right. I come away from her concerts always encouraged and far better informed that music is still being made and beautifully and that she weaves it together into one whole of shared tradition. Publishers like https://www.wisebloodbooks.com, or Chrism Press are places where young authors of our own time have a chance to be heard. There are also countless other smaller presses where newer, younger writers are given a chance to live out their vocations writing good and beautiful novels and stories for teens that reflect the world they need to encounter and what that encounter might look like in a hopeful way. This is the calling of my young artist friend with whom I had coffee. I salute her and wish her so much success!

We can't dump the modern world. We can't keep looking back all the time. We can't approach every. single. thing. with suspicion.

Walk through a hall of modern art and you might be surprised at what you find. Surely there are charlatan artists, but some of that art is truly powerful. My own daughter finds great peace when walking through a room of geometric artwork in neat and cheerful colors. She had me try it, and I had to agree. Give it a chance. We must circle back, surely, to the ages of the past and yet also seek out and discover what God is calling us to in this modern age we live in.

We must give our prayers, our hope, and our encouragement to the young artists among us and let them know in emphatic terms that it was no mistake that God placed them here in this time for a purpose. We must let them show us what they can do. We might be the most surprised old people on the planet if we do.

I do not feel inclined at this time to have a paid substack. But if we were together in a cafe discussing all these thoughts, I would not be opposed to you buying me a cup of coffee - with cream, of course. In that spirit, if any of my posts resonate with you and you feel so inclined, you can donate here: buymeacoffee.com/denise_trull