I once listened to a podcast by a Christian thinker I like and they said something like, “a myth is a story so true it can only be told in metaphor.”
The subject of the podcast was about Christmas and the focus wasn’t doctrinal per se – as I recall – but rather about the mythic power of this celebration by the world.
The statement resonated so much with how I am coming to view things more and more that I wrote it on a paper and taped it to one of my printers.
Alexander Shaia on the Mythic Power of Christmas
Over a long period of time I have heard various people directly state or indirectly imply that “ideas are dangerous” – in the context of expressed fear and the danger of those who may have a differing idea within some tribal community, association or institution.
I found this statement a little odd and jarring and ironically, potentiallydangerous.
In any tribal system (and I think tribal mentality is sociologically unavoidable – probably a basic mechanism of human protection within groups where those who generally agree on everything can have one another’s back so-to-speak and move as one unified group) there are usually overt or covert means or people whose role seems to be making sure no one in the tribe goes a little too far in holding a differing perspective on something.
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The Amish immediately come to mind. It is fascinating to ponder the contradictions which exist within the Amish community through carefully formed constricting rules that keep the community together yet permit it to function in the broader world.
These may be outdated and may have already transformed somewhat given the increased usage of cell phone and that some Amish now perform certain types of jobs in the broader community, but a number of years ago I saw a documentary or something and recall these things:
-Amish cannot have a telephone in their home, but can have one in a small structure outside. This ensures that communication is available for business transactions or medical emergencies while discouraging a teenage Amish girl from chatting with friends on a bedroom phone.
-Amish generally do not use electricity on their own property. I suppose because it does, in fact, lead to many other things, including dependency on the broader world – which is not necessarily a bad thing to become mostly self-sufficient. However, they can and do use huge, personally owned gas-powered generators to supply power to their homes and businesses.
-Amish women generally dress in black but are permitted to use certain basic colors (if I am not mistaken these are considered basic representative cool earth tones? blue – green – purple but do not include vibrant warm colors such as red – orange – yellow since that would draw attention to oneself). Their dresses are held together with straight pins, for obvious reasons.
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As an artist and a Christian, I find the idea a bit confounding that a religious tribe would limit a woman’s (and man’s) usage of the full spectrum of color God created.
I am now living near one of the largest Amish communities in the US and there is a beauty difficult to fully put in words that I see when I come up behind a man, woman, young couple or family driving an open Amish buggy with the driver holding the reigns of a horse, slowly trotting along.
Perhaps there are some young children with her or the family, clad in the Amish attire. The children peek curiously out the back window of the buggy at me and the surrounding world just as the children in my world do and, I imagine, stare back at the children in the buggies.
The women and even small girls wear their hair tightly under cover so as only to be seen by certain people in their most intimate circle. This is not a bad thing. I do recall as a young person that my grandmother Orpha on my father’s side actually had very long hair.
I was surprised because I never ever saw her long hair – she wore it in some type of rolled up way somewhat similar to Princess Leia…she came from a family with a long list of ministers in the United Brethren tradition, so I imagine that formed her in certain ways as to her sensibilities. Which is not necessarily a bad thing at all.
It is also common to pass Amish women in dresses and young children riding scooters (powered by their own foot-force) along the shoulders of main highways where speed limits can be as high as 50 mph.
If you have never lived near the Amish, these images may not resonate well. It is a powerful visual experience of a hugely contradictory set (and clash) of disparate ideas put into practice by both the Amish and those outside of this community.
The Amish are a Mennonite sect and it is my understanding they hold basic orthodox beliefs found in the Bible and in the Christ (Messiah) just as the Episcopal Church does. These are two examples of disparate extremes of views and expression within what the nicene creed calls the “holy Catholic (as in united as the one body of Christ) and apostolic church.”
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I am not a Bible scholar and have no real interest/gift in that but I listen enough (admitedly not on a regular basis these days) to a variety of Christian voices (and there are so very many) to form a basic underlying structure for my own personal beliefs and take-aways from the Bible, as we know it.
I was discussing the use of metaphor recently with my oldest son – something I observe myself doing quite often these days – and he said that one cannot form a proper metaphor without being first grounded in the more literal. And I would tend to agree.
So I am equally grateful and respecting of those with the gifting and desire to contemplate the full of the needed spectrum with the goal of assisting others to get a more accurate, full and clear coloration of the Bible as (in my view) holy and sacred expressions/texts of God’s interactions with mankind and divinely inspired and recorded. Yet, the disparity of conclusions expressed within this sector, too, can equally be confounding at times.
I like to focus on that which most Christians find basic agreement in, I think it makes for reasonable conversation. Something our world seems to be lacking in, more and more…
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I am not an aggressive driver at all – ha ha – I have no problem coming up on an Amish buggy and following it a good mile or greater at 10 mph if needed. All while scores of cars are riding up on my rear bumper and zoomingto pass me and *said Amish buggy* – sometimes crossing double yellow lines with a curve approaching seemingly without any hesitation…
Meanwhile, I am taking in this beautiful sight and glancing around the beautiful green (or white) farmland. I am contemplating a number of things about simplicity and the most basic things I think we all value – or at least want to value.
Sometimes I want to take a photo on my cell phone. Sometimes I have done that but I do know the Amish do not like to be photographed.
When I do get in a position to pass them, I exercise a lot of caution and do not cut back in front of this buggy until I am certain I’ve given that horse a wide enough breadth not to startle it and cause a terrible accident.
I suppose metaphorically speaking – not exercising care, caution and respect when situationally forced to interact with the Amish choice to travel a major road behind the reigns of a horse – could result in a very deep violation of my fellow humans and their God-given rights to choose the life they want for themselves.
I like the mutuality expressed in their willingness to at least put big red reflective lights and other safety items on all sides of the buggy! This, too, is a gesture of respect as I doubt any of us who choose to drive vehicles potentially capable of going up to 200 mph (according to my speedometer, ha ha) would feel very good about not seeing far enough ahead that there is a horse-drawn vehicle with precious human beings sharing the “highway of life” with them.
Right?
Yet as I write this I recognize times when I have handled others who differ without enough mutual positive regard – it can be a tough line to walk since I also believe there is a place for speaking out strongly in certain situations. The Amish give us clear visual cues to handle critique with care, perhaps, as do a family of Orthodox Jews visiting a public space.
I often wonder how many accidents the Amish are involved in. There are no seatbelts, no emergency brakes other than a human yank on the reign of a horse or a divine unseen hand of protection… I can’t imagine two buggies often collide but I suppose that is possible – so that would leave me to imagine some sort of terrible collision with a definite imbalance of power.
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I suppose for some it is difficult to imagine that allowing for new ideas or ways of looking at old ideas is not threatening. Just as more progressive thinkers have difficulty acknowledging when they are throwing out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak.
I do believe there are specific situations where that is actually true: some new idea is indeed dangerous, or conversely, some “sacred, how-dare-you-touch-this-baby” so to speak actually may need some throwing out?
On the other hand, in Ecclesiastes it says “there is nothing new under the sun.”
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The assembling of various parts and ideas into something new is pretty basic to the humanities – art, music, poetry, writing for example – but equally exists within the sciences, too, in terms of invention.
I am remembering the book I taught art from many years ago, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. The approach was broken into 5 parts – the fifth part to be the gestault achievement of the global skill of drawing. The first four parts are component parts which must be separately mastered before they can all merge together in needed function (the gestault).
Probably not many would enjoy a Picasso-like rendering of edges/forms with perfectly realistic rendering of light and shadow. Well, maybe, who knows!
The author believed that drawing is a global skill similiar to speaking, walking, reading, writing, riding a bicycle and doing math. The final global skill is attained by a succession of mastering the individual component skills and once learned, is generally not forgotten. When it is forgotten it usually involves some trauma to parts of one’s brain through a stroke or an accident, or possibly emotional trauma.
This global skill is unlike sight or touch or smell or hearing, which just is. But the basics senses are utilized when one learns a global skill such as speech and riding a bicycle.
I am surprising myself I can still state this in sequence, I suppose I taught that class so many times I didn’t need to refer to my notes and syllabus toward the later times – it simply became something I could explain and especially, do.
The first four component parts of the gestault of drawing are:
-perception of edges (lines)
-perception of spaces (forms)
-perception of relationships (perspective)
and
-perception of values (light and shadow…and also color)
The fourth skill – perception of light and shadow which includes color theory (hue , chroma (intensity) and saturation…ha ha…this is starting to stretch me to explain but, I now know it when I see it, innately, and work with these principles within a painting) has got to be the thing that excites me most in a painting. The drawing book teaches observation of value which is light and dark, which people refer to as “shading.” I had a lot of difficulty easily distinguishing the difference between hue, chroma and saturation – as it was explained to me by a relative that had a degree in fine arts and is a talented painter.
Hue is the “color” as in the general name of the color: red, orange, yellow, blue, green, purple….
Black and white are not considered colors and I have read that we should view “black” in painting as the absence of color and potentially the killer of color. When I paint I reserve black for true black objects and even though put undertones of color within the black. Otherwise the painting will not look realistic.
I once had a client who asked me to do a painting of a gray poodle. I always try to feel out a client’s expectations and their were cues she was giving me that led me to discuss my use of color on this gray poodle’s fur. I believe she kept telling me how very gray he was.
I explained that painting gray/black/white fur on animals is a challenge and normally I used colors within parts – not too much so that the animal look unrealistic but enough to in fact, enhance the sense of realism.
She was very concerned for me to throw in some colors but eventually agreed to let me use my judgement but keep it on the “tamer” side. In the end, both she and I were very pleased with the result. From a distance it looked “gray” but up close one could see purples, blues…maybe a few pinks…very subtle.
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When it comes to art, nothing identifies an amateur (or not fully worked) painting more to me than noting their method of creating dark colors/values within a color painting by adding amounts of black or white – apparently straight from the tube. When working with acrylics I have to watch this, myself.
While this may be done in the Home Depot paint department for swatches of wall colors, it simply does not carry over into fine art painting or some forms of illustration. Though, I can also split hairs to define when an illustration is more of a graphic design nature than fine art…and…sometimes the line is blurred.
I love Normal Rockwell – one of America’s greatest illustrators. He lamented that he was not considered a “fine artist” due to the nature of his works – yet his skills and usage of color arose from a deeper fine art training. While his subjects are sometimes considered trite visual communications, I think he does a fantastic job as well in communicating very deep things.
His work took a turn in the 60’s from the “white-washed” small hometown images he was being paid to create when he painted The Problem We All Live With.
The Four Freedoms also, in my mind, began to take him into another direction – away from his first popularized images of children, boy scouts and such into making stronger social commentary.
In his autobiography he describes his process (pre-camera) of having various models “on call” (close study of his works identifies he used the same men/women/girls/boys in a number of works just changing them up a bit) is quite fascinating and humorous! Given the images of the boys running with the dog in No Swimming (realistic yet caricaturized style) on one of his earlier covers of the Saturday Evening Post, you can imagine what it was like for him getting these boys to pose!
He mentions that at first he hesitated to incorporate the camera when it became easier to access in the 50’s/60’s, but that once he did that, alongside sketching from life models holding terribly awkward poses for long periods of time, his work took on a new quality. It still was recognizable as a Norman Rockwell, but with some additional aspects.
If we ask whether this period was better or worse than the earlier – I think we are asking the wrong question. It was simply different.
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There is another art book that changed the way I approached color, also – it was called Making Color Sing.
Some artists limit themselves to an analogous approach to color – ex. Caucasian flesh is peach, therefore you paint someone using shades of oranges and browns to achieve color tones and values.
But other artists use a complimentary color approach and will paint Caucasian flesh with a peach/blue scheme, since those two exist as opposites on the color wheel. This would include warm colors – reds, yellow, oranges, pinks and so forth – set off by cool colors within skin tone – blues, purples, greens, teals and so forth.
Caucasian skintones generally have undertones of blues although of late I experiment with purples especially if the subject is blonde and probably therefore fairer-skinned, since purple and yellow compliment and “sing”…while African-American skintones generally have a more purple undertone to them with either warmer or cooler browns.
As far as I know and I suppose there is always space to be wrong, I don’t think God made anyone “white” or “black.”
I always found it interesting and recall the statement in one of these books that “when the sun goes down, color disappears.” (I believe this was in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain)
This means you will see the true values (the amount of black and white, in a sense, that is creating the colors visible in the daylight) and know whether your use of color was successful. Without light, the painting moves into a grayscale image.
I often would finish a night of painting with dimming the lights and staring at it for awhile (evaluating parts that worked well from parts needing revision or additional work) from across the room at varying distances. Or by turning a photo of the painting grayscale in Photoshop if needed.
During the daytime, one can squint at something to force one’s eyes to blur it more and see more clearly the underlying values.
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Another random thought enters my mind – “Don’t re-invent the wheel” – basically re-states the truth that nothing is new under the sun. If any new thing is created using the basic “wheel” it is simply an expression of a new idea of how to use a “wheel.”
True, that can be dangerous.
Take for example – discovery of fire to the discovery of the fire created by an atomic bomb.
Some ideas which manifest themselves are like horrors out of the mythological Pandora’s box. What immediately comes to mind is the nuclear weapon. Once this technology was created and especially, used, it is now a threat to humanity in a way that can never be undone or unseen. It is the new source of tribal mentality and evil…with the one tribe who has ever actually used this weapon on a grand scale wanting to protect the world by making sure other tribes have limited access. (this idea/statement came from a podcast by Rob Bell – I would not be able to quickly locate the specific episode)
I’m remembering a Twilight Zone episode where there has been nuclear war and only one man is left…a man who loves books dearly and he is trapped in…you got it…a library.
As I loosely recall the episode, he is filled with a type of ecstacy as he realizes what has happened after the blast and is gazing around him at all the books he will get to read as he is trapped alone in this fantastic library.
Can’t say for sure but I believe there is some type of soliloquy of his thoughts pouring out, he is excited and as he stands up to go find his glasses so that he can read all these fantastic books for whatever temporal eternity he thinks remains for him….he….well….I’m just going to leave you on a cliffhanger, ha ha!
I actually just looked it up, it is this episode “Time Enough at Last.”
This title now leads me immediately to one of my favorite poems – a piece I became attached to after first hearing it read at Princess Diana’s funeral by her brother summer of 1997:
“Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.”
-Henry Van Dyke
This seems like a good stopping point and I see that what I intended to write as a lead-in to what I woke up wanting to express today has now become a more lengthy introduction than I expected – so I suppose it calls for a Part 2 at some point.
The basic philosophical questions on my mind are what kind of creative expression are we all existing in?
Are we in God’s poem? And if so…is it Wild Geese or Dante’s Inferno?
Are we in God’s painting? And if so, is it a Rembrandt or a Picasso?
Are we in God’s music? And if so, is it an Opera or something at the Ryman? Or, both?
Are we in God’s puppet show?
Are we in God’s calculus equation?
Are we in God’s lab experiment or current data study?
Are we in God’s historical documentary on some Netflix of the Galaxy?
Are we in God’s novel…or movie…or even some divine expression of impromptu comedy?
In my view all these questions would lead me to wonder, what kind of universe and Creator are we at the mercy of?
Is this Ultimate Supreme Being one of pure empathy or one of pure reason and rationality? Or, both? Or something beyond even both?
These may be some dangerous ideas and unusual questions but I personally don’t believe that anyone comes to anything without biases that are rooted in our earliest formation. We try to remove our blinders or rose-coloring glasses yet we cannot entirely do this.
This can be both helpful and unhelpful – contributing both to our greatest strengths and our greatest weaknesses.
I know this is true for myself. I tend to live in the grays so much….but gray is not gray unless there is a reference point/context – a black and white that sets the scale/spectrum.
At times I can have some rude awakenings when I realize the need to be more black and white about something, and since that is not in my nature, it can feel very uncomfortable.
Thank You For Reading
Please Feel Free To Express Your Thoughts Below
Thank You For Reading
Please Feel Free To Express Your Thoughts Below
