Art and Faith in the Private Sphere

2015-5-22 Art & Faith img01After the Protestant Reformation shattered the Christian consensus and ended the serene confidence of the Renaissance, the dramatic Baroque style swept Europe. In the Netherlands, religious wars had ravaged the country, so art tended to avoid religious topics. As church patronage declined, however, the Netherlands’s booming economy allowed private citizens to commission art. Rembrandt’s Night Watch reflects the shift towards painting private, secular activity. Meanwhile, Spain remained resolutely Catholic. Spanish painter Velázquez painted genre scenes during the Baroque period, but his work often included subtle religious messages that supported Catholic doctrine. In Las Meninas, he is more concerned with his personal aim to establish himself as a member of the royal household rather than with conveying a religious message. Both group portrait paintings demonstrate the shift in art from religious to secular subjects. Continue reading

Redefining Art

BRITAIN-ENTERTAINMENT-ART-AUCTION-EMINBefore modern art, critics understood that the best art is the most beautiful. This traditional idea of art has given way to a relativistic definition that grounds artwork’s value in the claim of the artist and the reception of the audience. “The first thing that makes it art is that I say that it is…” asserts modern artist Tracey Emin, referring to the rumpled, trash-strewn bed she exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1999. She would argue that there is no objective distinction between her work and Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix’s 19th century oil painting of disheveled bed covers. Both required an idea, creative energy, and physical expression, after all. Continue reading

The Thinker

The_Thinker_Musee_RodinMilo Thorpe was an average guy. His parents had always told him that, and so had his teachers, and his friends. He wondered what it meant to be average, really. Did it mean that he looked pretty much like everybody else, and earned decent grades, and went to a middling university? Did it mean that he felt kind of happy most of the time, but still worried a lot, when he remembered to, about things that most people wouldn’t remember (the cat he saw wandering outside the alley behind the supermarket, for instance)? Or, did it have more to do with taking over his parents’ bakery when he graduated? He thought that would be okay, but it didn’t keep him awake at night.

What kept him awake at night was wondering about being average. Continue reading

Artist’s Statement

2014-3-6 Artist's Statement img01A human person is an embodied soul – an apparently contradictory combination of spirit and body. Our lives are finite, yet our souls are eternal. As an artist, I address this tension by focusing on memory and unity. I seek to remember loved ones and represent the human form primarily in photography and charcoal drawings.

Images are crucial to memory, because they evoke associations and clarify the past. Every piece of art I create holds a fragment of time in its colors and shapes. Photographs are unique… Continue reading