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

Unveiling the Sacred

2015-3-5 sacred img01

I happened to see something on television in which a woman bought a scant outfit to wear for her husband in order to “get his attention” when he came home. Having no desire to watch it further, I turned back to whatever I had been doing and promptly forgot about it. Then, for some reason, the advertisement came to mind a day or so later. Why did it pop into my head again? Who knows. But I found that it was bothering me, and at first I couldn’t quite figure out why. Continue reading

Good, True, Beautiful

2015-2-25 GoodTrueBeautiful img01Editor’s Note: To commemorate the one-year anniversary of Good True Beautiful, Pallas has undertaken to summarize a mission statement for the blog.

Now if there is no resurrection, what will those do who are baptized for the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized for them? And as for us, why do we endanger ourselves every hour? I face death every day—yes, just as surely as I boast about you in Christ Jesus our Lord. If I fought wild beasts in Ephesus with no more than human hopes, what have I gained? If the dead are not raised,

“Let us eat and drink,
for tomorrow we die.”

Continue reading

Inspired

Peering up, the boy chewed the inside of his cheek contemplatively.  It was uncharacteristic of him to find his attention so firmly fixed on such a still and static thing as a statue, but here he now stood.

Shifting his backpack lightly across his shoulders, the boy pondered alone as the class slowly filtered down the hall filled with canvas and ancient marble.  He’d lost interest in the droning guide and whispered chattering of his peers.

“A thing of beauty.”

The boy turned his head, taking in at a glance the gray-haired man with bright eyes who had appeared at his side.  Continue reading

State of the Union

2015-1-22 Union img01After reading Beauty by Roger Scruton, a contemporary British philosopher, I wrote to ask him if politics could be beautiful, given how ugly that art is now, and seems to have always been. Is beauty achievable in politics? Receiving a reply made me beam like a six-year-old with a new Lego set.  He explained, politics might not be the best place to hope for beauty, but that the rudimentary elements necessary for beauty could be conserved in politics, because politics could create the conditions for beauty to flourish: order and liberty.

It is in the light of those ends of politics– order and liberty – that I have since sought to approach the politics of my nation, the United States, and the discourse that defines political study through speech.

In the light of this criterion, the state of the union was bad. 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