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DappledThings.org

A quarterly journal of ideas, art, and faith

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The Bakhita Prize for Visual Arts

Dappled Things

One of the saddest effects of the Fall is surely the human proclivity toward blindness in the face of glory. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” says Hopkins, but we soon start yawning at the sight. When we are left to our own devices, it would seem nothing in the cosmos can escape our capacity to take things for granted and therefore cease to really see them. This is most tragic when applied to the crown of Creation, the human person, bearer of the imago Dei. Behind all violence against human dignity is this failure—sometimes a willful failure—simply to see what is there.

This is why an essential part of the role of artists is continuously to help us open our eyes. This summer, shaken by the shocking death of George Floyd, the editors of Dappled Things wondered what a Catholic arts journal ought to bring to the table in light of such violence, especially violence directed against the black community. We decided to hold our first-ever visual arts contest, with a call for visual artists “to help us see more clearly,” to “honor and highlight the infinite worth inherent within each victim of racial violence.” The prize was named in honor of St. Josephine Bakhita, who, as the prize announcement explains, “was a Sudanese slave brutalized by her captors, who later became a religious sister renowned for her joyfulness, gentleness, and charity. Today she is the patroness of Sudan and survivors of human trafficking.”

Knowing we needed a range of diverse perspectives to properly consider the merits and fittingness of the works submitted, the editors reached out to artists Larry Cope and Daniel Mitsui, who along with me served as judges. We employed a blind process for assessing the works submitted, not considering resumes or artist statements, but looking always for pieces that could speak powerfully and directly as images. We received a wealth of excellent submissions, but in the end, we believe the following ten pieces best answered the contest’s call to help us “better see the humanity and God-given worth of victims of racial violence.” Sit with them; find out in what new ways they can open your eyes to the reality that—as the title of one piece proclaims—we are each wonderfully made. Trusting that these works have the power to do exactly that, we present them without further commentary.

Bernardo Aparicio
Publisher, Dappled Things

Winners and Honorees

Headlines – Bahkita Prize Winner, Oluwatobi Adewumi

Content of Character – Bahkita Prize Runner-Up, Howard Fullmer

Our Lady of Loreto in the refugees’ cloak – Honorable Mention, Margherita Gallucci

Black and Blue – Honorable Mention, Robert Forman

WE MATTER – Honorable Mention, Michael Riley

Wonderfully Made – Honorable Mention, Eva Crawford

Thurman by Firelight – Honorable Mention, Martin Dunn

A Mother’s Struggle – Honorable Mention, Rachel Singel

Why Divide? – Honorable Mention, Gurneet Kaur

Alisa – Honorable Mention, Hannah Thomas

 

Headlines, Oluwatobi Adewumi
Content of Character, Howard Fullmer
Our Lady of Loreto in the refugees’ cloak, Margherita Gallucci

Black and Blue, Robert Forman
WE MATTER, Michael Riley
Wonderfully Made, Eva Crawford

Thurman by Firelight, Martin Dunn
A Mother’s Struggle, Rachel Singel
Why Divide? Gurneet Kaur

Alisa, Hannah Thomas

Filed Under: Art and Photography, Mary Queen of Angels 2020 Leave a Comment

Ordered Creation: Life and Art Within an Atelier

Dappled Things

Essay and Photography by Matthew Lomanno

Entering the Ingbretson Studio of Drawing and Painting is like entering a monastery: the utter silence of students working in their stalls or reading in the library; the relative darkness, with angular natural light; the rhythm of communal life with a shared meal time; and a general solitude of experience. This space, and the culture inhabiting it, offers thoughtful and reflective work, which, in this former mill building in Manchester, New Hampshire, is orderly, directed, and yet creative.

One comes here to learn specific visual skills that require much time, practice, dedication, and guidance. All these could be achieved individually—by the solitary student under a master—but pursuing them within a tradition of community brings the benefits that many artists need to progress and succeed: support and encouragement by peers, judgment and critique by those same peers, seeing others’ work, learning from advanced students, discussing ideas and difficulties, and cultivating the various kinds of friendship formed after long periods of working together in close proximity. Suggestions and critiques are both clear and honest, as they stem from a shared set of visual and artistic goals, concepts, and vocabulary.

What unifies the enterprise at the Ingbretson Studio is the conviction that learning to see light and form—both in reality and in one’s strokes with pencil and brush—is requisite to practice in the visual arts. Developing those habits demands experience and time, to say nothing of talent and effort. Student artists proceed along the course only as the master sees fit, not according to a prescribed timeline. Such an approach to visual art-making—one that, if it is not a reaction against contemporary art, at least ignores most of the past century—is rare, scattered throughout the world in these studios known as “ateliers.”

Paul Ingbretson has been teaching here for more than three decades. He offers no degrees or certificates, and some students (even when they become teachers themselves) remain under his tutelage. Some have relocated to train here. Their histories and occupations vary: a retired medical doctor, a former art teacher, a current art teacher, a homeschooled musician. Some are here daily, full-time; others attend as work schedules permit. All of them seek a rare and nearly forgotten method of art education.

They come to this place—to Paul—to study the tradition of painting known as “the Boston School.” This tradition, carried along primarily by a master’s instruction and student’s practice, regards learning to see light and its effects first by drawing plaster casts on canvas with charcoal (creating a two-dimensional work from a three-dimensional object). The process is prescribed and orderly: following cast drawings, the student moves to still-life painting, then portraits, and finally figure studies. An advanced student will create the latter three continuously.

Ingbretson’s instruction and discussions inevitably invoke a reference to the Boston School’s past masters and founders: some who have inspired this tradition (Sargent, Vermeer, Monet), others immediately involved (Gammell, Paxton, Hale). This art is “derived from nature,” in Ingbretson’s words, and the work is constantly evaluated for that standard. What is created, however, is not life itself but a visually unified painting, with its own internal relations. That is, life is not confused with art; this is no blind realism or reproduction. Furthermore, the process is not fixed: it offers “guidelines, not rules,” “not a formula, but an ear” for painting. Forming habits of vision and of art is the goal of this education.

Creating this work has its own rhythm and pace: preparing the still life’s objects and background, with an eye towards color, tone, and arrangement; painting the layers to create shapes and tones; and standing back to view the subject and composition, then coming forward to make a mark on the canvas. This last step is repeated thousands of times over the hours of work, moving to and from the painting, seeing the whole while refining the details. The goal, according to Ingbretson, is to create a “unity of a general [visual] impression” (the “hardest part of painting”) via a “simultaneity” of relations such that the viewer understands the whole at once.

Contrasted to other approaches to art education (especially those since the mid-twentieth century), many of which value the artist’s expression over any particular learned techniques, Ingbretson demands a mastery of particular ways of seeing, drawing, and painting that will enable his students to produce anything they wish. How he educates his students is not inconsequential, either: one student remarked that she learned more in one and a half years with him than in four years in her BFA program. Another student, also with a BFA, had left his own teaching position at a high school because he “couldn’t teach them what they needed.” His previous art professors had discouraged and dismissed his desire to learn such a method: “Art has progressed from there,” they said.

All fine art, however, is contemporary, and the world is fortunately large enough to accommodate even a teacher and his students sustaining a traditional method of painting, toiling in a quiet old mill building.

For more photos from the Ingbretson Studio of Drawing and Painting, visit matthewlomanno.com/atelier.





Matthew Lomanno is an editorial and documentary photographer. His work can be seen at www.matthewlomanno.com.

Filed Under: Art and Photography, Essays, SS. Peter and Paul 2017

The Cosmopolitan and the Campesino: The Sacred Art of Luis Tapia

Dappled Things

Dana Gioia

There is so much activity and variety in the American visual arts that it is difficult to assess the significance of any individual artist, especially one still productive and unpredictable. Over the last quarter century, however, it has become clear that the sculptor Luis Tapia has accomplished something singular, important, and slightly surprising. He has reconceptualized one of the oldest traditions of Latino and American regional art—the santero’s craft devotional sculpture—in a way that is both strikingly original and deeply respectful of its origins. In the process, Tapia has not only redeemed this powerful but narrow tradition from the weight of its own past; he has given his personal revision of it an international presence, thereby elevating the distinctively Hispanic form of sculpture beyond its folkloric identity. Without losing his personal connection with the past, Tapia has transformed the restrictive roles of the santero and the santo into something meaningfully new—more fluent, contemporary, and expansive.

Luis Eligio Tapia was born in Agua Fria, New Mexico, just outside Santa Fe, in 1950. His father, a fireman at Los Alamos National Laboratory, died mysteriously when he was one, possibly from beryllium poisoning. His mother, who never remarried, worked at the New Mexico School for the Deaf. Tapia attended local Catholic schools and briefly studied at New Mexico State University. For a few years he worked in a retail clothing shop. As his interest in Latino traditional arts developed, he co-founded a local artist group, La Cofradia de Artes y Artesanos Hispanicos. In 1981 he worked on the restoration of San Francisco de Asis Mission Church in Ranchos de Taos. A self-taught artist, Tapia mastered the craft of carving and painting sacred images, called santos—a tradition that has been continuously practiced in New Mexico for four centuries. Unsatisfied with duplicating traditional subject matters and techniques, Tapia experimented with bold color and intricate design. He also renovated traditional subjects by executing old motifs in contemporary ways. He initially sold his art at regional fiestas. By the mid-1980s, he found a commercial gallery in Santa Fe. His work has steadily gained wider recognition through group and solo exhibitions. Tapia’s sculptures are now in major museums, including the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art, the Denver Museum of Art, and the American Folk Art Museum in New York.

The art world is more accustomed to disruption and transgression than to transformative renewal. (What is more normative in art nowadays than transgression?) It is easier to renounce or mock the past than to master and reshape it to new ends. Assimilating the past, however, allows new work to carry powerful formal and cultural resonance, such as Tapia’s adaptations of New Mexican Catholic folk subjects and symbolism into new secular and social contexts. Tapia does not approach the past with the distanced irony and intellectual condescension of artists such as John Currin or Jeff Koons. Tapia remains invested in the forms, themes, and techniques of the New Mexican Latino Catholic tradition. There is irony in his depiction of contemporary economic and racial relations between Anglos and Latinos, rich and poor, but his attitude toward his subject matter is never detached.

The vibrancy of Tapia’s ironic and incisive satire seems closer to Goya or Daumier than to his voguish urban contemporaries. If he is ironic, he is also big-hearted and vulnerably human. His mordant sense of humor—a rare thing in sculpture, especially in the Catholic devotional tradition—makes an immediate human connection with the onlooker. Tapia gains a particular kind of energy and authenticity by allowing the viewer to feel quite directly his complex and sometimes contradictory emotions. He is angry, amused, affectionate, rude, and reverent—often at the same time. Tapia is a visionary realist who visibly occupies the same daily world as the viewer but also reveals its hidden moral, indeed religious, resonances. He has made the devotional forms of the santero profane and political without losing their sacred authority.

Without renouncing his own roots, Tapia has become a significant American artist of unique identity, personal style, and political power. He did not abandon his tradition; he transformed it. Tapia has emerged from the Latino, Catholic, Southwestern, rural poor—five varieties of marginalization, all alien to the mostly metropolitan world of contemporary American art. He has made each of those “minor” and frequently patronized categories mean something different from his precursors. He has enlarged his tradition to make it capacious enough to contain his imagination and the complexities of contemporary Latino experience.

To discuss Tapia’s artistic identity in cultural and sociological terms is clarifying, but it also risks losing the main reason he is worth discussing in the first place—his excellence and originality. Contemporary art labors under heavy clouds of ideological weather. Latino artists in particular are rarely allowed to exist as individuals; they are abstracted into representations of group consciousness. Tapia’s art doesn’t matter because it is Latino, culturally marginal, or politically engaged. His art matters because it is so powerfully expressive, memorable, and original on its own individual terms. Studied in depth, his oeuvre reveals itself to be intellectually ambitious, thematically diverse, stylistically inventive, and masterful in technique.

Tapia’s particular genius is also refreshingly democratic and inclusive. His sculptures arrest the viewer’s attention whether that person is intellectually sophisticated or not. He has developed a visual language, drawn from both the Hispanic vernacular and elite traditions, that engages equally the cosmopolitan and the campesino. Significantly, his mostly small works hold the viewer’s gaze in ways that are simultaneously pleasurable and painful.

Tapia is a conceptual artist. There are always ideas animating both his forms and subjects, but those concepts are not imposed on the works. The meanings emanate from the physical objects themselves. We enter his disturbing and darkly beautiful work not intellectually but intuitively through its iconic images and visual narratives. There is also a conspicuously joyful mastery in his sculptures. They remind us that art, even tragic art, works most potently through pleasure.

I worry that I have taken too many theoretical flights in describing Tapia’s very sensuous art. If that has been the case, I blame him. I can’t look at Luis Tapia’s work without being flooded with ideas and emotions. Whenever I see his work in a gallery or museum, I have the same intense experience—I come, I see, he conquers. Even in a crowded exhibition, Tapia’s work arrests my attention, draws me in, and lingers in my memory. If you don’t believe me, turn these pages.

Saint Francis Receives the Stigmata, Luis Tapia. Carved and painted wood, ribbon. 33½ x 15¾ x 19 in. 2002. Denver Art Museum Collection; gift of Hope and Edward Connors. Photo by Dan Morse, courtesy of The Owings Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Angel of Color (San Miguelito), Luis Tapia. Carved and painted wood. 24½ x 12 x 9½ in. 2002. Private collection. Photo by Dan Morse, courtesy of The Owings Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Angel of Color (San Miguelito), Luis Tapia. Carved and painted wood. 24½ x 12 x 9½ in. 2002. Private collection. Photo by Dan Morse, courtesy of The Owings Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Pieta, Luis Tapia. Carved and painted wood. 20¼ x 14½ x 9½ in. 1999. Collection of John Robertshaw. Photo by Dan Morse, courtesy of The Owings Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
La Santísima Trinidad, Luis Tapia. Carved and painted wood. 7¾ x 7¼ x 5¾ in. 1988. Collection of the Spanish Colonial Arts Society, Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, Santa Fe. Photo by Addison Doty.
Virgen del camino de sueños, Luis Tapia. Carved and painted wood. 15¾ x 13 x 10¼ in. 2016. Collection of Curt, Christina, and Jonah Nonomaque. Photo by James Hart.

Virgen del camino de sueños, Luis Tapia. Carved and painted wood. 15¾ x 13 x 10¼ in. 2016. Collection of Curt, Christina, and Jonah Nonomaque. Photo by James Hart.
The Temptations of Saint Anthony, Luis Tapia. Carved and painted wood. 21 7/16 x 14 3/16 x 14½ in. 1991. Collection of the Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, IFAF Collection; gift of the Diane and Sandy Besser Collection. Photo by Polina Smutko.

Dana Gioia, poet and librettist, is the Judge Widney Professor at the University of Southern California. He served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003 through 2009. He holds ten honorary degrees and has won numerous awards, including the 2010 Laetare Medal from Notre Dame University. In 2015, Gioia was named the Poet Laureate of California by Gov. Jerry Brown.

Luis Tapia is a pioneering Chicano artist who for forty-five years has pushed the art of polychrome wood sculpture to new levels of craftsmanship and social and political commentary. Rooted in a folk art tradition established in seventeenth-century New Mexico, Tapia’s work at once honors its origins, reinterprets traditional subject matter, and revitalizes age-old techniques. His works have been exhibited internationally and widely reviewed by several publications. Tapia has received many awards for his work, including the 1996 New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the state’s highest artistic honor.

Filed Under: Art and Photography, Deep Down Things, Essays, Pentecost 2017

Why You’re Wrong About Medieval Art

Dappled Things

Daniel Mitsui

Opinions about art are diverse, strongly held, and contentious. Facing such conflict, many hoist a flag of surrender and say that art is just a matter of personal taste. Some even fly that flag triumphantly. They heatedly argue that art is not a thing worth arguing; they insist that nothing about art is objectively true except its objective lack of objective truthfulness.

This idea is not entirely new; de gustibus non est disputandum has been uttered for centuries, although I suspect that it has only recently been understood in an absolute sense. I see an error at the start of this line of reasoning: the assumption that in order for a thing to be real (and not just a product of the mind), it must be quantifiable. This is the perhaps the most popular error of modern thinking. At the end of this line of reasoning is a colorless, mechanical view of reality. The Catholic philosopher and physicist Wolfgang Smith described it well:

We are told that [the physical universe] consists of space, time and matter, or of space-time and energy, or perhaps of something else still more abstruse and even less imaginable; but in any case we are told in unequivocal terms what it excludes: as all of us have learnt, the physical universe is said to exclude just about everything which from the ordinary human point of view makes up the world . . . What is being bifurcated or cut asunder are the so-called primary and secondary qualities: the things that can be described in mathematical terms, and those that cannot. Logically speaking, the bifurcation postulate is tantamount to the identification of the so-called physical universe (the world as conceived by the physicist) with the real world per se, through the device of relegating all else (all that does not fit this conception) to an ontological limbo, situated outside the world of objectively existent things . . . Let it be said at once that this reduction of the world to the categories of physics is not a scientific discovery (as many believe), but a metaphysical assumption that has been built into the theory from the outset.1

New technology impresses this way of thinking even more deeply. Computers have it built into their every function, for they actually cannot heed anything unless it is reduced to a number. And technology imparts its bias to its users. To a man with a hammer, the adage goes, everything looks like a nail; to a man with a computer, everything looks like a datum.2

The modern mind has acquired the habit of quantifying, sorting and ranking things that are not inherently numerical: beauty, intelligence, friendship, originality, love. This is, to the modern mind, the only way to prove that they are real. Art is recalcitrant to numerical description; hurrah, I say, for art. The criterion of the modern mind does not need to be met; it needs to be dismissed.

My first advice to anyone who wishes to appreciate or make sacred art is not to treat art like data. Do not rate it with stars; do not make top-ten lists. Real appreciation is gotten by paying serious attention to a work of art, just looking at it for a very long time. It is in the looking that communication through art happens.

Glyph

Truth and Good, those things that sacred art intends to communicate, are transcendental; they are names of God. According to Dionysius, the author of The Divine Names, Beauty is another:

The Beautiful which is beyond individual being is called Beauty because of that beauty bestowed by it on all things, each in accordance with what it is. It is given this name because it is the cause of the harmony and splendor in everything, because like a light it flashes onto everything the beauty—causing impartations of its own wellspring ray . . . It is forever so, unvaryingly, unchangeably so, beautiful not as something coming to birth and death, to growth or decay, not lovely in one respect while ugly in some other way. It is not beautiful now but otherwise then . . . It is not beautiful in one place and not so in another, as though it could be beautiful for some and not for others . . . It is the great creating cause which bestirs the world and holds all things in existence by the longing inside them to have beauty.3

Sacred art has a permanent content that is knowable from tradition. The art called Gothic, which began in the twelfth century, is fully traditional; its makers did not predicate their originality on a rejection of the art of the past. Rather, they put it into order and expressed it more clearly. Gothic art is the visual equivalent of a medieval encyclopedia. It is as complete and disciplined a system as Byzantine iconography, but aligned to the Latin liturgy and the Latin church fathers. This is why I make it the basis of my own artwork.

I do not think of Gothic as a mere historic style belonging to a certain time and place; that would make it a very boring thing. Rather, I think of it as the best example of an art made according to Catholic principles—principles that are always and everywhere true. They are not merely useful for creating sacred art as it was during certain centuries of European history; rather, they are useful for creating sacred art in any place or time, including our own.

Glyph

The perspective of this art is fundamentally different from that adopted by art in the following ages. Perspective is more than a matter of convergences and relative sizes; it defines a picture’s entire purpose.

Gothic art is not as intentionally abstracted as its sibling art of Byzantine iconography, but neither does it represent a mundane view; the presence of haloes alone makes that obvious. There are seldom any cast shadows. The size of figures is determined by their importance, their placement by the demands of symbolism, hierarchy, and symmetry. Chronologically separate events may be depicted together in the same scene. Nothing important is hidden behind another object, or cut off by the edges of the picture.

Over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Gothic art became more detailed in its presentation of anatomy and clothing. Landscapes appeared in the background for the first time. Yet even in very late Gothic art—the paintings of Jan Van Eyck or Rogier Van Der Weyden, for example—the compositions are undeniably symbolic, hierarchical and symmetrical. There are no consistent points of convergence for all parallel lines within them. Admittedly (regrettably, I say—this is the one fault I find in them), some cast shadows appear, but they rarely fall on anything other than the ground or a wall.

So what, then, does Gothic art represent? Is it a view into heaven? This sounds right, but it does not entirely make sense to me. If it is a view into heaven, what is a picture of the Crucifixion? Are Jesus Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary and John the Apostle acting out a pageant for us on a heavenly stage? Who is playing the part of the bad thief, some angel in a costume?

What, then, does it represent? The answer is revealed in the arrangement and disposition of the image. For while Gothic art cannot be reduced to a number, it nonetheless has a mathematical order. Consider three ways in which direction is used as a sacred symbol:

The ancient tradition of the Catholic Church is to pray facing eastward; this is the direction of heaven, the direction to which Christ ascended and from whence He shall return. In a Gothic church, the sanctuary is oriented to the rising sun of the vernal equinox.

Another tradition associates north with the Old Testament and south with the New; the events of the Gospel occurred in the northern hemisphere, where north is shadowy, and south is sunlit. Chartres Cathedral, for example, has statues of prophets and patriarchs on its north porch and statues of apostles and martyrs on its south.

The right hand of God represents Mercy, and the left hand Justice; this is attested many times in holy writ. This is why, in a picture of the Crucifixion, the good thief is invariably to Christ’s right hand and the bad thief to His left.

Mercy and Justice are themselves related to the New and Old Testaments, and thus it is possible to align all three of these directions. Here is a picture of the Crucifixion. There is the good thief at the right hand of Christ, beneath the Sun, symbol of the New Testament; that must be south. There is the bad thief and the moon; that must be north. So what, then, is the perspective of the picture? The artist and the viewer are looking westward.

Consider a picture of the Last Supper. Jesus Christ faces the artist and the viewer. The Holy Eucharist is celebrated ad orientem, so the perspective of the picture must be ad occidentum. In a picture of the Ascension, Christ faces the artist and the viewer as He ascends to the east; again, they are looking westward.

Why should this be? Because Gothic art represents not a view into heaven but a view from heaven. It adopts the perspective of a heavenly being who sees events on earth—sees them, that is, with eyes that are not bound by time or space. Thus a picture of the Crucifixion is truly a picture of the Crucifixion, not of a reenactment. But it is the Crucifixion seen from eternity.

From eternity, happenings of different times may appear in the same inspection. Nothing is hidden due to distance, obstruction or shadow. There is no single vanishing point in the far-off distance, because the infinite (Our Father Who Art in Heaven) is behind the artist and the viewer. No light within the picture causes shadows to be cast onto the figures, for an overpowering light is again behind the artist and the viewer, illuminating everything, flashing onto everything the beauty—causing impartations of its own wellspring ray.

Considering this, the development in late Gothic art of more detailed anatomy, clothing and landscape is sensible and consistent with the tradition. It did not proceed from the same ideas that the contemporary innovations of the Italian Renaissance did.

Glyph

In Florence of the fifteenth century, artists invented technical methods for painting and drawing that eventually were adopted all over the world.

The architect Filippo Brunelleschi invented the method of linear perspective that is still taught in elementary art classes. This requires the artist to establish the horizon line of the picture, and to fix vanishing points on it. These indicate infinite distances; all parallel lines within the picture converge toward a single vanishing point. Leon Battista Alberti, another architect, wrote the first treatise on the method.

Leonardo of Vinci attempted to invent a method of shadow projection compatible with linear perspective. He was not entirely successful, but theorists of later centuries finished the task. The method requires an artist to fix not only vanishing points but also light sources; the manner in which shadows are cast by objects in the painting or drawing onto other objects in the painting or drawing is determined analytically.

The conventional wisdom says that the artists of the Italian Renaissance simply discovered the way to draw or paint realistically—that ancient and medieval men had always seen the world this way, but were not clever enough to figure out how to make pictures that matched what they saw.

Yet even a little consideration reveals that the system of linear perspective is unlike the reality that we perceive with our eyes and minds. We do not see with one unmoving eye, but with two eyes that move. When they focus on objects at a particular distance, objects at other distances split into transparent double images. We do not see straight lines as straight, for one part of them is always closer to our eyes than the others. Our visions are received by our retinas, which are concave, not flat; a flat painting or drawing distorts them in the same way that a map distorts the surface of the spherical earth. These distortions are exaggerated around the edges of the projection, especially if a large area is mapped. In a painting or drawing in linear perspective, these distortions can only be hidden by narrowing the field of vision. Psychologically, we place objects in our field of vision in relation to other objects, not in relation to an invisible grid.4

What linear perspective accurately represents is what a man will see when he holds still with one eye closed and looks through a narrow frame at something distant. Brunelleschi intended to prove the truthfulness of the newly invented method; he set up a viewing-box by the portals of the unfinished cathedral building in Florence. Looking into the box through a small hole, a viewer could see the baptistery down the street, and then a reflected painting in linear perspective of the same building. It worked: the painting looked just like the reflection—but only because the viewing-box created all of the specific conditions just described!

Neither does the similarity of paintings in linear perspective to photographs prove their truthfulness; cameras too are designed to create these specific conditions. And technology imparts its bias to its users. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail; to a man with a camera, everything looks like a photograph. Have you ever seen somebody look at the real world that God made, then crane back his neck, close one eye, and hold up his thumbs and forefingers at arms’ length to create a small rectangular frame for his field of vision? This is no way to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth . . .

Linear perspective is not a scientific discovery, but a symbolic form; it is a perfect visual expression of the idea that primary reality is an abstraction of quantities and extensions within a grid of homogenous space. Alberti actually instructed artists to paint or draw while looking through a frame in which a perpendicular grid of strings had been fixed. The vanishing point suggests that infinity is an endless distance existing within nature. Such a definition would never have been accepted by medieval thinkers, for to them infinity was a divine attribute—something that cannot exist, even conceptually, within created space. To them, endless distance was an oxymoron; a distance exists only by virtue of its bounds. Modern minds have become accustomed to thinking of eternity in the same way, as an endless duration—years upon years upon years upon years. In traditional Christian philosophy, eternity is not a duration at all; it is the now that does not pass.

Glyph

What, then, does a pious painting or drawing made with linear perspective and cast shadows represent? Not a view from eternity; the cast shadows fix everything in the picture at a single time of day. Not a view from heaven; here the artist and the viewer imagine themselves as a mundane man who happens to be present at a sacred event. If this man were to stand afar, hold still, close one eye and look through a narrow frame, the picture is like what he would see.

Now, I want to be very, very clear here; I am not saying that a painting or drawing like this is necessarily a bad thing, or a useless thing. I am not saying that it has no place in the Catholic Church. Its place is perhaps comparable to that of an imaginative prayer, rather than to that of a liturgical prayer.

I am merely saying that painting or drawing like this is a different thing from a work of sacred art from medieval, patristic, or apostolic times. And this different thing is not what the fathers of the Second Council of Nicea had in mind when they declared:

The composition of religious imagery is not the painter’s invention, but is approved by the law and tradition of the Catholic Church. The tradition does not belong to the painter; the art alone is his. True arrangement and disposition belong to the holy fathers.5

Glyph

This requirement for the artist to follow tradition rather than his own ideas is indispensable; without it, he would not be able to paint or draw from a heavenly perspective. I am not a saint in glory. I have never seen with the eyes of a resurrected body. I have never been caught up into the third heaven, either in the body or out of it. It is only possible for mundane men to make sacred art because God revealed Himself to mundane men, and Himself established the principles necessary to make it.

His Revelation was given publicly and definitively during the lifetimes of the Apostles. The Catholic religion is the perpetuated memory of what was seen and heard then. Some of this memory was, with divine inspiration, recorded in the books and letters of the New Testament. Some of it was perpetuated by tradition: liturgical, exegetical, indeed artistic. While art does not have so exalted a place in the Catholic religion as liturgy or exegesis, it corroborates them and operates with the same divinely-taught principles.

My second advice to anyone who wishes to appreciate or make sacred art is to be guided by holy writ, liturgical prayer, the writings of the church fathers and the art of the past. Do not make the mistake of thinking that tradition only counts once it has been expressed in magisterial documents. This is an epistemological absurdity; the bishops who are tasked with writing these documents need to know what they know somehow! Unless tradition has authority of its own to tell them what they must believe and must do even when they want to believe or do something else, it is merely a legal fiction.

Glyph

As a practical example, consider the task of painting or drawing the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. True arrangement and disposition of the picture requires the artist to do more than read Munificentissimus Deus. He does not have the liberty to paint or draw whatever he pleases, just so long as he does not contradict the magisterial document. The truth of the Virgin’s bodily assumption into heaven did not spring from Pius XII’s infallibility in 1950; it existed from the time that the event actually happened. It was known in 1950 because the memory of the event was perpetuated in the liturgical tradition and the writings of the church fathers.

These give a narrative of what occurred: the Apostles were miraculously gathered to the Virgin’s bedside; she died a painless death; a burial place was prepared in the Valley of Josaphat; as the Virgin’s body was taken there, it was assumed into heaven and reunited to her soul. To reject this narrative altogether, to paint or draw something else, is to consider the memory of the event untrustworthy—the memory upon which knowledge of the event entirely depends.

Glyph

The arrangement and disposition of sacred art belong to the holy fathers because they say the same things as the holy fathers, in the same manner. Allegory pervades patristic language; it likewise pervades Gothic art, especially in its juxtaposition of scenes from the New Testament with their Old Testament prefigurements. To quote the art historian Emile Mâle:

God who sees all things under the aspect of eternity willed that the Old and New Testaments should form a complete and harmonious whole; the Old is but an adumbration of the New. To use medieval language, that which the Gospel shows men in the light of the sun, the Old Testament showed them in the uncertain light of the moon and stars. In the Old Testament truth is veiled, but the death of Christ rent that mystic veil and that is why we are told in the Gospel that the veil of the Temple was rent in twain at the time of the Crucifixion . . . This doctrine, always held by the Church, is taught in the Gospels by the Savior Himself: As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up.6

The apostles Peter and Paul learned this lesson, and taught it in their epistles. It was elaborated by the church fathers: Origen, Hilary of Poitiers, Ambrose of Milan, Augustine of Hippo, Gregory the Great. Medieval encyclopedic works such as the Glossa Ordinaria expounded the symbolic meaning of every passage of holy writ. These works still exist, as do the patristic texts of which they are compilations. For my own purposes, I often refer to two popular late medieval summaries of the exegetical tradition, composed more of pictures than words: the Biblia Pauperum and the Speculum Humane Salvationis. These match the most important events in the life of Jesus Christ with their appropriate prefigurements. It is from these that I know to associate the Crucifixion not only with Moses and the brazen serpent, but also with the sacrifice of Isaac and the death of Eleazar Maccabee beneath a war elephant.

Glyph

In Gothic art, the natural world too is significant. For the invisible things of Him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made. To quote Emile Mâle again:

As the idea of his work is in the mind of the artist, so the universe was in the thought of God from the beginning. God created, but he created through His Word, that is, through His Son. The thought of the Father was realized in the Son through whom it passed from potentiality to act . . . The world therefore may be defined as a thought of God realized through his Word. If this be so then in each being is hidden a divine thought; the world is a book written by the hand of God in which every creature is a word charged with meaning . . . True knowledge, then, consists not in the study of things in themselves (the outward forms) but in penetrating to the inner meaning intended by God for our instruction, for in the words of Honorius of Autun, every creature is a shadow of truth and life. All being holds in its depths the reflection of the sacrifice of Christ, the image of the Church and of the virtues and vices.7

Medieval authors produced books called bestiaries, herbals, and lapidaries, in which the symbolism of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms are explained. It is from these that I know to surround a scene of the Resurrection with a whale, a phoenix, a pelican and a lion. According to one bestiary:

If the pelican has brought offspring into the world, when these grow up they strike their parents in the face. The parents strike back and kill them. After three days, their mother opens her own breast and side, and lies on her young, pouring all her blood over the dead bodies, and thus her love brings them back to life. So Our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the author and originator of all creatures, begot us, and, when we did not exist, He made us. But we struck Him in the face; as Isaiah said: I have begotten sons and raised them up, but they have despised me. Christ ascended the Cross and was struck in the side; blood and water came forth for our salvation, to give us eternal life.8

Of the lion, it says:

When the lioness brings forth her cubs, they come into the world dead. She watches over them for three days, until on the third day the father comes, blows in their faces, and awakens them to life. In the same way the Almighty Father awoke Our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead on the third day, as Jacob says: He couched as a lion; who shall rouse him up?9

The temptation, for the modern mind, is simply to snicker at the zoological naivety of these words; admittedly, no one has observed these behaviors in pelicans or lions in a very long time. But the authors of the bestiaries were working with the best knowledge they had, and their being mistaken in the details does not prove that their method of interpretation was fallacious. If we no longer find symbols of Jesus Christ in the behavior of pelicans and lions, is it because they are not there, or is it because we have ceased to look for them? Were we to see again with a theophanic worldview, might not our current knowledge yield even more profound symbols?

At least one religious artist of the early twentieth century thought so. In 1911, the priest Felix Granda wrote:

Through the microscope we can see the infinitely varied microorganisms; more powerful images have never come to the imagination of the artist. Should we not take advantage of this immense arsenal of scientific data that they provide to us, to make richer and more varied our decorations, and to teach the truth contained in the verse of the Kingly Prophet: O Lord, Thy thoughts are exceeding deep!?10

When I first read those words, they were especially resonant, for I had already begun to incorporate microbiological forms in my ornament and to consider their symbolic possibilities. It is one of my ambitions to find theophanic symbols in the scientific knowledge of the present day.

The animals that appear in my drawing of the Sacred Heart include sea horses, embryonic dogfish in their tendrilous egg cases, platypodes, chameleons, lyrebirds and a pangolin. In them, I see symbols of universality; they represent all of creation worshipping its God. Chameleons are creatures that seem to contain within themselves all colors, and lyrebirds are creatures that seem to contain within themselves all sounds. Platypodes and pangolins are beasts so peculiar in their anatomy that they resemble creatures of every class. Dogfish and sea horses (as their names suggest) are aquatic animals that resemble terrestrial ones.

Glyph

God exists; God is all-good; God is the Creator of all things visible and invisible. Because of these truths, all things, by the simple fact of existing, are in some way good, in some way (however small) like God. Only nothingness (which, by definition, is no thing at all) is altogether unlike God. An art that adopts a heavenly perspective, from which all of creation reflects the beauty of the Creator, cannot be an art full of nothingness.

Medieval sacred art is notable for its lack of blank space. Its makers filled whatever space was not occupied by the principal figures with gold leaf, knotwork, geometric patterns or stylized vines. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, they also used landscapes for this purpose. I like to fill blank space with tiny plants and animals, in the manner of Flemish millefleur tapestries. There is no intentional vacancy in Gothic art, nor in mine. The historical art term for this is horror vacui—fear of the empty.

Glyph

It may be apparent by now that I do not aspire to create art that is praised for its noble simplicity. That phrase is oft discussed within the Catholic Church; there is heated disagreement over what it truly is supposed to mean. I do not have an answer to that question; all I know is that, in its practical application to art, it usually amounts to a synonym for boring.

My conscience will not allow me to make boring artwork for God, at least not purposely.

I acknowledge that a minority within the Catholic Church has long advocated for very simple artwork. Its most illustrious representative is Bernard of Clairvaux, who condemned the decorative carving in Cluniac churches, and whose influence ended a flourishing tradition of Cistercian manuscript illumination. Bernard was a great saint, but I wonder how many who invoke him as an authority on sacred art know how complete his insensitivity to beauty was. His friend and biographer, William of St. Thierry, wrote:

He hardly used his bodily senses. He lived a whole year in the novices’ cell and yet did not know that it had a vaulted ceiling. He passed very often in and out of the monastery church, which had three windows in the apse, yet he thought there was only one . . . He had largely lost even he ability to distinguish different tastes. If, for example, oil was mistakenly put before him and he drank it, he was not aware of it until he wondered why his lips felt oily. Raw blood was served to him by mistake, and he is known to have used it day after day in place of butter.11

William takes this as evidence of holiness; I cannot read this account without seeing evidence also of some perceptual impairment. Undeniably, a man who cannot taste the difference between raw blood and butter can be a great saint. But I would not want him to teach me how to cook.

Nor do I want a man completely insensitive to visual beauty to establish the principles of sacred art. I rather defer to his esteemed contemporaries and friends: Hugh of St. Victor; Suger of St. Denis (the initiator of Gothic art and architecture); and Hildegard of Bingen, who possessed a supersensitivity so great that she could know the color of a calf’s hair while it was yet in utero. This, too, was taken as evidence of holiness.


Notes

  1. Wolfgang Smith, Cosmos and Transcendence: Breaking Through the Barrier of Scientistic Belief, (San Raphael CA: Sophia Perennis, 2008).↩
  2. Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, (New York: Vantage Books, 1992).↩
  3. Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, translated by Colm Luibheid, (New York: Paulist Press, 1987).↩
  4. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, translated by Christopher Wood, (New York: Zone Books, 1997).↩
  5. Emile Mâle, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century, translated by Dora Nussey, (New York: Icon Editions, 1972).↩
  6. Epiphanius of Constantinople, speaking at the Sixth Session of the Second Council of Nicea.↩
  7. ibid.↩
  8. Bestiary, translated by Richard Barber, (London: The Folio Society, 1992).↩
  9. ibid.↩
  10. Felix Granda, Mi Propósito, (Madrid: Talleres de Arte, 1911).↩
  11. William of St. Thierry, quoted by Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, translated by William Granger Ryan, (Princeton University Press, 1993).↩

Daniel Mitsui lives in Chicago with his wife and their four children. Meticulously detailed ink drawings inspired by medieval religious art are his specialty. More of his work can be seen at www.danielmitsui.com.

Filed Under: Art and Photography, Essays, Mary Queen of Angels 2016

On the Necessity of Hussar Armor

Dappled Things

Gabriel Olearnik

horseman1

Duelist, Andrzej Wiktor Gabriel Olearnik is depicted wearing his hussar armour whilst drawing the sabre or szabla, the traditional side arm of Polish nobility.

“A chicken in every pot, and a battle-harness in every home.” Words to ponder, words to live by. So what do I mean? Well, no half measures, dilution or counterfeits. An articulated set of gleaming steel, with a breastplate, backplate, oriental style bracers, a lobster-tail helmet and a gorget to protect the neck. (The neck always needs protection, it’s one of those things you learn quickly when people are trying to kill you). You need one, I need one, we all need one and, should it assist, I can point you in the direction of some armourers who will furnish you with appropriate wares. You should anticipate a wait of about a year as the parts emerge rough from the forge and slowly take on a complete shape. And yes, it is advisable to have a spare set, to deal with those occasions when your best suit is out being polished and you have some guests to entertain or perhaps a would-be-burglar to terrify. I suspect that when someone goes out to burgle a house, they are really looking for light and marketable luxury goods to sell on or fence. They were probably not expecting you in six feet of burnished steel as part of the bargain. Well, surprise!

Hussar, Andrzej Wiktor

Hussar, Andrzej Wiktor

Of course, in this world of frenetic intemperance, we will have the scoffers. This does not apply to you, of course, reader. I could detect your impeccable culture immediately. But they will say—pointless! Exorbitant! Childish! A fantasy! And—pointless! (This will not prevent them from asking for pictures, however, so that they can display them in whichever medium garners the most attention). Nevertheless, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires a justification for certain actions, and I can defend this one on the grounds of the beautiful, the good, and the true. Those are indeed worthy defences, which I intend to rely on, the basis of art and surest ground of an artist. But you want more, don’t you? So you’ll get more. The very nature of the thing, those three fundamentals working their way out in particular cuts and edges. So, in three words: arrest, invincibility, and hiddenness.

Beauty, especially extreme beauty, has on occasion elements of violence and paralysis. It strikes you as a blow, the shudder you have in a car as it stops suddenly, throwing you against the safety belt. And yes, the word stunning has been overused and it now appears as a description of everything from apartments to Tinder profiles. But this armour is stunning, is arresting, drawing in the light and your attention, demanding both. Which is what you would expect. When hussar knights appeared on the battlefield, this quality was supposed to intimidate—the usual stuff—riders, pale horses, and all Hell breaking loose.

Lancer - The success of a hussar charge was based on their hollow lance, the kopia. Up to 20 feet long, it proved its worth in countless engagements.

Lancer – The success of a hussar charge was based on their hollow lance, the kopia. Up to 20 feet long, it proved its worth in countless engagements.

There is also the distinct experience of wearing the armour. Normally, a strike to your chest would hurt. With a stick, you might take some bruises, perhaps crack a rib. With a sword or a hammer, it’s game over. In armour, though, you feel the impact but are utterly unharmed. The shape of the breastplate encourages blows to skitter off to the left or right. Perhaps you recall the old Norse myths about the god Balder, where everything in the universe apart from mistletoe swore not to harm him? Then the other gods played a game where they threw weapons and rocks and him—and found him invulnerable. This made them happy. It is one thing to read about it, another to feel confidence and euphoria, adult and child within you gloriously radiant. You are not just impassable. You have become impassibility, and nothing can hurt you.

And finally, hiddenness. In Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather, the character of Death has a conversation with his granddaughter. (Don’t ask.) Here’s how it goes, with Death speaking first:

“Yes. Justice. Mercy. Duty. That sort of thing.”

“They’re not the same at all!”

Captain, Andrzej Wiktor - The characteristic half plate armour of the hussars is shown on a regimental officer here. He wears a delia coat and carries a horsemen’s hammer as a mark of office.

Captain, Andrzej Wiktor – The characteristic half plate armour of the hussars is shown on a regimental officer here. He wears a delia coat and carries a horsemen’s hammer as a mark of office.

“You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy.”

“And yet”—Death waved a hand.

“And yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some . . . some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.”

 

Death always gets the last word, and here he’s right again. There isn’t a single atom of courage in the universe, not an ounce of nobility. There isn’t any measure of bravery, and as for identity, you can’t, for instance, show yourself being Polish or American or French in any other way than making it physically manifest. Art is a type of sacramental. It is the means by which the conversation of the living and the dead is prolonged. It is a proof for who we are and what we value. We have to become the winged horsemen, the angel knights, to show the angels inside us.

And here, dearest reader, you should imagine me smiling, and it is a real smile, with humour, but also hard, a grin which shows the edge of teeth, and because certain things are both funny and true—there is something wild in my eyes, something untameable, which speaks of the pride of a tribe that was long ago and far away, of the very deepest woods and campfires in the Old Country, of dark forests and tangled, where, if you pause and listen, you can still hear the griffins calling to each other and, ever so faintly, the wings of eagles.

The Winged Horsemen

Andrzej Wiktor

Introduction

This series depicts a particular type of cavalry unit unique to Poland: the hussars. The hussars were active in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and were characterized by their singular appearance and fortitude. They were largely undefeated during their period of operation, often taking on opponents when outnumbered three to one or more. Their most famous engagement was the relief of the siege of Vienna in 1683.

The photographs depict contemporary Poles dressed in historical reproductions of hussar armor. The participants are associated with an re-enactment society based in the castle of Gniew (g-nyeah-fff) in North Poland.

Andrzej Wiktor and Gabriel Olearnik are personal friends. When Gabriel saw Andrzej’s series of “Knighthood” pictures a few years ago, he suggested that they work on something in the future. A few months ago, they met and agreed to produce a revised series of photographs to accompany Gabriel’s new essay.

Captain, Andrzej Wiktor – The characteristic half plate armour of the hussars is shown on a regimental officer here. He wears a delia coat and carries a horsemen’s hammer as a mark of office.
Sergeant, Andrzej Wiktor – Hussars carried firearms to defeat cavalry. Note the powder horn and cartridge box worn on the chest.
Man-at-arms, Andrzej Wiktor – The most essential armor component is always the protection for the head. Hussar helms were open fronted with a lobster tail construction shielding the neck. This offered a fine combination between defense, mobility and comfort.

Veteran, Andrzej Wiktor – A hussar’s defenses consisted of metal armor on front, with the back protection often being the pelt of an exotic animal. This veteran wears a leopard skin cloak.
Armorer, Andrzej Wiktor
Hussar, Andrzej Wiktor

Lancer, Andrzej Wiktor – The success of a hussar charge was based on their hollow lance, the kopia. Up to 20 feet long, it proved its worth in countless engagements.
Hussar, Andrzej Wiktor
Hussar, Andrzej Wiktor

Hussar, Andrzej Wiktor
Hussar, Andrzej Wiktor
Duelist, Andrzej Wiktor – Gabriel Olearnik is depicted wearing his hussar armour whilst drawing the sabre or szabla, the traditional side arm of Polish nobility

Filed Under: Art and Photography, Essays, SS. Peter and Paul 2015

On Art and Necessity

David Harman

I once asked my old art professor why she was a painter. After stumbling around for a while, she said something like, “the process of painting teaches you how to live.”

I’ve been thinking about this response for a few years now. It’s a statement I believe in wholeheartedly, but I also stumble around before ever repeating it. In the studio, I often feel like I’m reaching in the dark, but I rarely feel like I am being taught.

Five weeks ago my wife and I had our first daughter. She came five weeks early. Twelve days in the NICU completely reoriented my priorities. The second Augusta was sent down the hall for breathing issues, my wife and I clicked into survival mode. Nothing else mattered besides caring and advocating for our daughter in the NICU. Now that we’re back home, I’ve haven’t clicked out of that mode. The impulse to create, replaced by the impulse to survive, now seems ridiculous. How could anything be less urgent than smudging oil and pigment around on a flat surface?

Obama shared my sentiments lately. A few weeks ago he was criticized for his thoughts on the art history degree:

“I promise you, folks can make a lot more potentially with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.” [sic][laughter]

This doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. Skilled manufacturing is so much more urgent, so much more relevant than discussing the well-smeared paste of artists long past. Who has time for that? I’d rather feed my family, or fix the problem in Syria.

The College Art Association responded to Obama’s remarks. If we do away with such degrees, “America’s future generations will be discouraged from taking advantage of the values, critical and decisive thinking and creative problem solving offered by the humanities.”

But art making never seems so urgent as saving future generations. When so much of what we encounter on a daily basis offers an escape from reality, isn’t art just another way out? So many paintings offer pastoral windows into other worlds. These pleasant getaways rarely challenge our beliefs or craft our values.

Of course such paintings have their place, but I really believe that art was born out of a much more urgent necessity. The Chauvet Cave drawings, some of the earliest known, are anything but decorative. Painted in the far recesses of a cave, most of the drawings feature predatory animals or buffalos or horses in states of movement. There is a palpable searching in these drawings, an urgency, a need to really figure something out. One drawing features a combined female and bison figure. Here two fabrics of life are awkwardly knit together in charcoal. Sustenance and generation, death and life so intertwined, it only makes sense to draw them as one.

The Chauvet Cave Drawings, photo from the Bradshaw Foundation

Such images often express what words cannot. More recently, drawings have been used in refugee camps as a successful way for children to express their thoughts and feelings. With a simple drawing, they can express what they could not put into words. The process of drawing accesses a different part of the psyche. It is a process of seeking, digging, carving until you get somewhere. You only need to keep your hand moving. Art does not offer a way out, it offers a way in. Born out of necessity, art making unfolds new topographies, new ways of charting. A drawing or painting becomes an extension of seeing, and even when it’s not necessary, we still turn to these mediums to know deeper.

Even still, art seems like an extra-thing, a we-could-get-by-without-it thing. But I think we can say its superfluousness is only matched by its necessity.

Filed Under: Art and Photography, Deep Down Things, General

Untitled

Dappled Things

Untitled Leonor Cerón de García

Untitled Leonor Cerón de García

Filed Under: Art and Photography, Christmas 2011

Volcán Galeras

Dappled Things

Volcán Galeras Leonor Cerón de García

Volcán Galeras Leonor Cerón de García

 

Filed Under: Art and Photography, Christmas 2011

Untitled

Dappled Things

Landscape painting by Leonor Cerón de García

Untitled Leonor Cerón de García

Filed Under: Art and Photography, Christmas 2011

Untitled

Dappled Things

Untitled Leonor Cerón de García
Untitled Leonor Cerón de García

Filed Under: Art and Photography, Christmas 2011

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Mary, Queen of Angels 2020

Purchase Featuring nonfiction from Joshua Hren, fiction from Jennifer Marie Donahue and Rob Davidson and the winners and honorees of the Bakhita Prize in Visual Arts.

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