Category Archives: The Arts

The MWS Podcast 32: Ed Catmull, President of Pixar and Disney Animation on Creativity.

Film, Member Profile, Podcast,

In this latest member profile, Ed Catmull, president of Pixar and Disney Animation talks about his new book Creativity Inc.,  the finding of the ‘Middle’ and how one sets up the conditions in a work environment so that creativity might flourish. He goes on to explain how he tries to maintain a work/life balance and why he decided to join the Middle Way Society.

If you’d like to read a review of ‘Creativity Inc’ by the chair of the society Robert M. Ellis, then click here.


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Therese Oulton. Surfaces not Underneaths. 2009.

Practice, The Arts, Uncategorized, , ,

 

Surfaces, not Underneaths. 2009.

 

I came across the work of Therese Oulton recently when looking for a post WW2 British female painter, she was born in 1953 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, studied at St. Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art having begun her studies as a student of anthropology. Oulton lives in London, she did spend a year in Vienna, in 1987 she was nominated for the Turner Prize. Oulton was not keen to join any group and I do not think she would want to be categorised as one of the YBAs, the young British painters, to quote her she wrote ‘I lead an extremely isolated existence.’ It is said that not many women choose to paint landscapes, perhaps not, although I like to paint landscapes, Oulton has been described as a ‘Neo-Expressionist’  known for her abstract work, also landscapes – in a fairly abstract way.

On discussing Surfaces, not Underneaths Germaine Greer writes, ‘Not many women use landscapes as subjects but for Oulton they are an inspiration and rescue painting from male domination’  she added   ‘Oulton makes us believe her reverence has extended to every single, irreplaceable pebble on the beach, she shows a familiar landscape, yet strange, the opposite of conceptual, as though she is shaking out the map of memory til it becomes a dynamic interweaving of sacred grass such as spinifex (an Australian grass) on rocks’ – an extract from an article in the Guardian in 2009, the method echoes the way Australian aborigine women paint.

This painting is painted with oils on aluminium I think, this means that the oil remains on the surface and is not absorbed as with canvas, colours are applied smoothly and can be blended, once the paint dries another coat can be laid on top. The final work will be lightly varnished to prevent scratching. We see the view from above, not directly above but as though we are gliding at an angle to the ground, as if ‘we hang in space’. It is easy to imagine the scene going beyond the frame as if into the far distance. I prefer large spaces, empty skies broken up with  white clouds and distant horizons, more than mountainous scenes although I also find them awe inspiring.  Standing on the shore line looking out to sea is one of my favourite occupations. Often I watch people on the beach, they seem to choose to walk along the edge of the solid ground within inches of the lapping waves.  I have stood at the foot of mountains near Delphi, in valleys in the beautiful Lake District and the highlands of Scotland but big skies that we can see in areas like Norfolk give me the most enjoyment. Flying along the shore line of north Devon with one of my sons in his microlite (winged  motor bike) was a thrill, looking down at the sea which looked like liquid mercury, rather similar to Therese Oulton’s depiction in this painting,

I wish I could see the work as an original because prints do not convey the depth of paint, the texture and the correct colouring, it is said that she uses a ‘delicate and virtuoso technique that amounts to contemplative practice’ her paintings are small in size but are crammed with detail. Much of her most recent work uses repeated motifs, rather like film strips, her work is widely collected, galleries in London exhibit her work, I would like to see them one day.

Information provided by wikipedia.

 

 

 

Ford Madox Brown 1821 – 1893.The Pretty Baa Lambs 1851.

Practice, The Arts, Uncategorized,

brown8

 

Ford Madox Brown was born in Calais, he and his wife did not move to live in England until 1844, his wife died two years later. The painter became closely linked to The  Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founded in London in 1848 by James Collinson, William Holman  Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, these artists were a well organised team who promoted their work in a journal they published named The Germ. Five years later the group disbanded and each artist went his own way, by then the group had expanded. Again we see how artists have found news means of expression, they rebelled against the art establishments like the Royal Academy and the public was shocked by their work when they depicted religious figures in every day occupations, Jesus in a carpenter’s workroom for example. They were described as the ‘first British avant garde’  in their case they looked back to earlier art, paintings executed before Raphael, their defiance was a catalyst for change, Ruskin, the art critic gave their work critical acclaim, they courted the nouveau riche who bought their work.

In Pretty Baa Lambs we have another work about motherhood but as the title suggests young animals are also part of the subject matter, Brown’s wife and daughter were his models, we can imagine the mother saying, ‘daughter, look at the pretty baa lambs’ as they gaze down, nearby a young woman gathers something from the grass, he may have dressed the figures in 18th.century clothes in order to hark back to a time before Industrialisation was in full swing, he must have known that Clapham Common, where the scene was mostly painted, would change beyond recognition. He worked in the open air before the Impressionists decided to do so, he also worked in his garden in nearby Stockwell. Using a restricted palette of mainly blue, white and green with an important flash of red, he records for us a memory of a scene reaching into the far distance stretching across fields, I like the big sky, the openness and space created. There is a wistfullness too I think, both his wives had babies who died young. His work often carried a moral message, with William Morris he founded the Hogarth club, he died in 1893 and was given a secular funeral, his second wife had died two years before.

Poetry 35: Tichborne’s Elegy by Chidiock Tichborne

Poetry, Practice, The Arts

HungDrawnQuartered

Tichborne wrote this elegy on the eve of his execution. He was one of fourteen convicted in 1586 in the plot to kill Elizabeth 1st of England.

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain;
The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

My tale was heard and yet it was not told,
My fruit is fallen, and yet my leaves are green,
My youth is spent and yet I am not old,
I saw the world and yet I was not seen;
My thread is cut and yet it is not spun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

I sought my death and found it in my womb,
I looked for life and saw it was a shade,
I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb,
And now I die, and now I was but made;
My glass is full, and now my glass is run,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Middle Way Thinkers 6: Jesus

Great Thinkers, Myth, Religion, The Arts,

Was Jesus a Middle Way Thinker? Largely not. His beliefs seem to have included many absolutes, and he has also been interpreted since in terms of those absolutes. Yet in this series I also want to encourage incremental thinking. I want to suggest that there are some important ways in which Jesus moved forward from the dogmas of his time, which amount to some specific instances of Middle Way thought. I’d suggest that it is due to these new ways that he addressed the conditions of his time that he gets much of his power. Particularly for those of us from a Christian background (which includes me), I think it’s important to re-examine Jesus in a critical way: one that tries to separate out the dogmas of Christian tradition from those elements that might helpfully speak to our experience.

However, this is a loaded subject, so I’d better start with some clarifications. On the one hand, I’m not interested in supporting any of the dogmas of the Christian tradition about Jesus: either that he was the Son of God, affirmed as some type of supernatural status, or that everything he uttered was ‘true’ and the Word of God. But nor, on the other hand, am I interested in historical revisionism, which seems to be the opposite trap for those interested in re-examining Jesus. I don’t want to make any claims about what Jesus “really” was, or believed, or meant to say. I’m content to work with the Jesus accepted by Christian tradition, and depicted in the four canonical gospels, because that is what ‘Jesus’ effectively means to most people today. I’m looking for insights or symbolic inspiration, rather than historical revelation, in this traditional depiction of Jesus, without getting swallowed up by the various scholarly quagmires of Biblical Studies. The third extreme I’d also want to avoid here, is the mere rejection of Jesus as a source of insights or inspiration. For me, and I suspect many others in the West, Jesus is a powerful archetypal figure, both because of his role in Western art and culture and because of his influence through the Christian churches (very much associated, for me, with childhood experience as a minister’s son).

Let me also briefly note some of the aspects of Jesus that I think are pretty unhelpful. There’s the virgin birth, the idealised childhood, and the sense of divine destiny as the son of God. There are the miracles: at least where these are presented not as acts of compassion but (as particularly in the gospel of John) as signs of divine status. There’s the self-sacrificial aspect: he appears to have basically offered himself up as a sacrifice, aware that he was walking into a trap that would result in his death in Jerusalem, but still doing it. In his trial before Pilate he also seems guilty of false modesty, not offering even a moderate defence to draw people’s attention to his innocence. It seems possible that he believed God would save him from the cross (accounting for ‘My God! Why have you forsaken me?’), because of his profound belief in cosmic justice and an imminent doomsday. Finally, if we follow the role of Jesus in Christian tradition, there’s the interpretation of Jesus’s death as an atonement for human original sin, and the belief in his resurrection as a further sign of divinity and a proof of eternal life for the saved: all these are damaging dogmas by which the moral complexity of our experience is overlaid with crude diagnoses and crude magical solutions.

But, if we can manage to leave all that stuff aside, let’s try to focus on some of the ways that Jesus can be inspiring and insightful – corresponding also to ways that he moves towards the Middle Way. I’d suggest that these fall into two categories: one of these is helpful elements in Jesus’s moral teaching, and the other is helpful archetypal interpretation of the meaning of Jesus as the Son of God.

Much of Jesus’s moral teaching involves a struggle with the Pharisees, who were a sect of Jewish legalists, and the Sadducees, who were conservatives associated with the priestly elite at the Jerusalem temple. Jesus is excoriating about rigid observance of tradition or adherence to the letter of the law, instead urging awareness of motive and the spirit behind the law. For example, when his disciples plucked ears of corn on the Sabbath (against the laws that forbid harvesting on the sabbath, which would be work) and were criticised by the Pharisees, Jesus said “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). He also emphasised motive in urging people not to be showy about giving alms, “Your good deed must be secret” (Matthew 6:4). From today’s perspective, to merely emphasise motive in ethics is not enough, because our motives vary so much along with our unintegrated desires. However, this emphasis was a major step forward in a context where people were thinking of ethics only as an extension of law, in the form of rigid social rules. On the other hand, Jesus seems to be trying to strike a Middle Way in relation to the Jewish Law, because he does not reject it either: “Do not suppose that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to complete” (Matthew 5:17).

Jesus is also well-known for his teaching of ‘turning the other cheek’ – the apparent pacifism of “Do not resist those who wrong you. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn and offer him the other also” (Matthew 5:39). The key insight here is the necessity of avoiding fruitless conflict. Rather than offering one rigid position in response to another, we need to find ways of reducing (an not acting on) the narrow egoistic identification we may have with ‘winning’ when someone challenges us. However, I also think that the Pacifist interpretation of this verse develops another kind of dogma. If we read it as forbidding violence in all circumstances whatsoever, then we rule out the possibility of violence addressing conditions in some circumstances where it might be the best response.

Jesus also offers what might be regarded as a brief equivalent to the Kalama Sutta in Buddhism, offering the suggestion that we need to consult experience when confronted with a conflict between different dogmatic claims. “Beware of false prophets, who come to you dressed as sheep while underneath they are savage wolves. You will recognise them by their fruit. Can grapes be plucked from briars, or figs from thistles? A good tree always yields sound fruit, and a poor tree bad fruit” (Matthew 7:15-17).  Here he seems to be suggesting that verbal claims are not enough, and one of the ways we can judge the justification of conflicting claims is by their integration, evident in people’s behaviour. Again, we could take this to another extreme, by rejecting a person’s view whenever there is a shade of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy does not necessarily make people’s claims untrue, but it is a useful warning sign.

Much more could be said about Jesus’ moral teaching, but I must keep this post brief. More broadly, too, I think Jesus’ symbolic role should also be mentioned. His traditional position in Christianity as ‘Son of God’, both wholly human and wholly divine (according to the Nicene Creed) does not have to be merely rejected as a dogmatic belief, because its meaning can be separated from such beliefs. That meaning is one I encounter very frequently in Renaissance art, where I encounter Jesus as what sometimes seem to be an attempt to represent the Middle Way in human experience. The symbolic richness of Jesus’s status as both divine and human is one way of confronting the profound ambiguity of the relationship between perfect ideals and imperfect experience, the ‘truth on the edge’, or necessity of maintaining a robust conception of truth without claiming to possess it. Jesus is full of contradictions: he is both vulnerable and powerful, wise and foolish, alive and dead, but these contradictions are only damaging as objects of incoherent belief. As symbols, on the other hand, their ambiguity can help us to recognise both the conflicts in our own experience and the ways we can work with those conflicts.

Orozco_Christ_cuts_his_CrossWestern art often depicts Jesus in three particular forms: as an infant, in his crucifixion, and in his resurrection. All of these, I think, can be appreciated as offering evocations of that symbolic richness. As an infant he represents the incarnation, that strange ambiguous middle way between divine and human. On the cross he represents the unbearable and unjust suffering of the human condition when understood in relation to divine perfection. When resurrected, he shows the perseverance of hope: that the good can still come through human experience even when we least expect it, when we have come to terms with the conditions of human life. The picture here is an intriguing one by the Mexican artist Orozco. There are many ways of reading it, either as a symbol of resurrection, or as an anti-theistic statement in which mere humanity triumphs.

I have passed through a number of stages in my response to Jesus. As a child and teenager, I mainly had a negative reaction to the idealised figure I was presented with, who was being foisted on me, but didn’t at all seem to represent the qualities I would have chosen to idealise or to worship. At times, however, I also tried out that idealisation, though I had great difficulty making it my own. I then started to see Jesus primarily as a swindle: an attempt to magically jump across the difficulties of human life. Now, however, I’m quite clear about rejecting a lot of the religious claptrap that surrounds beliefs around Jesus, but at the same time I think I am beginning to develop  a relationship with him both as a man and as an icon. As a moral teacher, he can be inspiring, but does not seem to me as hugely significant as he is often cut out to be, and a lot of contextualisation is needed to see how he was moving towards the Middle Way. As an archetypal symbol, though, he means a lot more, and that meaning develops a little almost every time I step into an art gallery.

Postscript (2018)

This article was written in 2014, and since then I have written a whole book, The Christian Middle Way, that is now being published. In that book I give a much more detailed interpretation of Jesus with rather more reference to the gospels. Although this article gives an idea of the direction I was heading in a couple of years before I wrote the book, the view of Jesus that I arrived at subsequently is in many respects more positive than this one.

Robert M. Ellis