Thinking About the Arts

1. Thinking About the Arts Michael Goheen Erin Goheen

2. Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779): Kitchen Maid Jan Vermeer (1632-1675): Milkmaid

3. Explore Four Areas • What is the source of the artistic impulse? • What is ‘art’? • What is the role of the arts in God’s world? • Battle for the arts

4. 1. Source of Artistic Impulse • Grounded in the creative and imaginative impulse that is part of image of God

5. As image-bearer of God, man possesses the possibility both to create something beautiful, and to delight in it’ (Abraham Kuyper). People were created by God as aesthetic creatures possessed of a capacity for beauty, craving the expression of their experiences and insights (Leland Ryken).

6. How then can [humanity] be said to resemble God? Is it his immortal soul, his rationality, his self-consciousness, his free will, or what, that gives him a claim to this rather startling distinction? A case may be argued for all these elements in the complex nature of man. But had the author of Genesis anything particular in mind? . . . The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and ability to make things (Dorothy Sayers).

7. 1. Source of Artistic Impulse • Grounded in the creative and imaginative impulse that is part of image of God • Grounded in the task God has given to be good stewards and develop our and world’s potential

8. 2. What is art? Create a world in which: • Human experience or world is presented for consideration (see) ‘My task . . . is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all to make you see.’ (Joseph Conrad) ‘The function of the arts is to heighten our awareness and perception of life by making us vicariously live in it.’ (Leland Ryken)

9. 2. What is art? Create a world in which: • Human experience or world is presented for consideration (see) • Human experience or world is simplified

10. Story or painting is a simplified world in which all the irrelevant details are removed; focus on subject to see with heightened clarity. • ‘The world of the literary imagination is a highly organized version of the real world. It is a world in which images, characters, and story patterns are presented stripped of distracting complexities’ (Ryken).

11. ‘We all know that Art is not truth. Art is the lie that makes us realize the truth.’ (Picasso) ‘The imagination . . . plays the game of make-believe. It simplifies and heightens reality. . . . The artistic imagination is a window to reality.’ (Leland Ryken)

12. 2. What is art? Create a world in which: • Human experience or world is presented for consideration (see) • Human experience or world is simplified • Human experience or world is interpreted (see as)

13. ‘To tell a story is to create a world, adopt an attitude, suggest a behaviour.’ (John Shea) ‘All great artists have a theme, an idea of life profoundly felt and founded in some personal and compelling experience. . . . A novelist, therefore, can give only . . . truth with an angle. (Joyce Cary)

14. ‘Artists aim to make the audience share their vision—to see what they see, feel what they feel, and interpret life as they do.’ (Ryken) ‘The artists . . . can transmute . . . reality into the order of significant form only in accordance with what are his most fundamental beliefs about what is radically significant in life.’ (Nathan Scott)

15. ‘Literary reality is a carefully framed and controlled kind of actuality, with every element displaying the artist’s own beliefs, his own values. His choice of subject matter and his treatment of it are evidences of his attitudes.’ (Keith McKean)

16. 2. What is art? Create a world: • Human experience or world is presented for consideration (see) • Human experience or world is simplified • Human experience or world is interpreted (see as) • Shaped by artistic techniques

17. ‘Art takes real life as its subject, but the imagination of the artist transforms those materials in keeping with the conventions of art.’ ‘Art does not try to give a photographic copy of life; it rearranges the materials of life in order to give us a heightened perception of its qualities. Art is life at the remove of imaginative form.’ ‘Method of art is to incarnate meaning in concrete form, signs, images, symbols. We enter the world of our imaginations.’ -Ryken

18. 3. What is the role of arts in God’s world? • Delight, enjoyment, entertainment ‘That is how it is with poetry: created and developed to give joy to human hearts.’ (Horace) ‘The arts tell us a lot about human experience, but they also exist to be delightful in themselves.’ (Ryken)

19. ‘Art needs no justification.’ (Rookmaker) • As God’s image created to delight in and enjoy beauty, harmony, etc. ‘A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. . . . It begins in delight . . . and ends in a clarification of life.’ (Robert Frost)

20. 3. What is the role of arts in God’s world? • Delight, enjoyment, entertainment • Deepens and broadens an understanding of ourselves, world, others

21. Deepens insight ‘The function of the arts is to heighten our awareness and perception of life by making us vicariously live in it.’ (Ryken)

22. ‘The grand power of poetry [also other arts] is its power of so dealing with things as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense of them, and of our relations with them. When this sense is awakened in us, . . . we feel ourselves to be in contact with the essential nature of those objects . . . (Matthew Arnold).

23. Imagination enables us to understand world in way reason does not! ‘The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the imagination. . . . The constructs of the imagination tell us things about human life that we don’t get in any other way.’ (Northrop Frye)

24. Also broadens insight ‘When we are at play, or looking at a painting or a statue, or reading a story, the imaginary work must have such an effect on us that it enlarges our own sense of reality.’ (Madelein L’Engle)

25. ‘We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. Each of us by nature sees the whole world from one point of view with a perspective and a selectiveness peculiar to himself. . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own. . . . We demand windows. . . . This, so far as I can see, is the specific value or good of literature. . . .; it admits us to experiences other than our own. (C.S. Lewis)

26. 3. What is the role of arts in God’s world? • Delight, enjoyment, entertainment • Deepens and broadens an understanding of ourselves, world, others • Expression of creative impulse • Nourishes the imagination

27. Role of the Artist 'To become an artist means that you become a professional imaginator in order to help your handicapped, unimaginative neighbour. Our artistic profession is meant to give voice, eyes, ears and tactile sense to those who are underdeveloped toward such rich nuances of meaning in God's creation‘ (Cal Seerveld).

28. We will live out of our imaginations . . . so they had better be nourished in a healthy way! ‘. . . we are far more image-making and image-using creatures than we usually think ourselves to be. . . We are guided by images in our minds . . . The human is a being who grasps and shapes reality . . . with the aid of great images, metaphors, and analogies.’ (H. Richard Niebuhr) ‘Pre-conceptual sensing’ ‘non-verbal cognition’ ‘the right side of the brain’

29. 4. Battle for Imagination and Arts ‘Our leisure, even our play, is a matter of serious concern. There is no neutral ground in the universe; every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan. . . . It is a serious matter to choose wholesome recreations.’ (C.S. Lewis)

30. ‘One of the great tragedies of our day is that people do not know how to use their leisure time in enriching ways.’ (Ryken) Much leisure time: boredom, search for distraction, fear of spending time by oneself, sensuality, escape into comedy, violence, and the appeal of horror. (Paul Elmen)