 |
|
Poet and biographer Paul Mariani
Features
Gallery Watch Message Board ImageNews |
|
FeaturesThe SPU MFA on YouTube
Click here to watch. Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life by Paul Mariani
Click here to buy the book. To read an Image web-exclusive interview in which Paul Mariani discusses the book, click here. Tim Lowly: Chasing Brother Angel
Click here to go to Tim Lowly's website. From there you can order the CD from his online store and also click through to his MySpace site. To read Image's Artist of the Month feature on Tim, click here, and for the full essay on Tim from issue #7 click here. Domestic Vision: Twenty-five Years of the Art of Joel Sheesley, edited by Gregg Hertzlieb
Buy the book here. Imagination and the Journey of Faith by Sandra M. Levy
Click here to buy the book. Gallery Watch Maria Tarruella: Hope
For more information, visit the gallery's website. Message BoardIf you have information other ImageUpdate readers might find interesting, share it here! Do you have a question that you hope a member of the ImageUpdate community might have the answer to? Ask it here. Have your messages posted by sending an e-mail to gwolfe@spu.edu. A Retreat for Pastors and Lay Ministers to Artists, April 20-23, 2009 Set in the beautiful landscape of the Hill Country of Texas, this retreat welcomes all who are in the business of caring for artists. Led by David Taylor, Mako Fujimura, Brian Moss, and Steven Purcell, the retreat will explore three specific topics: 1) Our own preparation as pastors, 2) the pastoring of the artist as a person, and 3) the pastoring of the artist as a worker. Whether you're a pastor or a teacher or a lifelong friend of artists, what connects us all is a sense of call; we feel called by God to shepherd artists. We invite you to join your kindred for three days of talking, playing, eating, resting, and praying on behalf of our artist brothers and sisters who are serving the church and the world. Where: the Laity Lodge. When: April 20-23. How much: $285 (includes meals and lodging). Click here for more information, and go to schedules/reservations to register. ImageNews -- The Scoop on Our Programs Application Deadline for the Milton Center Postgraduate Fellowship: March 15 The Milton Center postgraduate fellowship brings emerging writers of Christian commitment to Image, where their primary goal is to complete their first book-length manuscript in fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction. During their time at the Center, fellows will have a rich experience of literary and spiritual community; they will interact with the editorial staff of Image and the English department at Seattle Pacific University, participate in the Friday writer's workshop, and enjoy the lively literary scene in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. For more information and to download an application, click here. Scholarships to the Glen Workshop
The final deadline for applications is March 15, and all applicants will be notified by April 1. For more details, go to the Glen Scholarships page. See you in Santa Fe! Image Readings: Margaret Gibson Click here to listen. The 2009 Florence Seminar Register Now for the 2009 Glen Workshop, "Fully Human: Art and the Religious Sense" July 26 – August 2, 2009
A brochure will be printed and mailed in mid-January. If you are on the Image subscriber list, you'll automatically receive a brochure. If you'd like to have one mailed to you, send us an e-mail by clicking here. Subscribe to Image in Print and Get More Art, Fiction, Poetry, Essays, Interviews, and Every Good Thing If you like reading about great new art and writing inspired by faith in ImageUpdate, and you're ready to get down to reading and seeing the stuff itself, it's time to subscribe to Image. Each quarter our editors comb the world of art and letters to bring you our favorite new work--work that respects transcendent mystery as well as the gritty truth of the material world that bears the divine imprint. A one-year subscription gets you four beautifully produced issues delivered right to your door. Ninety percent of the journal's content is not available on our website, but only through what we call "the sacrament of print." Click here to get the magazine Terry Tempest Williams calls "evocative and inspiring" and Bret Lott calls "the most meaningful literary journal being produced today." ImageUpdatePublisher: Gregory WolfeManaging Editor: Beth Bevis Layout: Anna Johnson Contributors: Beth Bevis, Anna Johnson, Julie Mullins, and Gregory Wolfe ImageUpdate is the biweekly e-mail newsletter from Image, a quarterly print journal that explores the relationship between Judeo-Christian faith and art through contemporary fiction, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, film, music, and dance. Each issue also features interviews, memoirs, essays, and reviews. ImageUpdate brings you news about books, CDs, organizations, websites, conferences, exhibitions, and tours--all of which inhabit the intersection between faith and imagination. ImageUpdate will also notify you whenever a new issue of Image is printed, an Image event is upcoming, or new content is posted to our website. Copyright © 2009 Center for Religious Humanism. All rights reserved. |
|
The 
Gerard Manley Hopkins by poet and biographer Paul Mariani is a dense and ambitious book that earns its subtitle: A Life. Mariani's biography of Hopkins is not the first, but being both a poet and a Catholic himself, Mariani is uniquely suited to the task of emphasizing both the poems themselves and the importance of Hopkins's Catholic faith. He begins the biography with Hopkins's years at Oxford when he is wrestling with a desire to become Catholic. This focus on Hopkins's "going over to Rome" is necessary to the rest of the story, because it is Hopkins's religious belief that ultimately informs his poetic vision, his devotion to the sacraments of the church that sheds light on his trust in the beauty and goodness of the physical earth and which ultimately leads him to write the poetry that Mariani describes as "lettered and saturated with a language shimmering with the possibilities of a sacramental vision of the world around us." With an attentiveness to the quotidian reminiscent of Hopkins himself, Mariani searches out the details--in Hopkins's journals and letters written while at Oxford, while teaching young Jesuits, and during the process of taking of his vows. Mariani provides very little commentary on the events he relates; instead, he writes in the present tense, allowing us to simply live the moments along with Hopkins, to experience his delight as he catches the inscape of a horse and formulates his ideas about sprung rhythm, as he questions his calling and struggles with depression. And through his journals, Mariani presents us with gems like this: "Wonderful downpour of leaf: when the morning sun began to melt the frost they fell at one touch and in a few minutes a whole tree was flung of them; they lay masking and papering the ground at the foot. Then the tree seems to be looking down on its cast self." Thus, long before Hopkins embraces his poetic calling, we glimpse in his journals and letters early hints of a tendency to stare at and render the dappled world in his odd and lovely prose. What interpretation Mariani does give he provides by recapitulating lines of Hopkins's poetry so that they become tiny echoes or foreshadowings of Hopkins's life; by the time we get to his poetry, we are already steeped in it. And Mariani's readings of Hopkins's poems are elegant, deep explorations rather than critical analyses. He's at his best when he's riffing on some line of a Hopkins poem, when the biographer's prose is so saturated with his subject's poetry, so immersed in the poet's mind, that it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
Those familiar with the visual art scene may have come across the work of Chicago painter Tim Lowly, who was featured way back in Image 
The theme of domesticity is at the heart of Joel Sheesley's work. With his lucid technical mastery and wonderfully strange sense of composition, he paints canvases that draw out the profound weirdness of the everyday. His eye is generous; his portraits of suburbanites are made with a deadly-clear perception but also a full and loving sympathy. Domestic Vision--a meditation on a retrospective of Sheesley's work shown recently at the Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University--probes the contours of home as a place where the mundane bumps up against sudden truths only half-seen. In a series of essays, five art historians enter the space of Sheesley's domestic worlds, drawing out details and context that give the viewer a richer experience of the paintings themselves (assembled in beautiful, full-page sharpness at the back of the book). Under their careful eye, meaning emerges in the ordinary yet surreal tableaus: a couple searches for something unseen near a pool; figures stand on the threshold of doors or arrested at their bedroom windows; light reflected down hallways in glass or mirrors blurs layered images. As Wayne Roosa writes in his essay, humans "are simultaneously at home and unaware inside our being, and detached from it as if watching ourselves from the outside"--a self-consciousness that in Sheesley's work becomes the space where we are called out of ourselves into relationship with the mysterious Other. For Sheesley, home is not an ironic distraction from truth. It is the testing ground where we learn how we are fitted to this world, how we have fit the world to ourselves, and how we are fit for one another.
Sandra M. Levy, an Episcopal priest and a clinical psychologist, explores in her new book Imagination and the Journey of Faith a question very close to the collective heart of the Image community: how do we recognize the presence of God through the creation, experience, and interpretation of art? We are certain that we do, but how? Levy delves into the role of imagination in the faith walk--not the wandering, fanciful imagination that has no roots in reality, but the power of the human mind to "transcend the concrete...to receive and respond to God's revelation in our daily lives." Levy leans on the philosophies of many great artists familiar to Image readers, and draws out a common refrain from the heady thrill of the Romantics and the crushing ennui of postmodernists and everyone in between. Why do some people struggle for years with doubt, when faith comes so easily to others? Levy suggests that the asking of that question is in itself an act of faith. Even the recent "postreligious" generation, without the influence of any religious subculture at all, searches for meaning in its art while doubting the existence of meaning. Imagination and the Journey of Faith could be a handbook for both agnostics who view religious art with a reluctant curiosity and Christians wanting to reject the false choice between a religious life and good art. By her own admission, Sandra Levy is not a literary critic, but she writes so vividly that when she detours now and then into specifics of the powerful changes wrought in her own life by art, it seems a natural course. After all, the journey itself is the thing.
White Stone Gallery is pleased to introduce Maria Tarruella, a contemporary artist from Madrid, Spain. This is the artist's United States debut show. Maria Tarruella's rich layered works, which can be almost 7 feet by 7 feet, are collaged and painted using wax, acrylic paint, paper, iron powder, pigments, ashes, and mineral powder on raw linen canvas, each element having an intended purpose and meaning. Tarruella's aim is to bring attention to God's presence found in the quotidian. Tarruella creates a visual experience that changes as you move through the room. Some elements are only visible from certain angles. One layer, which looks like wind washing over the canvas, is only visible in the dark. The exhibition, Hope, which includes some of Tarruella's largest works, will be on display at White Stone Gallery in Philadelphia February 27-March 29, with an opening reception on February 27 and a talk on February 28.
Thought about attending the Glen Workshop? Cursed the economic fate that prevented you from going? Every year our generous donors help give a leg-up to Glen Workshop participants. This year, we have scholarships to offer writers, artists, and songwriters thanks to such generous donors as singer-songwriter Kate Campbell, Chrysostom, The Master's Artist, and City in Focus of Vancouver B.C., which is offering a scholarship to a Canadian attendee. Special Note: Because workshops are filling fast, we've tweaked our scholarship policy. You do not need to send a $100 deposit to apply for a scholarship. You may apply to any class, even if it's closed for registration (see the course descriptions 
This month, hear from poet and memoirist Margaret Gibson on Image Readings. To spend time in the poetry of Margaret Gibson is to be drawn into an especially vibrant kind of stillness. The sense of stillness is almost shocking, the way it trembles with anticipation. Through precise, tender, and earthy language, through meditations of the cycles of the natural world and our place in it, her poems move us into the presence of the holy. 
On September 13-20, 2009, Image will gather a small group of inquirers in Florence and Rome to explore the life and achievements of the sculptor, painter, architect, and poet, Michelangelo Buonarroti. In his works we see the dignity of humanity and its fall, the emergence of the individual and the dangers of individualism, and a fierce struggle to harmonize beauty with goodness and truth. Yet for all the conflict and tension in his work, Michelangelo left us with exquisite images of how God's grace can transform human experience. In Image's twentieth anniversary year, we'll return to Italy to explore how Michelangelo's incarnational vision can inform our own efforts to continue bringing about cultural transformation in our time. Our week together in Italy will begin with a couple days in Rome, where we will visit the Vatican and other sites associated with Michelangelo. The remainder of the week will be spent in Florence, where we will visit the great churches and museums featuring the artist and enjoy exquisite meals at restaurants in the city and the surrounding area.
If you're interested, visit the Florence Seminar 
The Glen Workshop is an illuminating conference on the arts and religion, where participants practice and strengthen their craft and vision in community. This weeklong event combines the best elements of a workshop, an arts festival, and a symposium. By exploring this year's theme, "Fully Human: Art and the Religious Sense," participants will share a common ground for discussion during the week. Morning workshops are small enough to allow the faculty to give close attention to each participant--to beginners as well as those advanced in their craft. This year's faculty includes poets Marilyn Nelson and B.H Fairchild, fiction writer Valerie Sayers, sculptor Lynn Aldrich, illustrator Barry Moser, painter Joel Sheesley, playwright Mark St. Germain, musicians Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist of Over the Rhine, and spiritual writer Lauren Winner. A seminar class, "Culture Making: Meaning in the Material World" will be led by Andy Crouch. For artists and non-artists alike, the seminar is a forum to explore the workshop theme in more depth through discussion and in-class creativity. Afternoons and evenings at the Glen feature faculty readings, lectures, and presentations. Each evening concludes with an ecumenical worship service that incorporates the arts, led by pastor Debbie Blue. Free time offers participants opportunities for writing, conversation, hiking, and exploring the stunning scenery and cultural treasures in and around Santa Fe. Surrounded by the stark, dramatic beauty of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the Glen is hosted at St. John's College campus and is within easy reach of the rich cultural, artistic, and spiritual traditions of northern New Mexico. Please note that class sizes are limited: don't wait too long to register!
To register for the Glen Workshop, or to find out more information, click 
