Still Points: The Quiet Spaces of Wolfgang Laib
By Essay Issue 53
Let us start from one admitted fact: if prayer, meditation, and contemplation were once taken for granted as central realities in human life everywhere, they are so no longer. They are regarded, even by believers, as somehow marginal and secondary: what counts is getting things done. ————-—Thomas Merton, from Contemplation in a World of Action…
Read MoreA Geology of the Sacred: Stephen Cox Reopens the Ancient Quarries
By Essay Issue 55
MY ATTENTION WANDERED from the closely printed pages of my first Bible, inscribed for darling Thomas from Gran April 1943, to its all too few illustrations. This was wartime England, with rationing. The picture pages showed brightly lit scenes of temple worship furnished, as it were, from Harrods. Jesus was turned out in clothes better…
Read MoreBarry Krammes: Shepherd of the Wasteland
By Essay Issue 55
WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I found, embedded in one of my parents’ liqueur bottles, a tiny brass wine goblet, a decorative marketing ploy. The toy-like quality of the goblet and the forbidden place I found it made it irresistible to me. I’ve kept it through the years: too small to display but too precious…
Read MoreOliver Barratt: Poetry of the Void
By Essay Issue 57
THE PHERICHE CLINIC clings to a windswept, rocky plateau two day’s hike below Everest Base Camp. Dwarfed by the majestic Himalayan peaks that surround it, this collection of low stone buildings is the highest medical clinic in the world, offering climbers and those who live there the care and expert treatment that are essential in…
Read MoreGravity and Grace: The Art of Richard Serra
By Essay Issue 57
RICHARD SERRA’S Torqued Ellipse I and Torqued Ellipse II (1996-97), now permanently installed at Dia:Beacon, remind me of Simone Weil’s axiom that “All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by the laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception” [see Plate 1]. These lines, from the opening of her book…
Read MoreAltars to the Unknown God: Modern Art for Modern Christians
By Essay Issue 59
A longer version of this essay appears as the introduction to God in the Gallery: A Christian Approach to Modern Art, forthcoming this fall from Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group, copyright 2008. For my wife, Kerri, and children, Daniel, Morgan, and Jacob WE THINK WE KNOW what art is. And that…
Read MoreFour Corners: Painters Frame Contemporary Painting
By Essay Issue 60
Painting has died and been resurrected several times in recent decades. Challenged by theory-laden conversations about art’s “post-medium” condition and a welter of deconstructionist propositions, painting seems nevertheless to have thrived in the face of adversity. Some would say it remains as manifold and imaginative as ever. In order to take its pulse, Image asked…
Read MoreDesire and Longing: Image Artists after Twenty Years
By Essay Issue 60
GREG WOLFE, Image founder, editor, publisher—and as I occasionally like to tease, indefatigable empire builder—has written many provocative essays. One of my favorites is “The Christian Writer in a Fragmented Culture,” which appeared in issue 7 in 1994. In the beginning of the essay, Greg muses on the dilemma of publishing a journal highlighting the intersection of…
Read MoreActive Sight: Vija Celmins and Jackson Pollock from Pictorialism to Perception
By Essay Issue 59
ON MAY 16 of this year, Night Sky #2 by Vija Celmins, on view at the 2008 Carnegie International at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art, was vandalized by one of the museum’s own security guards, who used a key to cut a gouge down the painting’s middle, damaging it beyond repair. While this act was…
Read MoreNight Vision: Jacques Maritain and the Meaning of Art
By Essay Issue 61
THE PEOPLE WE CALL artists have always gone into a dark space. A space turned inside-out. Not a somber space, where darkness is sadness, but a mysterious one—like the nighttime darkness of the imaginative child who marches golden caravans across his bedroom ceiling. The poet Homer, archetype of artists, was famously blind—yet out from his…
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