Profound Faith, Profound Beauty: The Life and Art of Sadao Watanabe
By Essay Issue 74
Sadao Watanabe (1913-96) was a printmaker celebrated internationally for his depictions of biblical subjects using traditional Japanese techniques. A longer version of this essay will appear in Beauty Given by Grace: The Biblical Prints of Sadao Watanabe, published by Square Halo Books in conjunction with a traveling exhibit sponsored by Christians in the Visual Arts.…
Read MoreArt
By Essay Issue 75
The Word-Soaked World Troubling the Lexicon of Art and Faith Since 1989, Image has hosted a conversation at the nexus of art and faith among writers and artists in all forms. As the conversation has evolved, certain words have cropped up again and again: Beauty. Mystery. Presence. For this issue, we invited a handful of…
Read MorePoetic Justice
By Essay Issue 74
The following is adapted from an address given at the Wild Goose Festival in Corvallis, Oregon, on September 1, 2012. BEFORE I CAME DOWN here to deliver this talk on how art and social justice should—and shouldn’t—mix, I posted on Facebook that I was preparing by reading the works of various writers. One commenter singled…
Read MoreDecay and Resurrection
By Essay Issue 76
Decay and Resurrection: An Engineer on the Ecosystem of Abandoned Buildings THERE’S A DENTIST’S OFFICE captured in photographs that, along with a number of companion images, got quite a bit of circulation in print and on the internet a few years back. The narrow, confined operating room, nested high in an office tower, is…
Read MorePeter Howson and the Harrowing of Hell
By Essay Issue 76
AMID THE USUAL eclectic lower Manhattan gallery offerings of Swiss cow-decorated milk bottles, comic-book art of the Oism faith, and an installation of banners with bankrupt bank logos, the opening of the exhibition Redemption at Flowers in Chelsea last spring, featuring four huge oil paintings of Christ’s death and resurrection by Scottish artist Peter Howson, qualified as…
Read MoreOf Mind and Matter
By Essay Issue 75
Of Mind and Matter The Art of Terry Maker GALLERY-GOERS who stumbled unaware into Reckoning, a 2012 exhibition at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, could be forgiven for assuming that they were viewing a group show, not a retrospective of the work of Terry Maker. Nearly ten thousand feet of gallery space overflowed…
Read MoreAllegorical Strays: The Art and Craft of James Mellick
By Essay Issue 79
AS YOU ARE A SAVVY and a dedicated reader, here for your delectation is a quick quiz in the pestering style of the SAT analogy, but more akin in spirit to Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. If critics from the pre-modern period considered craft to be the opposite of art (craft vs.…
Read MoreFrom Specimen to Spectacle: The Unruly Art of Dayton Castleman
By Essay Issue 80
The spectator experiences the phenomenon of transmutation; through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an actual transubstantiation takes place…. —Marcel Duchamp BACK WHEN MY KIDS were very young and I rarely had a moment to myself, I once managed…
Read MoreMirrormind: Lia Chavez and the Artistic Process
By Essay Issue 80
Neither the action nor the actors can be anticipated…. They begin as an unknown adventure in an unknown space. —Mark Rothko, 1947 OUR ENCOUNTER with reality is endlessly generative. Both Subject and Object, the contemplative and the contemplated, are replete with a beautiful, orderly complexity. The authentic artwork—glittering, effulgent with metaphysical…
Read MoreLascaux
By Poetry Issue 80
The photographs are separated by the turn of the page, so that to look at one is to conceal the other. In the first, reindeer scatter westward, their antlers unblooming trees upon the cave’s wall, their hooves roots snaking through barren rock, seeking distant water. In the second, the scene is repeated, but darkly, stripped…
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