Confession: I don’t “get” a lot of visual art. This is a secret confession, however, so please don’t tell the members of our church or the arts center that is our ministry to the community. I don’t get it for a number of reasons.
First, I’m impatient. I’m a skimmer when it comes to information — collecting data and letting whatever I see, hear and smell, taste and touch spark ideas, questions and dreams. That means it’s difficult for me to stop and really spend time with a painting if it doesn’t immediately grab my interest or illicit some sort of personal gut reaction.
Lisa Cole Smith
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Second, I don’t like feeling stupid. I don’t like not understanding the artist’s personal visual language or the context in which they are working. Many times without that information it isn’t possible to understand the artist’s intent and many times that’s exactly how they want it.
I had the exhausting yet good fortune to have parents who took my brother and me to museums all over the world. Usually, we would try to see several in one day in order to make the most of the short time we had in that city. Some of the larger ones have thousands of pieces under their roofs. So in order to accomplish such feats one must master the art of scanning. It’s simple. Imagine your eyes are the little machines used at the grocery store to scan prices and the paintings, sculptures and artifacts are bar codes. You walk past a piece of art, scan it with your eyes, absorb what you immediately can, say “Huh, interesting” and move on to the next piece. The more you can scan in a day the more you can say you have “seen.” Fortunately, there are pieces that speak to you on a personal level. They grab you and make you stop for a second look because they remind you of something or capture a feeling you are intimately familiar with. But most don’t.
This is a shame, because often the most difficult pieces to grasp have the most profound things to say. During Advent, our gallery exhibited the work of artist Deborah Sokolove. Deborah is director of the Henry Luce III Center for the Arts and Religion at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. I have been fortunate to learn about visual worship, art and even a little curating from Deborah. She has been a mentor and one of several artists who have taught me how to see. So hopefully, she will not be offended when I say that when I first saw her exhibit, “Considering Incarnation,” I didn’t get it. Deborah’s work is liturgical and devotional so it is filled with personal symbols for biblical themes. As much as I wanted a key to what each symbol meant to her — the paintings weren’t telling.
I needed to give this more than a scan. So I took a deep breath, stood with both feet planted on the floor, shoulders back — and looked. After fighting the urge to demand meaning from each piece, I resolved to just be with them and make the most elementary of observations. “What do you see?” I asked myself. And the answers came back simply: “I see hands, palm branches, something that looks like a snake; only it has wings. And so on. I stood before each of the nine pieces and just took notice of them.
Then I asked God what he might have to say in all of this. I thought about the symbols in relation to the nativity story and began to enter into the Bible account in a new way. Hands painted all over the canvas made me think about God’s hand in my life. A pelican and a stork representing Mary and Elizabeth made me think how bizarre and profound their meeting must have been. I pondered how evil was present every step of the way in that little snake in the lower left hand corner of every piece. In flight to Egypt the gorgeously luscious blue wings of angels overshadowed all danger. That image made me feel my life was connected to Christ’s birth as well. I experience the sense of presence in those painted wings, not just in the ancient account, but in every step I take.
After over an hour of confused contemplation, I realized Deborah’s difficult paintings had given me a gift. My reward for turning off my scanner and practicing silent presence was the realization that I had been praying. This was visual prayer. I had been still long enough to actually look and listen. For the first time that Advent season, I had truly considered the Incarnation.
Lisa Cole Smith ([email protected]) is pastor of Convergence, a Baptist community of faith in Alexandria, Va. To see “Considering Incarnation” online visit www.dsokolove.com.