8 Concepts of Art

Calvin Seerveld:

One misreads the knowledge won artistically if one thinks the painting or sculpture is simply a carbon copy of what is visible.

When the norm of allusively is transgressed the artwork becomes a tract.

Fundamentally art is…like a flower, like a jewel or an imaginative tear or a smile you giveaway to your neighbor, for Christ’s sake.

Walter Brueggemann

This is why poetry is so important; because the poetry just keeps opening and  opening and opening whereas the doctrinal practice of the church is always to close and close and close until you’re left with nothing that has transformative power.

C.S. Lewis:

This is one of the functions of art: To present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude.

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past— are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

Jean-Jacques von Allmen:

Art is “basically the longing of things for liturgical self-expression, to find their justification in the praise for which they were created.” 

Makoto Fujimara:

A grieving mother drove over 11 hrs to see my exhibit at Berry College Martha Berry Museum. She stood in front of my paintings and wept for a young son she lost only a week back. Art is a portal into the New, and I am grateful and humbled by these moments.