Visionism

VISIONISM

The Art Based on the Transcendent Light of Greatest Variety in Strongest Unity

Fragments on Wholeness
by Hagen G. Haltern, 2009

Fragment One

Civilization can be saved only by a moral, intellectual, [aesthetical] and spiritual revolution to match the scientific, technological, and economic revolution in which we are living.

Robert Hutchins

The visual arts constitute a vast realm of intelligent human creativity that can make us feel embarrassed in finding the right beginning for an acceptable introduction. After a good number of rejections of my own ideas, I finally was able to see some justification in writing a simple yet necessary miniature on opposition and contrast. Opposition is not a word that we see immediately in a pleasant context. And yet it belongs to the few qualities of the first rank for the development of our intelligence.

We live in a world of necessary opposition and contrast. What we notice, how we react and do create depends entirely on our sense’s discernment and the mind’s awareness of the qualities of opposition and contrast in and between all things. Without opposition and contrast, nothing could be sensed, differentiated or integrated, identified or defined, analyzed or synthesized; in short, intelligent life could not exist.

Most of the texts we read are printed black on white. If a text is printed in the identical white of the paper or background then it becomes illegible for us and ceases to exist for our senses.

Here are three comments by scientists concerning the duality of nature on an atomic level,

This wonderful, well-ordered butterfly or owl-shaped image, this perspective of a chaotic system shows the emergence of a strange attractor, the boundaries that contain chaos. The system never lands in the same place twice. Yet it never exceeds certain boundaries…. The world is far more sensitive than we had ever thought.

Margaret J. Wheatley

Here was one coin with two sides. Here was order, with randomness emerging, and then one step further away was randomness with its own underlying order.

Doyne Farmer

The law-event duality is at the heart of the conflicts which run through the history of ideas in the Western world, starting with the pre-Socratic speculations and continuing right up to our own time through quantum mechanics and relativity. Laws were associated to a continuous unfolding, to intelligibility, to deterministic predictions…. Events imply an element of arbitrariness as they involve discontinuities, probabilities…. We have to face the fact that we live in a dual universe, whose description involves both laws and events, certitudes and probabilities.

Ilya Prigogine

For J.B.S. Haldane nature is “not inly queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

About 50% of uniqueness… (an endless change and metamorphosis of the ever-unique)

…constitute 100% of all natural entities. The American philosopher William (THE ILLUSION OF TECHNIQUE) admitted realistically: “No matter how good your system is, unless there is a place for nature [with its uniqueness] the wind will blow it away. Nature is there, and nature always leaks in.” An exclusive pursuit of uniqueness is easily seen as a chaotic impossibility. The exclusive pursuit of lawfulness is probably a little bit harder to recognize for being equally destructive. If humankind would pursue and value only science and technology and would ignore nature and art and their particular achievement, namely, to fuse laws and uniqueness, then the leftover, ignored and discarded unique aspects of life would pile up more and more in time, until this mountain of “loose gravel” at one point would turn into chaos (uniqueness is not chaos, one—sidedness leads to chaos)—it would flood like a destructive landslide into the purely generalized and thereby doomed human culture or civilization. One extreme would destroy another extreme.

…and about 50% of lawfulness… (a permanent stasis and constancy)

Art is essential for human life. No culture and civilization can exist without art for various reasons. One of them being art’s ability to intercept the ever threatening chaos (of disconnection, separation, fission, explosion, etc.) by fusing law and uniqueness, which is only one positive effect of art. For example, nature and the man-made world (all products of our cultures and civilizations) would be fatally boring through their monotony, without the aspect of uniqueness. What saves us,

is the revelation … of the qualitative differences in the way the world appears to us, differences which, but for art, would remain the eternal secret of each of us. Only by art can we get outside ourselves, know what another sees of his universe, which is not the same as ours and the different views which would otherwise have remained as unknown to us as those there may be on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms, and as many as there are original artists, just so many worlds have we at our disposal, differing more widely from one another than those that roll through infinite space, and years after allowing the glowing center from which they emanated has been extinguished, be it called Rembrandt or Vermeer, they continue to send us their own rays of light.

Marcel Proust

And in cooperation with a wiser and more humble science, religion, technology, etc. supports a livable cosmos.

Today’s rational minds have a hard time with a theory that proclaims the necessity of the unique—and that uniqueness is just as important as lawfulness. Samuel Colman who wrote the marvelous book NATURE’S HARMONIC UNITY tells us,

Nature herself is rarely exact in every portion of any one flower, [this admission hurts him and thus he looks for a painkiller] yet if she presents us with an object numbered by five, such as the laurel blossom, for instance, no possible reasoning offered can change the obvious fact that she intended the form to be pentagonal even if it is several degrees removed from a symmetrical measurement, for the law of uniform growth is expressed by the average of geometric correlations and not by single disconnected measurements. [Nevertheless his good sense for truth admits again] However exact her principles may be in the abstract, or however clearly to be proven by scientific methods, it is in the appearance [including uniqueness] that she seems to take most delight.

Samuel Colman is torn back and forth by forces that are very real, in fact, omnipresent in all things and beings. Indeed, Colman is correct, the natural tendency for 50% lawfulness doesn’t end there, but continues to aim for a perfection in a 100% lawfulness. And so does its diametrically opposed tendency for 50% uniqueness—which uniqueness is driven to accomplish simultaneously a perfect 100% uniqueness. The realization of these tendencies would be of fatal consequence in our physical world. Fortunately, the dominating law of balanced opposition has priority and stops now the two opposing tendencies from any advancement toward 100% in our physical world. However, human beings have agency, can destroy natural balances, and reek havoc on nature and humankind. This insight helps us to see the necessity for transcendent vision and faithful adherence to its life-saving truth—and wait patiently and peacefully until God leads us into that envisioned wholeness. In fact, “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18).

The opportunity to see both opposing tendencies with 100% perfection each—which is actually a 200% situation—can only happen in a spiritual realm or supernatural world that transcends our physical world. That spiritual progress needs very different qualities. A much more sublimated substance with a yet unknown character of transparency and interpenetration and much purer eyes begin gently to announce their much needed presence.

“All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes” (Doctrine & Covenants 131:7). Albeit, the Russian author A. Solzhenitsyn is correct, it is time “to rise to a new height of vision.”

Simple soap bubbles fascinate us because in them we see geometrical spheres with ever-changing unique forms and colors on their surface, the whole sphere being of a very light, transparent and ephemeral nature.

Vision precedes momentum; it shows us the indispensable direction and way. What good are the blind leading the blind?

We long for an ideal and transcendent vision—but we are quite hesitant to pay the due price for it. In fact, and in spite of our yearning, too many don’t believe in the possible existence of an actual, significant and spiritual vision. And where there is no faith—the miracle of vision cannot happen, no matter how strong our desire, or necessity, for vision may be.

Goethe reminds us, “If we don’t know where we are going, we’ll go too far.” What this means in an age of hydrogen bombs is unimaginable horror.

The fact may be painful to accept, but the world of mere human intelligence remains forever a world without unity. We only need to collect statements made by various artists, critics and philosophers and it becomes obvious that any opinion or conviction in art is met by its exact opposite, creating a world of hopelessly conflicting contradictions, and beyond art in all walks of life,

Pro	Contra
Art is the mediation between God and man.	It’s all color and surface, that’s all.
And always choose the most beautiful things.	Beauty is dead.
Be guided by feeling alone.	Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments.
[So and so] is one of the few artists working today who opens up the window into eternity and spiritual clairvoyance—to which our society has been closed for a long time.	Aesthetic experience is an end in itself.
The art of the future will give form to our scientific convictions; this is our religion and our truth, and it is profound and weighty enough to produce the greatest style and the greatest reevaluation of form that the world has ever seen.	There is no ultimate truth. I am against systems; the most acceptable system is on principle to have none. All pictoral or plastic works are useless: let it then be a monstrosity that frightens servile minds.
Something escapes us: we escape ourselves in a process of no return, we have missed a certain point for turning back and have entered a universe of irreversible processes that nevertheless have no direction at all.	Each of us is now drawn, in one way or another, toward a great vision. It is more than a vision. It is an emerging force. It is the next step in our evolutionary journey.
Logic is always wrong. Its chains kill. Morality creates atrophy like every plague produced by intelligence. The control of morality and logic has inflicted us with impassivity in the presence of policemen—who are the cause of slavery—putrid rats infecting the bowels of the bourgeoisie. Let each man proclaim: there is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished. We must sweep and clean—no pity. After the carnage we still retain a hope of purified mankind. Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is DADA.	All my experience as a psychologist leads me to the conclusion that a sense of reverence is necessary for psychological health. If a person has no sense of reverence, no feeling that there is anyone or anything that inspires awe, it cuts the conscious personality off completely from the nourishing springs of the unconscious. It is ironic, then, that so much of our modern culture is aimed at eradicating all reverence, all respect for the high truths and qualities that inspire a feeling of awe and worship in the human soul.
I have no other wish than a close fusion with nature. We must always take from nature what we paint. I believe with you, that it is of the greatest importance for a painter always to have his mind upon nature, as the star by which he is to steer to excellence in his art. Art is not a different thing from nature, nor can it pass beyond nature’s boundaries. Imitate nature.	A picture is something which requires as much knavery, trickery, and deceit as the perpetration of a crime. The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he must make others see. Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things. A picture is first of all a product of the imagination of the artist; it must never be a copy.
Believe me, everything comes from the universal; one must partake in order to give life.	I work as if no art had ever been made before me, as if I had never learned anything. I am the first man to do sculpture.

Philippe de Montebello, a former director of the Metropolitan Museum of New York City holds the opinion that “There is no consensus about anything today.”

This sadly correct observation of our humankind’s present state of disintegration could be used one day in the future to serve as the centerpiece for a preface of a book on World War III. Visions of unified oppositions have nothing to do with idle games that are played in entranced ivory towers. Transcendent visions are in fact a matter of life and death, “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18).

Fragment Two

Today’s scientists tell us that our human eye and natural sense of sight (vision) processes ten times the amount of bytes of information than our next strongest sense. Obviously, seeing ranks very highly among our physiological abilities that keep our most complex organisms alive. Contrasting opposites allow us to know facts. The sustained observation of facts allows us to see finally the one in many, and understand laws—which will be weighed soon by our growing wisdom and things will not be produced anymore just because we can.

Seeing light and its colors stimulate our lives to grow into greater complexity and intelligence. Unconscious, yet intuitive playing is the beginning of very serious, early child-work.

Art surprises us constantly with innovative combinations of colors and forms because all elements and principles exist in infinite variety. Likewise, every artist presents a different and unique worldview—providing us with a neverending radiance of stimulating and life-enhancing images.

Behind a simple word, like “point”, which is an easy and useful construct, we can find an entire world of endless variety of points (spot, patch, splash, mark, dot, splatter, dapple, stipple, drip, drop, smear, smudge, etc.) Here are a few samples of points.

[ points diagram - 1pg ]

[ Lines diagrams - 2pgs ]

After some meditation we realize that all visual elements of art, like points, lines, planes, etc., and all principles of organization, like geometry, perspective, composition, etc., appear to us in the form of particular manifestations of light, which are immediately processed and interpreted by our eyes and brains the moment they enter into our bodies. When light disappears, so vanishes the entire visual world. The necessity for light in the visual arts presents us a challenging: which kind of light allows us to create a progressive, excellent, perhaps even supreme style of art? Is it sunlight, electric light, the light of our imagination, or some other kind of light?

Quite often the best painters show three typical and major phases in the handling of light in their drawings, prints and paintings, etc.

1. The early works show a somewhat academic yet elementary treatment of light. A relatively dark, heavy and earthy realism is sought for and expressed. The artist depends on nature, serves nature. Light comes from a particular source, like the sun, a candle, a fire etc.

2. In the middle of their lives the artists have gained more detachment from nature’s allurement, demand and dictum. The artists find their personal style beyond class assignments like perspective or composition. They blend an inner world of strong ideas and meaningful theories with the outer appearance of things. Their works interpret life with increased color and light intensity and a more personal handwriting. The outer light is balanced by an inner mental theory of light.

3. In their advanced or old age the painter’s lights and colors almost dissolve realism and become a radiant metaphor for the spiritual, transcendent and supernatural aspects of light. The emphasis has turned from an academic record of an outer appearance to a manifestation of an inner, spiritual light, which has become now the dominant element in the paintings.

The American painter Ken Wilbur interprets the three steps of development in the visual arts with these words:

According to the world’s great spiritual traditions, men and women possess at least three different modes of knowing: the eye of flesh, which discloses the material, concrete, and sensuous world; the eye of mind, which discloses the symbolic, conceptual, and linguistic world; and the eye of contemplation, which discloses the spiritual and transcendental world. These are not three different worlds, but three different aspects of our own world, disclosed by different modes of knowing and perceiving.

The magnificent works of Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Turner bear indisputable record of this development,

[Michelangelo Picture - 1]

1. The early drawings of the young Michelangelo are a successful blend of down-to-earth realism and heightened idealism. The human bodies in his drawings look corporeal, physically substantial. The lines that form these bodies are weighty and strong. Sometimes they are of an almost metallic hardness, as can be seen in the ink drawing for the “Battle of Cascina”. The character of the lines does not change much, but is almost without variety. The lines are marked by consistency and conformity.

The high rank of the human figure is deeply ingrained in Michelangelo’s nature and he must have been absolutely delighted in learning that it is based on and originates in the divine shape. The value of the human shape comes from God, in whose image we are created. The ultimate in art can never be expressed without the central and essential form of the human figure, a sacred shape. Art historian Hans Sedlmayr confirms the necessity of this point of view:

… this truth that brings us healing power—the thing to which we must have clear and irrefutable certitude, is simply this, that our dream of autonomous man was a disaster, a thing that could only end by destroying us, as we can well see by contemplating the results of that dream, both in nature and in art … under the massive ice of this age of fear, joy still hibernates and retains its germinal life. Yet for its flowering it needs a soil, and there is but one soil that can bring it to fruition—it is the soil of knowledge, the knowledge that we are creatures of God. …

There is only one remedy—to hold fast to the eternal image of man, but this eternal image is a thing that men cannot simply excogitate, for it is not of their making.

Nor is there any means of holding fast in the mind this image, or of seeing it with any clarity, unless we truly believe that man has been created—potentially—in the image of God, and that he has his place in a definite ordering of the world—even though that ordering has been disturbed.
This is our fixed point.

Michelangelo stands by no means alone in his preference of the human shape over all other shapes,

Portraiture is the only thing in painting that moves me to the depths, and makes me feel closer to infinity than anything else.

Vincent van Gogh, 1888

The sight of human forms feeds and comforts me … Sometimes it seems that you can find nothing in a model, then, all at once, a bit of nature shows itself, a strip of flesh becomes visible, and that shred of truth gives the whole truth, and allows itself to be raised by a leap to the absolute principle of things.
The human body is like a walking temple, and like a temple it has a central point around which the volumes place and spread themselves.

Auguste Rodin

Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.

1 Corinthians 3:16,17

[Michelangelo Picture - 2]

2. The drawings of the middle-aged artist, who is more sure of himself, are more relaxed and show an increased range of expression in his lines. The artist uses weightless and free flowing lines that sometimes cohere more strongly and search for form, as well as an immense refinement in certain details. The drawing is sketch and study in one.

[Michelangelo picture - 3]

3. The lines of the last drawings try to depict something that transcends a mere physical vision. More than ever before Michelangelo concentrates on the eternal man—the eternal spirit of man—and he can only find him in the deep contemplation entirely directed towards the passion of Christ. Michelangelo achieved the expression of the essence of man (his eternal, divine, spiritual nature) by very specific artistic means. The lines are not so pinned down like those of his early drawings. Michelangelo creates an immense variety of lines, far beyond anything he had done before. The lines and forms vibrate, pulse, and breathe stronger now. Form is built up and broken down again, lines are lost and found again. The additive and subtractive methods reflect the metabolism of all organic life. Sketch and study become interchangeable. The ambiguity of the non-finito is balanced by a perfection of a certain detail. Academic representation is balanced by a new emphasis on the abstract elements, like the line, which now becomes much more vital in itself. Any degree of realism is possible, any degree of abstraction is possible. The web of lines creates the radiation of a new kind of light. It is spiritual luminescence that glows throughout the bodies from their inside, not from an outer source of light.

In the end, Michelangelo leaves the ideas of the renaissance in favor of a mystic directness to the Spirit of God. Michelangelo shifts from human ideals to the beginnings of divine light, the power of which ruptures the calm equilibrium of a classical style like the Renaissance—reaching into a personal expressiveness beyond Mannerism.

Why did Michelangelo decide, at the end of his life, to turn away from the formal culture that he, more than anyone in that period, had helped to construct and make known?
Why did he turn back as though he were retracting? These are questions to which it is difficult if not impossible to give answers that are not of a spiritual and existential order.

Antonio Paolucci

Even the connoisseurs of Italian Rennaissance art, like Bernard Berenson (1865-1959 A.D.), felt unpleasantly overwhelmed by Michelangelo’s dramatic change, felt inadequate to categorize that radical revulsion, and sighed, “Pity he survived the Medici Chapel. It might have been better had he finished his career with the completion of the Sistene Chapel. I feel the spell of his late work and cannot get away from it. My soul and my mind revolt as from something obscenely overpowering.” Berenson presents a typical example of the vast majority of people who lack the courage to walk alone into terra incognita.

The greatest potential and quality of Michelangelo’s marks, lines and other elements is never found in a disconnected, absolute freedom that goes nowhere, but is always “bound up in union with God” (Michelangelo, Artists on Art).

While Michelangelo worked on his last drawings he also worked on his last sculpture, the Rondanini Pieta, in which many have “recognized its closeness to modern sensibilities and anxieties” (Antonio Paolucci).

The radical change to the original state and the unfinished quality of the sculpture have recently attracted … the interests of scholars, who have seen in its disregard for all convention the expressive culmination of the master’s spiritualism.

Paola Barocci

Paolucci senses also “Michelangelo’s intention to dissolve the marble into an ‘indistinct luminosity, a shudder of emotion’ (Russoli).” Paolucci adds, “For Bottari, the Rondanini Pieta is a ‘hallucinatory breath of the soul’ and the forms seem to him ‘extremely incorporeal, reduced to a larval expression, as though laying bare the shuddering of the spirit.’ While for Mariani it reveals itself as exceptional testimony of the extreme limit to which sculpture can go in negating itself … and we cannot imagine where this road could lead the artist, if not death.”

Michelangelo used to work on commissions for other people and their purposes. Fortunately, his last drawings and the Rondanini Pieta seem to be works he created just for his personal reasons and in these works he proceeds and probes undisturbed into dimensions and depths that were entirely of his own interest and most progressive vision. In his studies for the Pieta and with the help of the rediscovered fragment of Christ’s head, shoulder and part of the chest, it becomes evident how decisively Michelangelo reduced and negated his first ideas and executions. Only the now superfluous fragment of one arm of his first approach remains still connected with the final (unfinished?) shapes of Christ and Maria. Christ’s entire body is now almost “welded” next to, almost “welded” together with the shape of his mother, the two bodies becoming almost one “tree trunk” in which the dead Christ seems to carry his mother. A revolution permeates the traditional iconography.

[Rembrandt Picture - 1]

1. Rembrandt was born in 1606. In 1633, when he was about 27 years olf, he made an etching that shows the deposition of Christ. The large, center-stage figures are clearly sculpted by a strong contrast of light and shadow. The background of the scene seems to be a dull, flat and gray sky, through which streak a few bundles of sunlight—looking like the poor work of an untalented stage designer.

[Rembrandt Picture - 2]

2. In 1649, when Rembrandt was about 43 years old, he created an etching showing the teaching Christ and his listeners. Here the play between light and shadow is much more subtle, believable and mature.

[Rembrandt Picture - 3]

3. A third etching, done after 1653, when Rembrandt was at least 47 years old, is the direct reversal of the first etching. Gone is the detailed realism of the figures, and the timid light of the first etching’s background has turned now into a mighty cataract of spiritual light flooding the entire image. Even the central drama of the crucifixion—it sounds impossible—has become a secondary event.

How is the development of a light possible and justified that overpowers and predominates practically everything else?

Michelangelo’s and Rembrandt’s late works present an enormously rich variety of lines and mark-making.

[ Picture - collage of Rembrandt's lines ]

Naturally they cannot create actually all possible elements. But they compensate that impossibility by presenting a fertile, germinating variety whose quality is unusually evocative and makes us feel that their marks, lines and other elements are connected with the infinite web of all possible visual elements of the universe, which universe in turn flows back into the outreaching elements and principles of the artist—and from the elements back into our gaze, establishing a marvelous circular journey that unites everything in a surprising harmony. When Vincent van Gogh saw Rembrandt’s painting “The Jewish Bride”, he said to a joining friend, “I should be happy to give ten years of my life if I could go on sitting in front of this picture for ten days with only a dry crust of bread.” In his book “Rembrandt’s Eyes” Simon Shama admires Rembrandt’s “prophetic invention” and “visionary courage”, his early leap into an abstract realm with its “autonomy of paint”, “as if a new world of painting is unfurled”—as if Rembrandt “had navigated an odyssey to the outermost rim of the known world of painting.” In a veritable ecstasy Shama continues to describe in great detail Remrandt’s “encyclopedic” use of elements and principles.

Indeed, Rembrandt has the vital intelligence and power that allows only a few artists to close to him but never beyond him.

When you see Frans Hals, you take pleasure in painting; when you see Rembrandt, you want to give up.

Max Liebermann

[Rembrandt] unites all contrasts in one work, he blends in one image the bloodiest and most naked veracity with the boldest, freest, and most surprising fantasy. He is the past, the present, and the future. He surpasses all of them.

Emile Verhaeren

[Finally,] Rembrandt acquired the feeling that to leave the concrete world of matter and evoke the impalpable and invisible world of the inner life, a different, essentially evocative light was called for.

This is what the great mystics evoke, in their eagerness to exceed tangible reality and the evidence of the senses, to open themselves to the blaze of a going beyond.

This constant obsession leads him to scrutinize the enigma of thought turned totally inward in meditation; in this lies the origin of a theme to which, from the beginning, he endlessly returns: that of the Philosopher. Rembrandt portrays him retired from the world, in his cell. The Philosopher flees the daylight by placing his hand over his eyes or even by closing them, the better to isolate himself in his meditation, that final cutting off of physical experience … and surely that is why Rembrandt, painter of the visible, wished to sink into the night and silence, to seek there a light and a music that transport us beyond our limits.

René Huyghe

The American art critic Theodore F. Wolff praises Rembrandt highly by acknowledging the painter’s significance for our own times,

None of the old masters is more relevant today than Rembrandt.
Opinions have varied, sometimes dramatically, but most experts have agreed that the key to Rembrandt’s greatness is depth, and the source of his extraordinary effectiveness lay in his ability to infuse even the most ordinary objects with dignity and character.
His achievement came about because of his enormous capacity for creative growth. One of art’s all-time miracles is Rembrandt’s transformation from a moderately talented and insensitive youth to one of the world’s greatest artists. It’s a process one can follow by watching his art unfold, by observing its progress from youthful clumsiness to mature, heartwarming depth and grandeur. It is this amazing progression that sets Rembrandt apart from everyone else and makes him so relevant today.
Depth, after all, is out of fashion in the art of the 1980s. And so, by and large, are dignity, character, and compassion. What we have, instead, are impressive amounts of inventiveness, wit, passion, and entertainment; a modicum of brilliance; and many more self-conscious and silly attempts at profundity and originality than anyone could have imagined even three decades ago.
Fortunately, we do realize that Rembrandt and his peers can give us something we can’t get elsewhere…. Great art … is a profound and often highly complex manifestation of the human spirit striving for ever-greater symbolic realization, is always something of a surprise and a miracle.
Given this situation, we would be wise to look more seriously to the old masters for standards of excellence, integrity, and commitment…. And, if asked which of the old masters I consider most relevant today, I’d name Rembrandt, for none is more worthy or more challenging to our often limited goals and ideals than he.

“What Rembrandt Has to Teach Us”, The Many Masks of Modern Art

[Turner Picture - 1]

1. His early seascapes are rather realistic, relatively dark, and still quite academic. Water looks like water, wood like wood, and metal like metal. Turner presents naturalistic illusions of different objects and substances. However, when we hear the name of Turner, paintings of this kind are not what we usually associate with him.

[Turner Picture - 2]

2. . This painting represents what we would consider a typical example of Turner’s work. Water, air, the metal of a ship—all things are treated with the same kind of painterly handwriting and texture. A very personal manipulation of the media replaces the wish to perform a particular outer illusion. A sublime, artistic vision supercedes the reality of nature in Turner’s presentation of atmosphere and light. The outer world of reality and the inner world of Turner’s vision fuse together in an artistic harmony.

[Turner Picture - 3]

3. The late Turner is almost abstract. The radiant light of the painting is no longer the light of the sun, a candle, or a fire. The image reveals a mysterious light—an autonomous element, a self-originated energy from a transcendent realm. The natural world provides man with breathtaking beauty. Yet, it remains forever insufficient, leaving man thirsty and yearning “for a supernatural bliss,” provoking “the discontent that kept driving him to attempt the impossible and make his dream real” (Anthony Bailey on J.M.W. Turner).

The metamorphosis from physical light to spiritual light overpowered even the Impressionist painters, the champions of plain air (outdoor painting). Georges Clemenceau considered the paintings of Monet as being the celebrations of immediate sensorial experience, a kind of apotheosis of material existence. However, the analytical eyes of the Impressionists saw something quite different at the end of their lives. Bennett Schiff writes, “Renoir’s painting: the secret was light from inside.”

In his last paintings Paul Cézanne leaves many spots in his works simply blank, white. The skin of his paint has holes. The same in the late series of 1996 by Robert Rauschenberg. The images become almost sieves. But the white spots still hide what lies behind the holes. The German impressionist Paul Baum paints his last paintings in Italy almost white in white. His works look like a gauze in front of a half-hidden world-view.

Shortly before his death, the French painter Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was asked which direction art would take in the future. “Toward light” was his answer.

A deeper look into the late style of great artists is defined often by an unusual terminology of the critics of our time,

The secret was light from inside.

The principle of light emanating from within.

Inner and spiritual light, an order beyond man and nature.

An image of life in almost supernatural intensity.

A kind of superorgan.

Then harmony prevailed over the surge of passion, a cosmic harmony, like a spiritual apparition beyond an immense gulf of space, like a heavenward aspiration.

A ringing voice giving utterance in this sphere of the almost divine.

Light, which Giacometti recognized as the beginning and the end, presided; it meant the last stage in his spiritual maturation. Reality at last transmuted into light. Like Proust, Giacometti is able to transmute present into the timeless, this eternity. He had dreamed of that wholeness. Light here sprang straight from within the artist’s vision and awareness of the world, and existing things are thereby effaced, but at the same time hallowed.

Yves Bonnefoy

Is it not remarkable that the best artists of different times, places and styles converge in the end toward one common goal: to envision and express life through the means of spiritual light. This progression remains constant in all changes.

Albeit, here at the very threshold where the greatest artistic adventure might begin, and the greatest boon may be gained–mankind and its artists turn around too often, heading for shallower and safer waters: the art of the middle-aged artist.

Rudolph Arnheim, the leading psychologist of art in his time, relates to this deplorable fact:

The art historian Kurt Badt, whose observations on our subject are reflected in much of what I have said here, has maintained that the late works of artists do not influence the style of their successors. It is rather the works created by the great men in their middle years that act as examples and guiding images to posterity and thereby make history. But “the late works of great masters, which come about at the same time as the period style of a subsequent generation, tower above the flow of history as solitudes (Einsamkeiten) inaccessible to the context of time.”

However, an improved education will turn this rare insight into a much more common knowledge in the future.

Fragment Three

What then is the meaning of this tremendous metamorphosis in the late style of our greatest artists? Why did they build up an admirable style (Michelangelo and the Renaissance, for example), only to endanger or even break down their accomplishments in an unstoppable process of disintegration, dissolving of form, discarding of traditions, abandonment of all kinds of organizing principles, etc.

Which mysterious quality encouraged them to dare to take steps, seemingly suicidal steps, without even reaching their unknown goal? They all died before their dream came true—and knew about it!—and didn’t care too much about that shortfall—convinced and driven alone by the blurry and incomprehensible, yet uncanny acuteness of intuition or inspiration. Paul Cezanne feared that he, like Moses, would not be allowed to enter into his holy land. Nevertheless, Cezanne kept following steadfastly his groundbreaking path.

Marcel Proust put this unresistable allurement into these words,

I knew that I … would never forget this new coloration of joy, this appeal for a supernatural bliss … once again the vaguely gleaming vision was close and seemed to tell me: seize me, if you have the power, and try to unravel the mystery of fortune, that I offer you.

What is this unusual “joy”, “supernatural bliss”, and “vaguely gleaming vision” that motivates artists to take such daunting risks, drawing them into something out of this world?

The answer to this question can only be found if we shed all self-deceptions and become finally ready to probe, utterly unarmed and fearsomely defenseless, into our (in most cases) still vague identity: who are we? We want to know the answer through a personal and authentic experience—of which I will talk later.

One of the most significant answers can be found in Psalms 82:6 where God Himself helps our understanding, “I have said ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.” And since we are the children of God it is only normal and logical that we are meant to become gods—which has nothing to do with an improper megalomania. Why else does Christ nudge us with these almost unbelievable words, “Be ye perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).

We don’t need to become heatedly excited in pointless disputations because there comes first a tremendous tests before the being: first we have to become adults, mature gods. This test of becoming is the crux—which reveals in no time humankind’s cowardice which causes instant mass retreat.

A mere sympathy for the spiritual life is not enough,

At the risk of pretention I have to say that, for me, the great adventure could be yet to come, had I only the courage and strength of will to embark on it: a spiritual journey, all foibles, silliness and ill-will mastered and thrown overboard and a genuine attempt made at achieving total simplicity. A day-dream only, I fear. I lack sufficient humility and it is so warm and cozy on the shore. The seas look wide and dark; storms quickly arise, great waves can mount threateningly; and there are probably monsters in the deep.

Sir Alec Guinness

It takes a much more decisive and bolder valor to live a life that deserves that name and a much more fearless resolution to create great art,

That is at the bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called “visions,” the whole so-called spirit world, death, all those things that are so closely akin to us have, but daily parrying, been so crowded out of life that the sense with which we could have grasped them is atrophied, to say nothing of God.

Rainer Maria Rilke

We know exactly that we are not perfect, but we can begin patiently with the process of perfecting ourselves any day, even today—nevermind how small this beginning may be.

To be perfect means also to know and to work in a perfect style of art. Of course, we are not perfect artists—but we can have a perfect vision, meaning that we can have a true direction for our quest—and accomplish our goal in the eternities to come.

He who cherishes a beautiful vision, a lofty ideal in his heart, will one day realize it. Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day be. Dreams are the seedlings of realities. The Vision that you glorify in your mind, the ideal that you enthrone in your heart—this you will build your life by, this you will become.

James Allen

And as we proceed on this high road we learn that we must be willing and able to change ourselves, voluntarily and peacefully, from naturally born egocentric individuals into spiritually born again deocentric beings. This is the most significant revolution in our life. This most profound conversion is also called “to be born again.” Jesus Christ left no doubt about this significant step in our progression, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (Matthew 3:3).

Furthermore, we cannot be born again without going through the ordinance of baptism. And the word baptism begins with this definition, “Baptism symbolizes death, burial, and resurrection” (Bible Dictionary). In metaphorical terms, to be born again means to die first. This most serious point in our development needs to be understood very correctly: we don’t need to commit suicide, let alone kill anyone. What counts is the authentic willingness and readiness to die. This is enough. The authentic readiness to die suffices perfectly. Let us never go too far or shoot beyond the mark. Let us remember, Abraham didn’t have to kill Isaac. Many foolish habits, addictions, stupid ideas and sometimes complex philosophies have to die, have to be left behind—the old Adam is to die in the grave of water; “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it” (Luke 9:24). And here is the rub—we don’t want do die. However, birth and death hang together, are inseparable conditions of life. O yes, we want to “be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:19)—omniscience, omnipotence, eternal life etc. are most desirable to us—but the greatest possible filling can only happen in the greatest possible emptiness. China’s great poet Su Dung Bo had already said a long time ago, “Don’t fear the emptiness.” “Baptism’s symbolism is beautiful, and its consequences ever so desirable” (Bible Dictionary). Nevertheless, it is not easy to overcome our pride and our hard won accomplishments—to empty us of sometimes good things in order to receive the best. It might help us to remember that emptiness or a vacuum have tremendous powers! We have heard, nature doesn’t like vacuums. Indeed, vacuums have an astonishing power to draw in, to be filled. By turning ourselves into vacuums, we bring our strongest power to bear. We can stay actually at home, and yet go beyond unpopulated and remotest deserts, lonely storm-swept mountaintops and the deepest, darkest and eeriest caves, the harbingers of the temple—because “we are the temple of God, and … the Spirit of God dwelleth in [us]” (1 Corinthians 3:16). Thus, we can receive personal revelation that transcends our usual rationality.

Some contemporary thinkers like the American philosopher Arthur C. Danto believe that philosophical ideas carry todays more significant art. For thinkers of his kind, the emphasis of esthetical issues has shifted simply to more intellectual issues,

You can’t say something’s art or not art anymore. That’s all finished. There used to be a time when you could pick out something perceptually the way you can recognize, say, tulips or giraffes. But the way things have evolved, art can look like anything, so you can’t tell by looking. Criteria like the critic’s good eye no longer apply. Art these days has very little to do with esthetic responses; it has more to do with intellectual responses.

Arthur C. Danto

Thinkers of this kind commit at least three serious mistakes,

a) The contemporary German philosopher Wolfgang Stegmüller stated simply that philosophy is no more, and that the diverse and heterogenous activities which use her name today have no longer a common thread. He does not believe that the contemporary process of disintegration can be turned around, but will become more critical still, and finally end in a total breakdown of communication. Thus, philosophy cannot come to the rescue of art—”That’s all finished.”

Philosophy has come to an end … is closed and finished …. If I may shortly and perhaps a little bit strongly say so, but out of long consideration: Philosophy will not be able to cause any direct change of the contemporary world condition. This doesn’t mean only philosophy—but all mere human thinking and intentions. Only God can save us. To us only the possibility is left, to prepare a readiness in thinking and poetry for the epiphany (appearance) of God—or for the ruin in the absence of God.

Martin Heidegger

b) Even Charles Darwin (1809-1882 A.D.) wrote in his autobiography on a “lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes” and its deleterious effects,

A man with a mind more highly organized or better constituted than mine, would not I suppose have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied could thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

The contemporary opposition against beauty goes far beyond a mere aesthetical problem; it is a subversive onslaught against the whole of life,

Beauty is a word with which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness. No longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.

Cardinal Hans Urs von Balthasar

Truth, virtue and beauty form a triad of interdependent quality. The destruction of one of the three will destroy all three in time—and all of us will be finished.

c) What many haven’t understood yet is the profound fact that philosophy was never meant to be the leading category of intelligence for human life. Authentic spirituality can provide us with revelations and visions that philosophy cannot deliver. Once in a while, the better philosophers see this quite clearly. Heidegger said straightforwardly, “Only God can save us.” When Heidegger listened to a sonata for piano by Shubert he said, “Philosophy can’t do that.”

The Russian author A. Solzhenitsyn is correct, it is time “to rise to a new height of vision,” and to see “through this intensified presence the radiance of the whole” (Jean Gebser).

The German-Jewish philosopher Theodor W. Adorno ends his philosophical reflections in his book, Minima Moralia, with the statement that the only responsible philosophy left for humankind would be the attempt to see all things as they are represented by the point of view of redemption. Knowledge has no light, except the one that shines from redemption to earth. Adorno hopes for the creation of perspectives in which the earth reveals its alienation and ruptures, as it lies maimed and in need of the Messianic Light. To reach for such perspectives without violence—this is what counts. The world situation calls for this knowledge. Adorno realizes the urge for, and impossibility of, the necessary ecstasy, because our thinking and knowledge have the same wounds of distortion and indigence as the wounded and desperate world that humankind’s knowledge wants to overcome.

After the truly intelligent artists have done everything in their power to understand art’s complexities and the best kind of art, the acknowledge their weaknesses. They know the desired answer to be way beyond their intelligence, their drilling thoughts. Intuitively they turn themselves into vacuums and empty their minds, hearts and spirits of all pointless efforts, wrong and counter-productive ideas.

At times, it’s better not to push it. God alone knows how that happens, but it really does. You have to stuff youself—gorge yourself on a problem—and then leave it.

Peter Carruthers

…the truly creative individual has an undying faith in cosmic perspectives. Precisely out of this sense of abundance and fullness of life comes the readiness to embrace the divine. Instead of withdrawing from situations it cannot master in order to maintain mere bodily balance, love risks everything, even life itself for the sake of a more complete engagement with that which his outside and beyond it.

Lewis Mumford

The American mathematician George Spencer Brown stated,

To arrive at the simplest, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. No activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is one needs to know. And yet those with the courage to tread this path to real discovery are not only offered practically with no guidance on how to do so, they are actively discouraged and have to set about it in secret, pretending meanwhile to be diligently engaged in the frantic diversions and to conform with the deadening personal opinions which are being continually thrust upon them. In these circumstances, the discoveries that any person is able to undertake represent the places where, in the face of induced psychosis, he has, by his own faltering and unaided efforts, returned to sanity. Painfully, and even dangerously, perhaps. But nonetheless returned, however furtively.

The first step, then, is withdrawal and rejection, a course that may bring poverty, hardship, sacrifice, certainly it demands a readiness to accept insecurity– though security naturally has become the obsession of our disintegrating culture…Epicuru’s injunction, hide yourself, is the first move toward having an inner life: something that will ultimately be worth showing. Each one of us is like Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus: at any moment we may be struck by a blinding light and hear a voice…

Lewis Mumford

This self-surrender, the leaving of the ego-position, so familiar to creative minds is nearly always hard to achieve. It calls for a purity of motive that is rarely sustained except through dedication and discipline. Subordination of everything to the whole impulse of life is easier for the innocent and ignorant because they are not fully aware of the hazards of it or are less impressed by them, and they are not so powerfully possessed by convention. When their life is strong in them they can sometimes surrender themselves to it without effort.

Brewster Ghiselin

We are called upon to do something new, to confront a no man’s land, to push into a forest where there are no well-worn paths and from which no one has returned to guide us …. To live into the future means to leap into the unknown, and this requires a degree of courage for which there is immediate precedent and which few people realize.

Rollo May

M.C. Richards formulation is very much to the point,

Am I willing to give up what I have in order to be what I am not yet? … Am I able to follow the spirit of love into the desert? To empty myself even of my concept of emptiness?

These ideas sound even somewhat noble. However, their social and daily reality are quite daunting and often downright depressive.

In 1883 the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo,

…What am I in most people’s eyes? A nonentity, or an eccentric and disagreeable man—somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low.

To dissolve all forms, to let go of all forms in dedifferentiation, to detach oneself from all forms emanates a strange aura around oneself. One begins to look like one’s mental and spiritual attitude, the depth rises to the surface, one begins to look absolutely unattractive and even disgusting in the eyes of the world. The physical body becomes affected by the spiritual vacuum. One appears to look lightless, lifeless, like a spineless worm.

One appears to be entirely characterless, just like the momentary state of mind and spirit, the characteristic void. Very quickly one becomes a social reject, an untouchable pariah, and finally an invisible no-count—the true Visionist doesn’t care a bit.

The world (suffering from “horror vacui”) does not perceive the humble and lowly vacuum as a highly refined tool or instrument. Emptiness is seen usually as a deficiency, a badge of shame, is seen as a repulsive open sore, a terrible wound one turns away from.

But only the lowly, grey and lightless vacuum of the molten heart (which is completely unattractive for the world, and always overlooked) is effective enough to draw upon the redeemed and exalted side of reality. Pure humility can cause transcendent light to reach down into our wretched darkness.

The Visionist just continues to live very simply, ever more detached from the world’s superficial goals and finally forgets even all about “the [road] less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference” (Robert Frost).

Spencer W. Kimball challenges us, “We need people who can dream of things that never were, and ask, ‘Why not?’”

The acceptance of this undramatic and humble commitment to become empty can be the turning point for our creative work and for our lives.

First Things First: We are not earthlings who might have a spiritual experiences once in a while. Rather, we are eternal spirits who have right now an earth experience with a physical body—which is nothing but a test: are we worthy to return to God and become gods ourselves?

[ Picture - Sistene Chapel - Adam ]

On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, one can see a magnificent fresco by Michelangelo (1475-1546 A.D.), The Creation of Adam by God. Most of us have seen this mural, at least in some form of reproduction, and it is etched into our minds how God reaches out with His right hand to the outreaching Adam.

But what does God do with His left arm? He actually holds a young woman. This is Eve, who is already created spiritually by God, awaiting her physical creation, which is shown on another part of the fresco. Michelangelo depicted here one of the great eternal truths, namely that all living things were first created spiritually by God before they were joined by physical substance on this earth—which physical creation of Eve happens on the subsequent fresco.

Concerning the wonderful fact of man’s pre-existence, God said to Jeremiah,
”Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations” (Jeremiah 1:5). “
These indicators point to the spiritual origin prior to all spatio-temporal materialization” (Jean Gebser).

Artists and lovers of art often forget that the spirit is not simply manifest in the form of spiritual themes and/or pious subjects. The spirit actually has a visual dimension, an acoustic dimension, etc., that transcend the temporary aesthetic phenomena of the world: “His raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow; so as no fuller on the earth can white them” (Mark 9:2-13); “And they (74 individuals) saw the God of Israel: and there was under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the body of heaven in his clearness” (Exodus 24:10); Joseph Smith, who had a vision of the Celestial kingdom, used the words “transcendent beauty” to describe its glory (Doctrine & Covenants 137:2).

A teacher development manual, which is used in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints states in its preface, “
…All life was organized in spirit form before it was organized physically. ‘For I the Lord God, created all things, of which I have spoken, spiritually before they were naturally upon the face of the earth’ (Pearl of Great Price, Moses 3:5). The Lord has also said,
’Follow me, and do the things which ye have seen me do’ (2 Nephi 31:12). How can we follow His examples in our callings as teachers? How do we create spiritually first in our teaching [and in our creative works?]”

A view from another angle can make the fundamental relationship between the spirit and art quite obvious. In great art, form and content are one. Let’s imagine for a moment that an art historian wrote a book on the last year of the tormented life of Vincent van Gogh. Our art historian finds an interested publisher who likes the idea to have the book illustrated with the nice and cute watercolors of Beatrix Potter. Potter’s illustrations for Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddleduck, etc., match very well her stories for young children, but not the account of van Gogh’s struggle for health and sanity. Thus, if we desire to accomplish great art, or even the best possible art, we need to understand that the greatest visual formalistic creation can only be realized if it fuses with the most meaningful and greatest content—which is God. Lord Kenneth Clark (the former Director of the National Gallery in London) wanted to emphasize the obvious interdependence between form and content by bringing the issue to an extreme expression, saying that the “highest masterpieces are illustrations of great themes.” If we avoid God, great art will avoid us—it’s as simple as that. We will remain pitiful mediocrities.

The French writer Antoine de St.-Exupery posits the only solution, “One must rediscover that a life of the spirit exists which ranks higher than the life of reasoning, and which alone is able to satisfy man.”

The Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman has no illusions, “Art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life.”

There is no other way—we must reconnect with the authentically divine. We need to understand with sober clarity: art is not a goal in itself.

The foremost and supreme goal of all human beings is to become one with God (Matthew 22:37-40; John 17:21). Everyone and everything in this universe, like art, are meant to serve in the realization of this most sublime and sacred union, in which we inherit, become and enjoy all that our Heavenly Father has designated for us.

There is no other priority because of our divine origin and destiny. Allow me to quote again, “I have said that ye are gods; and all of you are the children of the most High” (Psalms 82:6). Christ Himself quoted this powerful statement with added emphasis, “Is it not written in your law, I said, ye are gods? And the scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:34-35). “And if children, then heirs of God, that we may be also glorified” (Romans 8:17), assure His apostles.

The majestic grandeur of this potential, its glorious truth, virtue and beauty (which are interdependent), transcend by far all mere human ideas and imaginations—as it can be convincingly experienced in anticipating personal and authentic revelation and vision. After all, God is also the God of art.

Of course, there will be always those who cannot or don’t want to believe in these truths and experiences. Little do they know how badly they mistreat themselves, for they cut themselves off from the most wonderful experience that a human being can have in this world: “the love of God, which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men; wherefore, it is the most desirable above all things. … Yea, and the most joyous to the soul” (1 Nephi 11:21-23).

Absolutely nothing comes even close to this experience of divine love and the sure knowledge concerning our true identity. Divine love is a category of love that leaves all human qualities of love far behind. Those who have not experienced it ought not to talk about love—they know too little about it.

Those who received this divine flame have no shadow of a doubt, “Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name; worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness” (Psalms 29:2). The best and greatest kind of art is always the beauty of holiness.

Thus, neither any human “I” nor any human “We” have priority—if left to themselves, both become prisons.

Our art must be the kind which edifies man, which takes into account his immortal nature, and which prepares us for heaven, not hell. Through the process of revelation there are yet many great and important things to be given to mankind which all have an intellectual and spiritual impact far beyond what man can imagine. Catch the total vision of our potential and dream and see visions of the future. And so we are building a style of our own, a great spiritual culture that the Lord wants.

Spencer W. Kimball

The creation of a good work of art needs obviously various categories of intelligence. “Some people will say that art is real when it shows sound knowledge, mastered craft, vivid imagination, strong common sense, truth, and wise meaning” (from a Royal Bank of Canada Newsletter, in National Sculpture, Spring 1979). This is a nice statement but it needs improvement and greater courage.

Sometimes, courage means to have the courage to look back—did we miss something vital in the past? WIlliam Shakespeare can help us to look into the right direction. In his King Lear we read, “The oldest hath borne most: we that are young shall never see so much nor live so long.” There are situations in which it is necessary to look back and to rediscover forgotten qualities that are vital for us. Giuseppe Verdi’s “Ritorniamo all’antico, sará un progresso” sometimes is of absolute necessity. (If anyone doubts this attitude, read 2 Kings 22:8, etc.)

In the book of Exodus we can read numerous pages that deal with the building of the tabernacle, which was a temple, an edifice where heaven and earth were meant to come together. This particular temple could be set up and taken down. It travelled with the tribes of Israel which moved from feeding ground to feeding ground according to the needs of their animals. This tabernacle/temple was made of the finest materials and as artfully as possible.

And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, See, I have called by name Bezaleel the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah: and I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship … that they may make all that I have commanded; The tabernacle of the congregation

Exodus 31:1-3,6-7; 35:30-31; Matthew 10:19-20

Let us have a closer and more detailed look at this ancient revelation with its various categories of intelligence, which God prefers to see in the making of art—in fact, in the entire creation of the culture and civilization according to God’s will.

1) [image] Ruakh Elohim – “the Spirit of God”
—the anagogical, celestial or revelatory level of meaning, to become conscious of divine and heavenly reality, to see how God the Father sees the Celestial Style—thanks to the transmission of the Holy Ghost. This is the beginning, the foundation, not the end. Those who don’t build on this foundation have no foundation and will fail miserably. God is not mocked (Galatians 6:7). After all, God is also the God of art, and His revealed style surpasses all possible human styles.

2) [image] bekhokhmah – “in wisdom”
—the allegorical, archetypal and mythical level of meaning, the understanding and judging heart of the lower categories, and the warm and burning heart. “The heart has reasons which reason doesn’t know” (Blaise Pascal).

3) [image] bitvunah – “in understanding”
—the legal level of meaning, understanding the laws of nature through logical reasoning and the observation of many facts—the realm of the sciences and philosophies

4) [image] bedaat – “in knowledge”
—the literal level of meaning, knowing the plain facts; differentiation and identification through contrast and opposition

5) [image] melakhah – “craftsmanship”
—the practical level of meaning; having a good work ethic; an excellent eye-brain-hand coordination; to use our body; to accept dirt, sweat, pain, fatigue—and to finish nevertheless; the hands-on experience

It is precisely here where the art of Modernism and Post-Modernism failed and fail still miserably. Both movements of art never explored the visual world in its true depth, greatness and meaning. Being unwilling to pay the due price (humility, to bow low long enough), the Modernists and Post-Modernists remain premature, spiritually blind and miss the true foundation: Ruakh Elohim.

It is entirely pointless to reason against the Spirit of God (Ruakh Elohim, which is the supreme category of intelligence) by using merely lower categories of intelligence like knowledge—not even wisdom comprehends the spirit. This is well known since thousands of years and the apostle Paul explained it in clear terms, “Which [spiritual] things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man receiveth not the
things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man” (1 Corinthians 2:13-15).

Art that supports our oneness with God begins with the perfect revelation and vision of His unsurpassed Spirit, Ruakh Elohim, His exalted point of view. We cannot build on our own nature, “For the natural man is an enemy to God” (Mosiah 3:19).

In Doctrine & Covenants 105:5,6 we read a serious God advising us,

And Zion cannot be built up unless it is by the principles of the law of the celestial kingdom; otherwise I cannot receive her unto myself. And my people muse needs be chastened until they learn obedience, if it must needs be, by the things which they suffer.

This is not fluffy babble—this is a dead-serious warning—meant to help us to avoid very painful world developments. And how can we know the principles of the law of the celestial kingdom, the absolute precondition for the building up of Zion, the civilization chosen by God for His children? Through Ruakh Elohim only—that which is globally ignored today.

And where is love in our art? Love is the key to our universe! The Italian philosopher Giovanni Papini pointed out that the key-element for a better understanding of Michelangelo’s life and work was an all-refining and all-transfiguring divine spark of love in the great artist’s soul. An unceasing inner fire had made Michelangelo one of the foremost loving people of all times.

Michelangelo wrote about himself in this regard, “Whenever I meet someone who is distinguished by special abilities/virtue or mental/spiritual talents…then I must love him, then I fall so very much under his spell, so that it is not me anymore, but he who becomes master over me.” This condition will never change: the greatest works can only be achieved where love guides the psyche!

Many hearts have grown cold in our present time, and these unloving, cold hearts lack the necessary courage, trust, endurance, and instinct for direction demanded by the creative process in order to receive the grace of great things,

He, unlike Orpheus, he, loveless from the beginning, unable to send forth the loving recollection and guided by no memory, he had not even reached the first level under the iron rule of Vulcan, even less the deeper realm of the law-founding fathers, and still less the much deeper one of the nothing, which gives birth to the world, to memory, to salvation, he had remained in the torpid emptiness of the surface.

Hermann Broch

The prophet Isaiah uses the edifice of the tabernacle/temple, its inherent balanced epistemology, the artistic creativity—as a foreshadowing of the one human civilization desired by God, Zion, which will be built at Jesus Christ’s second coming (Isaiah 33:20).

It has often been said the temple is the source of all civilization … The temple is the great teaching institution of the human race … The temple, not the palace, is the source of all government … It [the temple] is the middle point at which the worlds above and the worlds below join. This scale model of the universe is the temple … It is the hierocentric point around which all things are organized … Civilization is hiero centric, centered around the holy point of the temple … The temple represents that organizing principle in the universe which brings all things together. It is the school where we learn about these things.

Hugh Nibley

There exist terrible examples of the most painful consequences of human forgetfulness and carelessness. The Old Testament (Leviticus 15) teaches explicit methods for those who deal with infected people. Those simple methods of hygiene (to wash your hands in running water, etc.) were later ignored—and doctors went from patient to patient without disinfecting their hands and instruments—and consequently infected and killed many thousands of women who had just given birth to a child. This ignorance of old knowledge received its own name, “childbed fever”. In reality, there is no such thing as childbed fever, and never was. There simply was a lot of filthiness. Dr. Semmelweis (1818-1865 A.D.), a professor of medicine in Budapest and Vienna realized and changed the scandalous habits among doctors and nurses. And for this long overdue progress he became ostracized, institutionalized and finally killed! And yes, this shameful scandal in the history of medicine is an analogy for the state of today’s art.

However, our world of contrasts encourages us,

And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.

- Joel 2:28

Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the spirit searcheth all things, yes even the deep things of God.

- 1 Corinthians 2:9-10

It will be during this dispensation that the highest point of spiritual perfection obtainable by mortals will be realized.

My Kingdom Shall Roll Forth

There will be less and less a tendency to subscribe to the false teachings of men. There will be more and more a tendency to first lay a groundwork of the gospel truth in every subject.

Ezra Taft Benson

There exists in fact a profound tradition among the great artists that follows the deeper insights of this prophetic kind,

The divine character of painting means that the mind of the painter is transformed into an image of the mind of God.

-Leonardo da Vinci

Michelangelo asserted that great art aims at a “perfection which is bound up in union with God,”

If the soul were not created in God’s image, it would aspire only to external beauty, gratifying the senses; but since it knows that beauty as false, it ascends again for the archetype (forma universale) of beauty.

I’m not interested in relations of color or form, I’m not an abstractionist. The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point.

- Mark Rothko

I’m looking for what we are all looking for, the something that is beyond painting.

- Jean Bazaine

What matters is to establish as many interrelationships as possible.

- Paul Cézanne

Blinding the surging mind enclosed

Rushing from wall to bone wall

Seeking an outlet

Hoping to find a vision.

- Ivan Albright

What do I think?

What do I feel?

I look into myself

O! How I would like to say something divine! Yes.

- Alexej Jawlensky

The task is to open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes of man. Such enterprise is exploration into God. Such is the task of art.

- Sir George Trevelyan

This quote by Sir George Trevelyan indentifies precisely and exactly the issue of all issues in art; and to move boldly toward this God-centered and literal vision has absolute priority. Any other issue of art comes later.

Just a slightly more comprehensive vision, still of the natural kind, can have strong and transformational effects for the better. Some of the most technical minded and pragmatic people on earth, the astronauts/cosmonauts have an entirely different vision of life than the countless mediocrities in art suffering from preferred spiritual blindness.

It wasn’t until the last day of our flight that I even had a chance to look out. But when I did, I was truly overwhelmed. A Chinese tale tells of some men sent to harm a young girl who, upon seeing her beauty, became her protectors rather than her violators. That’s how I felt seeing the Earth for the first time. I could not help but love and cherish her.

- Taylor Wang, China / USA

From space I saw earth—indescribably beautiful with the scars of boundaries gone.

- Muhammad Ahmad Faris, Syria

After an orange cloud—formed as a result of a dust storm over the Sahara and caught up by air currents—reached the Philippines and settled there with rain, I understood that we are all sailing in the same boat.

- Vladimir Kovalyonok, U.S.S.R.

Two words leaped into my mind as I looked down on all this: commonality and interdependence. We are one world.

- John-David Bartoe, U.S.A.

Those who have been in space realize that, in spite of the complete disparity between them . . . any predicament, disagreement, or obstacle can be overcome.

- Oleg Makarov, U.S.S.R.

We went to the moon as technicians; we returned as humanitarians. Gazing through 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious. My view of our planet was a glimpse of divinity.

- Edgar Mitchell, U.S.A.

Seeing this has to change a man, has to make a man appreciate the creation of God and the love of God.

- James Irwin, U.S.A.

The astronauts cherish their experience with the divine, and so should do our artists.

Fragment Four

The works of some artists mature into positively transformational and life enhancing pictures of admirable quality and excellence—while many other artists and their pseudo artworks sink simultaneously ever deeper into the fatal quicksand of sheer stupidities, ice-cold hearts and destructive perversions&mdahs;drawing with them the fools who surrender needlessly.

About 100 years ago, and only five years before the beginning of World War I, this selected part of a manifesto on art became known,

We intend to sing the love of danger. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, and scorn for women. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism. So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! Here they are! Come on! Set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums! Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discoloured and shredded! Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly! Our hearts know no weariness because they are fed with fire, hatred, and speed! Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl our defiance at the stars! Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, 1909

Since then things have just gotten worse,

Artists have compulsively rejected and subverted morality, law, society, and art itself; all boundaries have been crossed, all taboos broken, all limits violated. Anthony Julius shows how the modern period has been characterized by three kinds of transgressive art: an art that perverts established art rules; an art that defiles the beliefs and sentiments of its audience; and an art that challenges and disobeys the rules of the state. What is art’s future when its boundary-exceeding, taboo-breaking endeavors become the norm? And is anything of value lost when we submit to art’s violation?

The University of Chicago Press, 2002

The last question can be answered easily and quickly: art has lost Ruakh Elohim and without that first and most perfect category of intelligence our contemporary so-called art lacks its most significant foundation. Soon it will be blown away like anything that severs itself from God.

The composer of electronic music Karl-Heinz Stockhausen “hailed” the catastrophe of 9/11 to be “the greatest work of art in the universe.” And the painter Georg Baselitz “enlightens” us,

The artist is not responsible to anyone. His social role is asocial, and he makes no statement; he offers no information, message, or opinion. He gives no help to anyone, and his work cannot be used.

The American art critic Barry Gewen asks in understandable frustration, “Has the art world gone crazy?”

We should not be surprised when we hear that art has ceased to exist for some critical minds, “Art tries to make us believe that it is disappearing, when it is already gone” (the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard).

The American philosopher Jacques Barzun laments that today’s art and art criticism are nothing but “dust particles” of “past and overpast”, they have joined the dance of death.

The more honest intellectuals clearly see the rising danger—unfortunately the lack the working alternative,

The very concept of art has been so brutalised in recent years that it is difficult to see how it can survive, let alone revive. Without a widely accepted understanding of what we mean by art, what chance has it to regenerate? The task we face is to clarify what qualities distinguish a genuine work of art from the ersatz products of today.

Julian Spalding

But so strong is the hold on our minds and imaginations of what is that to make any substantial change in the way we think about the whole process of education will require, in David Bohm’s words, “an energy, a passion, a seriousness, beyond even that needed to make creative and original discoveries in science, art, or in other such fields.”

Page Smith

Albeit, the Visionists continue to pursue straightforwardly the only way left for a possible solution.

In his mémoires Andre Malraux stated that neither the religious person nor the atheist rest content with the surfaces of the things at hand.

We want to understand a thing or living being beyond its mere appearance. We desire more transparency and a deeper comprehension of the subject of our interest. Consequently we are the witnesses of man’s decisive explorations into all directions and levels of space, order, law, knowledge, skill, imagination, expression and meaning. But this fascinating development has become questionable if not frightening.

Some people have called the age of the 20th Century “The Explosion of Knowledge”. Humankind has made admirable progresses in many fields of learning. The problem is that the differentiation, the immense variety and richness of knowledge and understanding is not balanced by an integrating principle of universal validity. Besides, for the first time in history the scientific and technological progress has allowed man to create weapons which could destroy all humankind. Yet we see that man has not stepped up to a higher level of morality that assures us that a catastrophic abuse of these destructive devices is out of the question.

The better intellectuals of our time are aware of the danger that comes with “The Explosion of Knowledge”,

The greater and more divergent the branches of the sciences unfolded, which tried to find the mystery of this world in microbiological processes and macrocosmic appearances, the more urgent became the need for an intergral vision, which today, more than ever before, has become our task.

Detlef-Ingo Lauf

The art critic Edouard Beaucamp joins in,

The almost exclusive goal of modern art is the edifice of a comprehensive and new coherency, which intergrates the broken down range of reality, which orders the world anew, and makes it intelligible and available for man.

I quoted Julian Spalding and Page Smith before. What the responsible thinkers of our time know is that we need to rise to a higher form of intelligence. The Jewish philosopher Isaiah Berlin writes, “The creation of integrated wholes out of discrete data is the fundamental organizing activity of human nature, implanted in its constitution.” For many people this statement may sound very promising, pointing to the human drive for integration above disintegration. However, when we observe the aggressions of human beings we have to admit sadly that with the progress of technology, more battles with increasing destruction were fought among our species. Unimaginable wars await us. Why? Because a mere increase in knowledge and understanding is just not good enough when the highest form of intelligence, Ruakh Elohim, is diligently rejected—although it is always available for us,

…all these gifts of which I have spoken, which are spiritual, never will be done away, even as long as the world shall stand.

Moroni 10:19

The Latin word “vision” has gained over time several different meanings.

a) Vision is the natural sense of sight—which provides a tremendous orientation for our lives.

b) Imaginative vision allows the creative person to trace and invent geometrical order as well as new and unique forms and colors.

c) Vision can also irritate us in the form of illusion and hallucination caused by illness, drugs, or some form of trauma. These unfortunate facts are reason enough for many to ignore wrongly the higher form of authentic spiritual vision altogether.

d) Vision allows us to draw conclusions and to foresee patterns of future events.

e) The surprise of an unusually beautiful sight.

f) To think new ideas, to discover, to invent, to progress mentally dynamically.

g) Extraordinary images made possible through sight-enhancing devices like microscopes and telescopes, etc, of great quality.

h) Prognostic dreams, which foreshadow that which is to come

i) Through vision (we may be asleep or awake) God can open our spiritual eyes and enable us to transcend the natural sense of vision and share His Divine and exalted vision with us. This peak experience is the optimal form of vision and has absolute priority in the human life-test here on earth.

All modern and post-modern ideas have failed to explore the full range of Vision. The use of the natural sense of vision, imagination, fantasy and dream doesn’t disclose the full truth, virtue and beauty of visual reality. Only the addition of transcendent vision completes the full spectrum of Vision, the price of which is deepest humility—which is of course most unpopular among today’s many ego-inflators, self-elevators and I-celebrators who use the convenient point c) with aplomb to defame point i).

The world always says,

to the seers, see not!
and to those with visions
Predict not what is right for us:
flatter us; foresee a farce!
Get out of the way;
move aside, off the path!
Cease confronting us
with the Holy One of Israel!
Therefore, thus says the Holy One of Israel:
Because you have rejected this word,
and rely on manipulation and double dealing,
and on them are dependent,
this iniquity will be to you
as a perilous breach exposed in a high wall
which suddenly and unexpectedly collapses.
It shall shatter with a crash
like an earthware vessel
ruthlessly smashed,
among whose fragments
shall not be found a shard
with which to scoop embers
from a fireplace,
or dip water from a tank.
…by a calm response triumph;
with quiet confidence gain the victory.
But you would have none of it.

Isaiah 30:10-15, Translation by Abraham Gileadi

An art-dealer in New York City says to an intelligent art-critic, “Andy Warhol is a greater artist than Leonardo da Vinci!” This is not stupidity but ice-cold and ugly deception matching exactly what Isaiah put into his words, “Predict not what is right for us: flatter us, foresee a farce!” How can any civilization survive that builds on “the art” of deception and the cynical rejection of authentic truth, virtue and beauty?

It is very tempting to believe H.L. Mencken’s opinion,

No normal human being wants to hear the truth. It is the passion of a small and aberrant minority of men, most of them pathological. They are hated for telling it while they live and when they die are swiftly forgotten. What remains to the world in the field of wisdom, is a series of long-tested and solidly agreeable lies.

When I was 21 years old I was still a miserable nonbeliever in anything, being neither a Christian nor anything else—and painfully unable to find my style in art. Our eyes, nerves and brains have no physiological difficulty to see so many different forms of art. Likewise, our minds are ready and able to understand practically all of it—and I liked almost all of it—but could not imagine a style or draw or paint in a style that contained almost all of it. I longed for an all-encompassing style of art (of truth, virtue and beauty) which was painfully absent.

[ picture of Holbein, yin yang, etc. ]

Parallel to nature, the realm of man-made art and design has been always most fascinating for me.

I did not limit my love for art to a particular style. What really captured me was the stupendous quality of artworks from all parts of the world, all peoples and all times. As a young teenages I began to dream about a most complex style of art that included all good aspects of all styles. This dream or idea was most alluring—but also painful, because I was not able to unite the vast variety of art styles of this world. It was a most exciting moment when I came upon a statement by the German artist Kurt Schwitters already in “The Ararat” magazine of December, 1920.

Experimentation with different art forms has been an artistic necessity for me. The reason for this was not the wish to enlarge my field of activity, but the urge, not to become a specialist of any one type of art, but an artist. My goal is Universal MERZ-Art, i.e. to combine all forms of art into complete artistic unity.

The Austrian-Jewish composer Gustav Mahler had said something which related to Schwitters, “A symphony should be like the world, everything should be in it.”

Logically, I developed a great respect for the American post-modern masters Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, Fred Otnes, Anthony Smith, and others like them. Mitsuo Katsui wrote on Otnes,

The success of Otnes’ collages lies in their integration of the unexpected, in the brilliant skill with which they juxtapose intrinsically alien objects. The past and the future. The macroscopic and the microscopic. Photographic positives and negatives. The two-dimensional and the three. The organic and the inorganic. The abstract and the concrete. The eternal and the momentary. By intertwining specific examples of these polar opposites, Otnes succeeds in creating a world altogether his own.

Like these artists I too had a strong inclination for “a total vision of the world” (Kurt Schwitters). Of course this pursuit of “a total vision of the world” had its daunting problems that one might consider to be impossibilities. For example, the pluralistic, eclecticistic and “hunters and gatherers” attitude of Post-Modernism had some serious problems.

“Back to the origins” has been a powerful slogan and mental attitude in modern art; however it was never achieved. Quite the opposite happened: instead of joining in the center, the modern artists followed an explosion into all disintegrating directions; away from the center and away from each other—until the only common denominator was bad quality—until that dramatical explosive gesture was over too—and all got stuck in the dead-end-street of what we call a reductio ad absurdum.

When we arrive at an end then the next step is either disintegration or a step back—or a step up. Stepping up seems to be too demanding—and so we see a mass retreat, in fact capitulation. Modern architecture became so sterile, cold and abrasive to our emotional needs, that people turned their backs to that intolerable excess in Modernism and increasingly borrowed from earlier styles, whose elements provide some warmth and human response. We call this change Postmodernism—which happily picks up whatever seems convenient; it is a mosaic of old fragments, a cocktail, and a hodge-podge. And what holds these stylistic fragments and particles together, giving them unity?

The entire variety is clamped down by a random or arbitrary overemphasis of just one of those old elements—and not by the superior reign of a new and higher element. That is why so much of post-modern art looks so violent, brutal, crude, unrefined, irritated, fearful, and often downright stupid, and unspiritual, and close to the trash can: because to randomly choose just another simple element or principle of organization, and then to use it as an integrating agent, has no logical justification, lacks any necessity of hierarchy, and, definitely, completely misses a vision of wholeness. The mindless elevation of just another ordinary element, mostly from Modernism, up to the level of a dominating integron is nothing else but a dictatorial act and foreshadows frightening things yet to come.

The Post-Modernist rejects the dedication to preference of the elements and principles of the typical Modernist—only to demonstrate a strong preference of his own kind over Modernism. Post-Modernism with its eclecticism, pluralism, multi-culturalism etc. thus suffers from a tremendous absurdity concerning preferences.

The art that was meaningful to me had definite problems,

1. Art is an ongoing process and is never finished; it develops and changes continuously. Each newborn artist comes with a new vision of life, necessitated by his or her own uniqueness and consequent innovation. How could anybody know the art that would be created say two hundred years after his or her death?
2. The variety of visual elements like points, lines, textures, etc. Is simply unlimited and new ones are constantly found and created.
3. The sheer amount of artworks which I would never see, never know, and never understand—and the relentlessly growing mass of scholarly publications on art would always fan out before me and remain beyond my reach.
4. What was the most comprehensive and truthful visual fusion of the law and unique? My deep longing and striving for an all comprehensive totality in art was obviously an unobtainable mirage, so it seemed. And yet, I could not simply drop the entire matter, radically sever myself from the dream and never look back again.

Although I knew that I did not have the strength or intelligence to create my ideal–I did not doubt for one moment that it existed. I fervently believed that some intelligence in the universe was way ahead of my puny cerebral efforts and had indeed the solution to my problems–and could show the solution to me. The French painter Paul Cezanne felt doubtlessly the weakness of Impressionist paintings: the relentless change of the atmospheric vagueness of our sight. Cezanne felt the blemish of a missing order,

Everything we see surely melts away? Nature is always the same but nothing of it endures… Our art ought to give it that sense of duration with the elements, the appearance of all its changes. It ought to make us feel it is eternal.

And to find this quality we call “eternal” shaped the path of my quest. And so I decided to become empty and wait for a meeting with that hoped-for intelligence and be filled by the supreme vision of it. I kept quiet about that decision and lived very simply along, being a little nobody. Sometimes I asked myself how a young loner without any means can have such a seemingly impossible conviction in an art of such super-human qualities. Am I the wretched victim of megalomania or was there an experience in my life that gave this unshakable belief such an unquestioned foundation?

“Experience is the mother of all sciences,” says Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote. But many experiences are not talked about in spite of their glorious reality. Let us consider how those who have near-death experiences are basically ignored or opposed by most people. Jesus Christ says something most interestingly in this regard,

I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father: for so it seemed good in thy sight.

Matthew 11:25,26

Little children do have words given unto them many times, which confound the wise and the learned

Alma 32:23

And not only this, but those things which never have been revealed from the foundation of the world, but have been kept hid from the wise and prudent, shall be revealed unto the babes and sucklings in this, the dispensation of the fulness of times

Doctrine & Covenants 128:18

One of the most marvelous truths is the fact that little children have very profound self-manifestations of Jesus Christ, angels, and other sublime personages–and for a good reason. Human beings are born with no memory of life before their birth. Human life on earth begins in unconsciousness. After a few months our consciousness awakens. Again, after a few months our self-consciousness awakens. Each of these steps is a growth in intelligence. However, self-consciousness does not come without a great danger. A little child realizes that it is a single entity, separated from all other things and beings. A higher level of differentiation and growth of intelligence has begun–but for a price. The child doesn’t feel the natural connectedness with all things anymore. It is now alone and separated. This awareness can cause a depressing trauma–to be single and alone can lead to a destructive feeling of hopeless loneliness. For this situation of great danger to the little child’s psyche, God has established a protecting and healing experience, the enthusiasm for which more than compensates for our loss of our “oceanic feeling”, in which we feel connected with the world like a drop of water in the sea.

Into this critical situation God places a divine manifestation. In many such situations the divine enters in the form of a pure vision with perfect self-evidence. This divine perfection can have many different characteristics–but God, Who knows us perfectly, knows also which kind of manifestation will have the best effect on us–will make us want to bond with the manifestation which is exactly ‘tailored’ to our needs. I wished that more pediatricians would be more observant for this life-enhancing experience and share their insights with us.

Allow me to describe my own experience of this kind which I remember quite well. The divine comes with its opposite first. I walk through an endless forest without paths or ways and see a rider on a horse hunting a black bull. The rider is dressed most elegantly in a red jacket, white pants, black boots and wears a black cap on his head. He rides very well–a beautiful snow-white horse–always close behind the fleeing black bull. The meaning of this little dream-vision-clip was that one can live and pursue only ones individual passions, sensations of the flesh.

I am about 1.5 to 2 years old while I see this scene. Years later I see images of riding competitions in which I recognize the same elegant wear of the rider of my early dream or vision.

Not long after this event, maybe one, two or three days later, another dream or vision occurs which had a powerful influence on me. I see a young boy standing in front of me. He is a few years older and taller than I am. We look one another straight into the eyes. He has dark curly hair. Little children feel naturally attracted to children that are a little bit taller and older than they are. However I felt something more than just an attraction. The longer I looked at this boy the more he means to me–until he means absolute perfection. I am in a state of total fascination and admiration. Also, I notice that we are not in my village of precise red brick houses, but in a village of white-washed soft clay with the round touch of the human hand–some lay in ruins. Years later I recognized that we must have been in a Mediterranean village. A few yards behind the boy stands his mother, dressed in dark, perhaps black clothes. Nobody says a word and not a sound is to be heard. I don’t have a clue of who this boy is–except that he is perfection (it’s beyond my understanding how a little child can intuit perfection, but he or she does), the finest human being possible–and I enjoy my spiritual enthusiasm beyond description.

Again, years later, while I received my Christian education I could not help myself but to think of the boy in my early dream-vision as having been Jesus Christ as a young boy. I also remember that I walked later through my village hoping to find the fascinating and unique boy again. Of course, nothing came of my search.

For once, the most dubious of all philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche is correct, “What alone is able to restore us? To envision perfection.” Today I am convinced that these early experiences of divine perfection, the fulgency of the noumenon, allow us to trust, in life and in the reality of later epiphanies that leave our ego-position and its rational thinking behind, and we dare to approach the divine personally and directly. It helps to know that one is not alone in having experiences of this kind.

Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some years ago, in a book he called No More Secondhand God, Buckminster Fuller said something like this: Why not meet God directly? Why take someone else’s story about hearing someone else’s story as your own religious experience? If you are inclined to meet God, why not go out and look [Him] up? Why take someone else’s word for what God is like? Why not be the first Christian, the first Jew?

Peter London

Fragment Five

As mentioned before, I lived very simply and unobtrusively along, taught for a while drawing and etching classes and after that spent two years in a bread factory. And sometimes I even drew or painted playfully something without relating anything of deeper meaning to the scribbled game.

A peculiar and astonishing thing happened: I wasn’t disappointed in myself or others. Although I had stepped out of the frantic world of competition and getting ahead, I felt neither fear nor panic, but rather a cheerful imperturbability and relief. The acceptance of this undramatic and humble commitment became the turning point in my life.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe rightly said,

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans. The moment one definitely commits oneself, providence moves you. All sorts of things occur to help one that would otherwise never have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come this way. Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.

This excellent statement applies for activists and contemplatives alike. To turn yourself into a tabula rasa, an erased tablet, a clean slate, takes indeed courage and commitment–who wants to appear like a living dead, who wants to go through dying without death?

At 21 years I had made the decision to become empty. We may be able to empty our conscious mind concerning art, etc.–however, we continue to live, which means that certain forms of intelligence keep working and don’t sleep for a second. Our subconsciousness is part of that group of powers. This hidden activity of our intelligence does some interesting work while we don’t notice it. Likewise, yet unknown personal revelation becomes stockpiled.

The silent vacuum, the patient emptiness, the retreat from the babble of pointless opinions, allowed for an unascertained restoration of an art we knew before we were born into this earthly here and now.

Two-year-old children, of varied racial and national origins create drawings that are made up of about twenty basic scribbles:

In these early scribbles we can already see lines that have a strong intuitive tendency to become horizontals, verticals and circles. Children of the age of three, refine their scribbles and clearly try to draw diagrams like the square, circle, cross, triangle, etc.:

Between the ages of three and four the children then advance by creating “combines” and “aggregates” made of the basic scribbles and diagrams:

At about the age of four children normally begin to use these archetypes in a pictorial way, drawing suns, plants, houses, animals, humans, etc.:

There is an intriguing similarity between children’s patterns of drawings and the designs of “primitive” adults and prehistoric adults:

The so-called archetypes of circle and square can be found literally in thousands of examples of designs which bear some cultural meaning.

[ circles and squares ]

Why these artists and scientists took such risks can only be answered by one of the most profound questions we all can pose: Who are we? What is our identity? One compelling answer can be found in Psalms 82:6 were God Himself helps our understanding, “I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.” And since we are the children of God it is only normal and logical that we desire to be Gods&mdashwhich has nothing to do with an improper megalomania. Why else does Christ nudge us with these almost unbelievable words, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). We don’t need to become heatedly excited in pointless disputations because there comes first a tremendous test before the being: first we have to become mature gods! This test of becoming is the crux— which reveals in no time humankind’s cowardice, which causes instant mass retreat.

The spirit is not a luxury icing on the cake—but the irreplaceable foundation of all things, of our lives and everything significant in it.

Of course it needs unusual courage to strive for truly great art today because the art-market has no interest in it. One Rembrandt might make one or two art dealers rich. But when we can hype up huge masses of third-rate and worthless art—and make the visually uneducated rich believe that this or that nonsense is great art—then many art-dealers can make a lot of money. To give you an example: how can an art dealer in New York City claim that a flimsy artist like Andy Warhol is a greater artist than Leonardo da Vinci? True to his idol Warhol, who himself said, “Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art.” Let’s be realistic for a moment, nobody can be that stupid and diminish da Vinci—we are dealing here with wanton deception—motivated by the most disgusting greed for money. Art is always ahead of things. And when the art world gets away with nonsense of this kind—soon the entire economy of a country will follow—and then the entire country itself. And that is our present experience. The ancient Romans knew already, mundus vult decipi (the world wants to be deceived)—which means also that today’s greatest artists may never be known.

It means that we must be willing and able to change ourselves, voluntarily and peacefully, from naturally born egocentric beings into spiritually born again deocentric beings. This is the most significant revolution in our lives (the human predisposition for a profound revolution is sometimes exploited by bad politicians).

Many people in today’s world consider such thoughts to belong to an extreme or a fanatical past. And what is the progress of the “real world” that becomes constantly more explosive? How much time, intelligence, science, technology, and money are invested into ever more military build-ups, wars and genocides all over the world? Is this moral regression so marvelously progressive?

In spite of its difficulties, to be born again cannot be circumvented by those who want to make the best of their lives and futures. Jesus Christ left no doubt about this most important step: “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (Matthew 3:3).

The characteristics of the late style, such as the dissolving of form, the discarding of traditions, the abandonment of particular light-sources, a general diffusion of color and form, may be painful to look at in the beginning. But it should not escape our attention that the final dedifferentiation is met by the most marvelous signs of a bold reintegration, a new and higher creation that replaces the disintegration of the previous style. Indeed, we must realize that what many have labeled as a “decline” in the later works of artists is in fact a transition to a higher realm, to the most profound artistic expression possible.

However, a very particular step has to be taken courageously. What some see as a death of middle-aged greatness is in fact a rebirth to the highest spiritual plane and supreme quality of art for those who have the necessary courage.

That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called “visions,” the whole so-called spirit world, death, all those things that are so closely akin to us have, by daily parrying, been so crowded out of life that the sense with which we could have grasped them is atrophied, to say nothing of God.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Humankind will never be able to circumvent this fundamental truth: In great art, form and content are one. Let’s imagine for a moment that an art historian wrote a book on the last year of the tormented life of Vincent van Gogh. Our art historian finds an interested publisher who likes the idea to have the book illustrated with the nice and cute watercolors of Beatrix Potter. Potter’s illustrations for PETER RABBIT and JEMIMA PUDDLEDUCK, etc., match very well her stories for young children, but not the account of van Gogh’s struggle for health and sanity. Thus, if we desire to accomplish great art, or even the best possible art, we need to understand that the greatest visual formalistic creation can only be realized if it fuses with the most meaningful and greatest content—which is God. Lord Kenneth Clark (the former Director of the National Gallery in London) wanted to emphasize the obvious interdependence between form and content by bringing the issue to an extreme expression, saying that the “highest masterpieces are illustrations of great themes.” If we avoid God, great art will avoid us—it’s as simple and shameful as that. We will remain pitiful mediocrities.

The natural world provides man with breathtaking beauty. Yet, it remains forever insufficient, leaving man thirsty and yearning “for a supernatural bliss,” provoking “the discontent that kept driving him to attempt the impossible and make his dream real” (Anthony Bailey on J.M.W. Turner).

Likewise, God’s prophets and apostles always testify of man’s potential for transcendent vision.

And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.

- Joel 2:28

Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the spirit searcheth all things, yes even the deep things of God.

- 1 Corinthians 2:9-10

The heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God.

- Ezekiel 1:1

It is quite remarkable that certain philosophers become aware of their limits.

Martin Heidegger said outright, “God alone can save us.”

Whenever we come to our limits close to perfection, all elements and principles converge in a very particular archetype and topological shape: the torus, Greek for a thick ring shape.

Let us not forget that in great art, form and content are one. Without a highest, spiritual content, the greatest form cannot emerge.

Furthermore, the creation of first-rate art depends like all creativity on first-rate intelligence. It is known since thousands of years that great art is based, at least, on these five categories of intelligence (see Exodus 31,35):

1. Anagogical intelligence, meaning heavenly, elated or revelatory intelligence;
2. Allegorical, and archetypal intelligence, also the understanding heart or wisdom;
3. Legal intelligence, the understanding of laws;
4. Literal intelligence, the knowledge of facts;
5. Practical intelligence, the hands-on experience that builds skill and craftsmanship.

The comprehension and application of this broad and balanced spectrum of categories of intelligence has been known and used by the greatest masters since literally thousands of years.

We hope that our works are contemporary samples of these timeless, constant elements and principles successfully fused with the uniqueness and change of today. Such fortunate conjunctio oppositorum is only possible where the authentic light of a transcendent vision precedes momentum.

Let us remember the world of opposition and contrast. The English writer Charles Dickens (1812-1870) begins his novel A TALE OF TWO CITIES with the renowned sentence, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Dickens’ assessment of the late 18th century’s political contrasts gains in actuality in our own time—in general and in the visual arts in particular. On the one hand, one is tempted to believe almost H.L. Mencken’s statement,

No normal human being wants to hear the truth. It is the passion of a small and aberrant minority of men, most of them pathological. They are hated for telling it while they live and when they die are swiftly forgotten. What remains to the world in the field of wisdom, is a series of long-tested and solidly agreeable lies.

On the other hand, we can find justified comfort in the promised beauty of holiness,

It will be during this dispensation that the highest point of spiritual perfection obtainable by mortals will be realized.

My Kingdom Shall Roll Forth

This positive appraisal of today’s time and that of the near future provides a welcome expectation—the greatest art is yet to come.

- Hagen Haltern, 2009