Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night--Paintings of Persons

The Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night exhibition at MoMA showcases several paintings that convey Van Gogh’s tender feelings towards the human person. Even if often he is painting his human subjects with stark realism, not much flattering them or their situation in life, he still conveys a sadness at an unhappy life, perhaps a reflection of his own unhappiness; and he paints many of his scenes to be suffused with a simple and tender human moment.

I would like to look at two of the paintings from the exhibition in light of their human subjects, and I will leave out some obvious other paintings, including The Potato Eaters, Eugene Boch, and Gauguin’s Chair.

I would like to look first at the painting The Night Cafe, not to be confused with the very famous Terrace of a Cafe at Night (Place du Forum). The Night Café I could have very easily written about yesterday in the blog on color. The painting is purposefully garish, with much less of the short brushstroke work that we are used to with Van Gogh. Unadulterated deep red and turquoise dominate the painting, at least color wise; the bold golden floor does little to mute them. In the middle of the painting, however, sits a gigantic pool table, presided over by the bartender, who stands as though he were without movement for all eternity; he looks out at us in his white eternal robes – his white bartender’s outfit – stuck in hell. And the rest of the scene is not charming. Two men appear drunk off to the right, one to the left, and just above the latter a man and a woman sit mysteriously, and seem to be meant to evoke a subtle lasciviousness in the background. This is not a happy place for Van Gogh, but he paints with empathy, allowing the bartender to plea with us that we might commiserate with him.

The second painting, The Cottage, is one of Van Gogh’s much older paintings. It is painted fairly realistically, a dark landscape with a fiery streak of sunset, dominated by a cottage. This is one of my favorite paintings from the exhibition, if not my favorite. I like it so much because of the woman standing at the cottage window. There is something loving about the way that she is leaned to the right; and the small fire that we see through the middle window is just the right touch of home, which Van Gogh would miss as his life came to a close.

Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night--Use of Color

Van Gogh would reinvent color if it meant the brushstroke that harmonized his painting. But this is only to say partly that he was influenced by the Impressionists, and partly that he was meticulous. What we see in this exhibition, however, we see through Van Gogh’s willingness to let color determine the realization of his vision of each piece.

I will talk about only two paintings from the exhibition, unfortunately leaving some other obvious ones out. The first is one of Van Gogh’s many paintings of a sower; the second is a painting entitled Night (after Millet).

The Sower, a smaller copy of a larger painting, is one of Van Gogh’s most striking experiments in color. A sower in the foreground casts seed along a broad path, and the small painting is cut in half by a Japanese-inspired tree. But the tree, which would otherwise be dominating, only draws our attention to the neon sky laced with pink clouds, and to the enormous and thickly painted sun setting over the field. The sky in this painting is an anomaly in my experience of art. And the original painting, which is in the exhibition catalogue, is gorgeous, complete, and refined; its smaller copy is shocking and just as charming.

It is almost impossible to describe the second painting that I have mentioned, Night (after Millet). A family of three sits before the hearth, the parents doing chores by the light of the lamp. The infant sleeps under the lamp, and is barely detailed. The mother half faces outward, reflecting whites and pinks and greens. The father gives us his back, a deep clay in the shadows. I mention this lovely scene of the holy family only because it is lovely.

Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night--Some Early Paintings

The exhibition offers a rare look at some of Van Gogh’s earlier paintings; and the juxtaposition of these early paintings with the paintings of Van Gogh’s mature style, for which he is so famous, also offers a rare look at the artist’s progress. In the first room of the exhibition, in the northeast corner of that room, three paintings, one from 1883, when he was living in the Hague, one from 1887, after he had moved to France, and one from 1890, one of the chronologically latest paintings in the exhibition, surprised me with the contrast between them but also with the continuity. In each painting the subject is not much different – a twilight scene – but each painting also marks a moment in the artist’s progress. The first, Twilight, Old Farm Houses in Loosduinen, is drab and conveys Van Gogh’s concern with painting realistically. The second, Sunset at Montmartre, is still concerned with realism, but evinces a striking shift in Van Gogh’s relationship with color and brushstroke. The declining sun reminds us of the Van Gogh we know, as it looks forward to his warm use of color – light oranges and yellows set against the blue-green sky – and his standout, powerful strokes with the brush. The third painting, however, Landscape at Twilight, finished not long before his death, calls the artist to mind without hesitation, as Van Gogh lacquers on thick brushstrokes in contrasting bright, deep, warm, dark, ocher hues.

Many of the other early paintings are certainly worthy of note, but I can only manage here to say that one of them in particular, Toward Evening, which Van Gogh painted in 1885, begins to show us, as a friend of mine said, his ability to cast a meditative quality. He does this by laying down a scene: the vastness of nature, with the human playing its tender part in the field.

Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night

This week’s topic is going to be the recent exhibition at MoMA entitled Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night. I have been to this charming exhibition four times, and I am excited to write about it. It is a very small display – 25 or so of his paintings, some drawings and letters, and some of his books – but it includes some major works along with some surprising works that are probably not often seen outside of their homes in permanent collections around the world.

The first two rooms of the exhibition include some works from the early part of his career that bear almost no resemblance to his later paintings but are quite lovely in their own right, and I will blog about these works tomorrow.

On Wednesday I will blog about the persons in some of these paintings.

On Thursday I will write about Van Gogh’s use of color in these paintings.

And Friday I will leave open, either for some more writing about this exhibition, or for something pulled out of a hat.

Placebo Adam

Human beings try lots of different things (duh!). Take me for example: I have a disease called Charcot-Marie-Tooth, which over time depletes the myelin coating in the body’s peripheral nervous system. Fortunately, I do not have an extreme case; in some people it is quite debilitating, and researchers are doing a variety of experiments to see if anything will help or fix this disease (I think most of us are placing our hope in gene therapy). One of the possibilities is to take a fairly high daily dose of something called Coenzyme Q-10, which does lots of good things for lots of other people. I have noticed, however, that if I am taking Q-10 outside of a study, I have no way myself of knowing whether it is beneficial to me if it is not immediately making me feel better, especially because the disease is progressive in nature but in fits and starts, and very often it plateaus; I have no way of knowing if I am at a plateau or if the Q-10 is working. And the reason that I have no way of knowing is that I have no “placebo Adam” who is not taking Q-10 and to whom I can compare myself.

Since the term “placebo effect” is already taken to describe something else, I am looking for a general term that will describe the following reality: whenever we do something that we think is good, we have no way of knowing at present whether it will have a beneficial effect. I would like the term to have the word “placebo” in it.

Here’s another example, perhaps the best one: considering the crappy state of the world, it’s very easy to say that philosophy, or religion, or poetry, or science, or loving another person seem to have no beneficial effect; after all, we do these things, and then the world continues to in many ways suck despite our efforts (or perhaps even because of our efforts). But we really have no way of knowing what the world would have been like had Plato never written, had Augustine never converted, or had the Hubble telescope never been built. Because really, we have no “placebo world” against which we can measure whether our “successes” were good or bad.

Is this then the purpose of history?

Proselytism: A Last Entry

I am at the point where this subject has ceased to be of interest for me. This is mostly due to the fact, I think, that I fall in the camp whose members do not believe that someone is going to hell because her own spirituality places her outside of a narrow “law”, which we must admit is mysterious if it exists at all. After all, to proselytize is really to try to convert someone so that she believes what I believe; and what I believe, I have already said, is mysterious even to me; and what I believe, since I have written a lot about happiness, I must admit does not always make me happy, and I am not in the business of leading someone to be certain about something about which I myself am not certain.

So I gladly transition to life, setting aside this question of evangelism. I am not a salesman. St. Francis of Assisi reputedly said, “Preach the Gospel always, and if necessary, use words”; St. Augustine said, “Love, and do what you will.” I am happy to spend the rest of my life exploring God, fully aware that Jesus warned us to be wary and to watch out for false messiahs and false prophets; and I hope to do this in the company of friends who, like me, have questions more than they have answers.

Proselytism: Exemplification or Discussion?

After having yesterday completely obliterated my own previous assumptions about proselytism, it seems only fair to upend myself by returning to some of the questions that I asked on Saturday; and I will focus on the following one: Is it good enough simply to be an exemplar of your faith/happiness, or is the discussion necessary? After all, the three points that I made in yesterday’s blog entry would be to a certain extent moot if exemplifying your happiness were the point and matter that would necessitate another person’s also being happy. (I will for now stay on the idea of happiness rather than return my focus to faith, since mature discussions of faith are really born of transcending the idea of happiness once we have exhausted its utility, really a focus on a more complex truth.)

To see ourselves merely as exemplars is probably to ignore our nature as social creatures; in fact, it would be an extremely rare and perhaps suspect person whose happiness was circumscribed by the Self. Happiness is more directly than inversely proportional to our engagement with others, which, if it is to be true engagement, must include the opening of the heart, must include vulnerability in regards to happiness and unhappiness. Thus, happiness as mere example is impossible, and could even be the result of discussing the topic with the exemplar.

How to Proselytize?

I ended yesterday’s exploration of proselytizing by saying the following: if you find that your faith brings you happiness, and if you are not so much concerned about salvation versus damnation, then proselytism is for you your ongoing conversation with others about happiness.

In some ways this is not really proselytism at all; or rather, it is a fresh way of looking at proselytism, a suggestion that we are probably already doing this in the course of our normal lives, without any burden of obligation, but with joy and intellectual hunger. So the question of how to proselytize becomes far more broad: how to talk about happiness?

This seems like a ridiculous question to ask, but I think that the question has some things to say to us. First, it forces us to know ourselves as creatures of happiness or unhappiness.

Second, the question of how to have a conversation about happiness forces us to ask whether we know our fellow human beings intimately enough from our own sense of ourselves that we should be able to presume that our own procedures for happiness are requisite for the happiness of the other.

Third, any conversation about the happiness of the individual should necessitate further discussion about the happiness of all individuals, and whether the happiness of one can exist without the happiness of the many, or whether the happiness of one can exist without the happiness of all.

It is likely that these discussions will lead to discussions about belief, either immediately or after a period of some time; but we must also be open to the possibility that discussions about belief may not suggest insight about happiness for every person involved.

Who to Proselytize?

Today I would like to address the question, Who to proselytize? Not that I will answer the question completely – certainly I will not; just this simple question itself raises some other questions, most notably, Why proselytize?

So on to that second question. I think that there can only be two answers to this: the first is that you think you are right about a certain belief -- let’s say Christianity, just to be broad – and you believe that Christianity condemns nonbelievers to eternal damnation, but also that Christianity rewards believers with eternal salvation, and you want people to be saved rather than damned; the second is that you think you are right about Christianity, and Christianity makes you happy, and therefore you want to share Christianity with everyone.

If you fall under the first camp, you most certainly have an obligation to proselytize. Otherwise, your lack of effort is the damnation of others; and while you might be saved in the end, you want others to be happy, too, in the end; and besides, your indifference would be your own damnation. If you don’t fall under the first camp, if, for instance, you believe that God can still welcome nonbelievers into Paradise, then proselytism is not a requirement for you because your proselytism has no effect on another person’s salvation or damnation. But you might still fall into the second camp if you believe that God can save nonbelievers.

This brings us back to the first question, Who to proselytize? If you think that salvation and damnation depend on belief, well then, you’d better get to work; your target is everyone who doesn’t believe what you believe. If you don’t think that, however, but you do find that your faith brings you happiness, then for you proselytism is nothing more and nothing less than your ongoing conversation with others about happiness.

Proselytizing

I don’t proselytize, on principle. But I am sure that some people might consider this an anemic Christianity. After all, the Gospels do contain commands to evangelize. That said, here are some questions that might help us think about the issue.

If you were to proselytize, who would you target? Would you target atheists, or would you go after the agnostics first? Or, would you talk to believers of other religions – Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, pagan ritualism, etc.? Or (since I am Catholic), would you engage with denominations that share your own core religious beliefs but that differ markedly in ritual, hierarchy, etc.? What about other religious denominations that differ only slightly from your own?

How would you go about it?

Is it good enough simply to be an exemplar of your faith, or is the discussion necessary?

If you decide that the discussion is important, what do you have to know? How much do you have to know?

Can you reasonably expect your efforts to be effective? In other words, are human beings stubborn or are they willing to embrace change? And if they are stubborn, should they not be? And if they are willing to embrace change, should they be so quick?

Every day this week starting Monday, I will try to look at these questions a little bit more in-depth.

Shelley's A Defense of Poetry

Embarrassment comes in many forms, much to the delight of the rest of us. Today I admit to a rather boring and nerdy embarrassment: I profess to be a writer, perhaps even a poet, and I have never read anything by John Milton (I’m not even sure that John is his first name (off the top of my head)); and not only do I consider myself a writer, I am actually in all truth in possession of a BA and an MA in English literature, and I still have never read anything by Milton. This is not entirely my fault: I tried to take a class on Milton my first semester of graduate school, but the class was full, and I ended up taking a much better class in its place; but it is partially my fault, as I was supposed to read Paradise Lost, at least parts of it, as an undergrad, and I didn’t. It probably seemed too long. I was also supposed to read “Lycidas”, but I really just skimmed it.

This only comes up because we are approaching Milton’s 400th birthday; because there is a new edition of Paradise Lost out, a facing-page “translation” of the poem into a more modern English prose, by Dennis Danielson; and because I was reading Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry, in which he can’t stop talking about Milton. So: to celebrate my knowledge of Milton, I throw my hat in the ring with a few quotes from Shelley that have nothing to do with him; and I vow to read Paradise Lost in the coming months (in verse, mind you), and perhaps “Lycidas”.

All quotes are from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry, printed selectively in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2. You can see the full text at http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html.

“Although all men observe a similar, they observe not the same order.”

“[ The poet ] not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time.”

“The story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”

“The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.”

“The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it.”

“The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is Poetry.”

Even though Shelley is wrong when he says, “all spirits on which [ poetry ] falls, open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight,” perhaps it wouldn’t hurt these days to read a little Milton, or Shelley, or Zaremberg (pending publication – no, no: pending submission; first up, a translation of Shelley into reasonable English).

Jdimytai Damour

We have forgotten about Thanksgiving. How else can we explain the stampeding to death of Jdimytai Damour?

I don’t know anything about Mr. Damour; I don’t know if he was kind or unkind; and I don’t know anything about the people who trampled him; I don’t know if they lapsed or if I should be unsurprised. I don’t really care about blaming anyone for Mr. Damour’s death, although it would be easy to blame the people who trampled him and to not be wrong.

I am more interested in the question, How did these human hearts become hearts of stone? It is one thing to be malicious, to capture people, to blow them up, to shoot them, to decide that one person is worth less than another; but it is something subtly different to be, perhaps, not malicious, but indifferent without margin. At least in our malice we choose to be hurtful. Indifference, however, we gather to ourselves the way a tree gathers fruit to its branches: there is a system in place in the world of which we find ourselves a part – indifference seems to work in us without our knowing.

Unless we fight it. And Christmas, unfortunately, has prepared itself against us. A holiday that, for Christians, should excuse us from “the anxieties of daily life,”* has instead cloaked selfishness in the wool of love; and we are no longer rejoicing with our families if this seeming-love is a burden to us.

There were many factors involved in the tragedy of Mr. Damour’s death and I don’t want to make a simple thing of it. But we can probably sum up the causes into an obvious truth: for a small group of people, for a small amount of time, there was an absence of care -- self-care (not Mr. Damour’s, but the self-care that is absent in the presence of guilt), and care of the fellow. And I cannot shake the feeling that, in some way, if I was ever selfish, or if I ever placated the selfishness of another, I contributed to the culture that led to this man’s death. It is time, therefore, to move forward in simplicity, and to better give of myself with joy.

* “Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life, and that day catch you by surprise like a trap.” Luke 21:34.

Thankful for Playing With Words

I am fortunate enough that I have a great deal to be thankful for this year. Some of the things I am thankful for are doubtless things that most of us would recognize as worthy of our gratitude: family and friends, a home to protect me and food to eat, my relationship with God (has its ups and downs) – these are all good places to start.

But I am also thankful for a recent development in my life that I touched on in the previous post, namely a rebirth of my curiosity; and while the other day I wrote about my curiosity with science, today I am fortunate enough to be able to write about a rebirth of my curiosity with language.

To write poetry is to commit to something quite difficult: the poet must negotiate the demands of sound, sense, and structure (to borrow from Perrine) to create something that is beauty and meaning. For me, this negotiation has always begun in the realm of sound: sound has always proposed the terms, sense and structure have always had to meet the terms or compromise. I don’t think that this happens joyfully unless I give sound its free reign to propose what is principally odd – sound does not like to give much heed to sense, and structure it either corrals or deals with.

Thankful for my new willingness to play, I share a couple of the oddities that sound has made for me in recent days:

Words words words – the discus is a mantle-claying crown.

Thus they work in pairs –
They work in pairs to cut hairs.

What bears with caring? – O! I think you are a folly!

To flee one’s purpose, never has poor Time.

Fortunately, every now and then sound carries forth some sense.

Science Rocks

I remember an afternoon in high school, at that point in the Earth's solar orbit when the tilt of the Earth's axis begins to favor the Northern Hemisphere, when I sat at a swim meet, waiting for my events and chatting with friends, but by and large reading the illustrated edition of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. I don't remember anything about the book, except that I was dazzled by computer renderings (this was a fairly new thing) of wormholes and black holes; indeed, I mostly remember the boy, and I have been wondering recently what happened to him.

There might be a tendency, when one becomes "religious", to push against science. After all, science is in the business of explaining things, and God, if God exists, is the holy grail of proof; God is probably the only part of existence that we will never prove or disprove, but as science inches ever closer toward possibly explaining the fundamental workings of the universe, I, as a religious person, often confront a fear that God will be, in the instant of some discovery, erased from the realm of what is possible. I always conclude, however, that this will not happen, and moreover, that a love for God can and does include a love of science.

All that being said, the study of nature is becoming for me once again like Christmas morning. Not that I am the one studying it -- but whenever I get to read about some new scientific discovery I am bedazzled. Recently I ran across a special from the show Nova on PBS called "The Elegant Universe". The special is a couple years old, but it happens to be rather timely still, as string theory, the topic of the special, seems to have been stalled since "The Elegant Universe" aired. Physicists, and not just string theorists, are hoping that some observational breakthroughs will come out of the new large hadron collider that just became operational in Switzerland.

So am I. Having been spoiled by growing up in the 20th century, when massive scientific breakthroughs were happening almost every day, I am a little hungry for something astonishing, like the formation of little miniature black holes, or the disappearance of gravity into what seems to be nothingness. But even simple things are fascinating: yesterday my girlfriend and I were talking about her experience at some hot springs -- the idea that you can take a bath in water that is heated by the center of the earth blows my mind; medical researchers are looking at various uses for snail poison; sunflowers detoxify the land that they grow in; and mathematicians can actually figure out that the laws of physics break down during the Big Bang.

It's just cool to let scientists send you on a mind trip.

God of Judgment or God of Justice

I think that we have missed a major point in the Gospels: God is better than we give her credit for. We still attend to the God of the Pharisees, God casting judgment rather than God bringing about justice. What is the difference?

To cast judgment (and we are not talking here in the sense of good judgment versus poor judgment) is to prescribe a punishment for an action. To bring about justice (now we are more talking about judging rightly versus judging wrongly) is to affirm the dignity of all persons without exception.

Jesus makes this idea of justice clear in many Gospel stories, sayings, clarifications; I think that he most clearly distinguishes justice and the law in his teachings about the Sabbath. A Jew was not to violate the Sabbath by doing work; but there are several stories in the various Gospels in which Jesus cures people on the Sabbath, and he says essentially that it is better to work for good on the Sabbath than to be idle while evil flourishes. His most pithy comment on the matter, "the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath," denounces the preeminence of the law when the law would harm rather than help the person.

The Catholic Church seems sometimes to favor its own laws over the dignity of the human being. We ought to make sure that we are making and remaking a church that upholds our dignity, that we are not making and remaking ourselves to conform to the Church.

The Perpetual Virginity of Mary

I am a committed Catholic, and one of the things that I would like to do in this blog is explore some of the thornier contentions that the Church maintains in its dogma. Surely many Christians know that the Catholic Church teaches that Mary was a virgin eternally, despite her becoming pregnant with Jesus, her giving birth to him, and her being married to Joseph. I believe with absolutely no qualms in the virginal conception. I would, however, like to ask a question about Mary’s remaining a virgin even after giving birth to Jesus and despite her being married to Joseph – why is this important? And if it is not important, then why would it matter to God?

As to the first question, only one answer strikes me as being valid, that virginity is more pure than is marriage (marriage, of course, implies sexual intercourse); Mary would then be pure as pure can be, only marrying out of obedience to the will of God, so that Jesus would be raised by a mother and father, and remaining undefiled by sex forever; and Mary would then be capable of our adoration.

The logical extension of this reasoning into our lives as Christians seems to me to be pernicious. Here is a family every member of which we look to for guidance in our own lives – the Holy Family exemplifies loving parents who raise a loving and obedient child. If we cannot see our own marriages as loving in the same way that that marriage was loving, how can we look on our families without disdain?

This is to say nothing of the Church teachings about marriage and sex. The Church teaches that sexual intercourse is one of, if not the, greatest and most mysterious gifts that God has given to us; marriage is one of the sacraments and the foundation of a good society. Is it possible, then, to reconcile the idea that virginity is more pure than un-virginity with the idea that sex is one of God’s greatest gifts to humanity? Is it possible, then, to reconcile the idea that the most important marriage that ever was was non-sexual with the idea that sexual, child-rearing marriages are sacramental and are the foundation of our society?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, although I suspect that in both cases the answer is “no.” The only thing that I do think I know for sure is that if God exists, God thinks love is very important, and that if anything is superfluous to love, it is not important to God.

Economics of Vegetarianism

Over the past several years I have gone through different iterations of what could sometimes be called vegetarianism. My avoidance of eating meat began once I had learned only two basic facts: 1) that the industrialized meat industry is a major source of environmental degradation, and 2) that the industrialized meat industry consumes far more calories than it puts out. There are complicating factors, most of which are well-known: the industrialized meat industry does not treat animals well; eating meat is, by its nature, possible only after a certain amount of violence; eating meat in the quantities typical of the average American diet can contribute to colon cancer and heart disease, amongst other health problems; and the list continues. Michael Pollan has written a lot recently to teach us about food, and Mark Bittman wrote a very good article in January that summarizes the case against industrialized meat production; refer to them for more thorough information.

In my own experiments as a vegetarian, I have often thought about the concept in terms of straightforward supply-and-demand economics. Vegetarianism is a no-vote against the industrialized meat industry because it seeks to eliminate the demand for meat.
But vegetarianism also has its problems. I am thinking particularly about the way in which the vegetarian food industry substitutes animal proteins with manufactured high-protein-content faux “meats”. There is also the issue of iron deficiency, particularly in women, and the resulting anemia.

So what would happen if we only ate a little bit of meat once in a while, rather than a large portion of meat two times per day? What if we ate two ounces of meat 100 times per year rather than eight ounces of meat 700 times per year? These are just hypothetical numbers, but they create a good example: the difference is a drop in per capita meat consumption from 5600 ounces per year to 200 ounces per year, a decrease of over 96%.

If your concerns as a vegetarian focus largely on the industrialization of meat production, you should be able to eat a little bit of meat once in a while. Industrial production depends on economies of scale, and no industry can withstand such an evisceration of demand. A small demand throughout the country, however, would encourage localized, small-scale meat production; and the consumer would have more control over food.

Art, Andy Weeks

Visual art uniquely challenges the reader’s willingness to confront immediate beauty in an intellectual space. This is to suggest that, while to hear music is to confront immediate beauty; and while to read or to hear literature spoken aloud is to constantly analyze, all the while expecting that the finished poem or story will satisfy our desire to know beauty that is a culmination fought for; art challenges us to analyze its elements but does not withhold from us some kind of coherent impact in the very moment we glimpse it. Or, at least, so as not to seem pedantic, I think that my favorite art does this.

I am very impressed with an artist currently living, a youngish man named Andy Weeks. Now, there is a bit of disclosure necessary if I am going to talk about him: he is a friend of mine. He happens, however, to be one of my more talented friends, and you can judge for yourself whether I write wrongly or rightly that he is maturing into a remarkable painter: www.andyweeks.net. I recently saw his painting Brooklyn 1 at a show. It would be in an inaccessibly relative comment to say that it was the standout piece; so I will add to that by saying that the painting is realistic, charming, atmospheric, and elegant. Andy is deft with line and, while he is dealing with a place that actually exists (the view is of a building from the Brooklyn Bridge), he is not afraid to give precedence to the formal composition of line and color, allowing composition to impinge ever so slightly on realism. One of the loveliest aspects of the painting is the strip of shiny wet road that bends towards the painting’s dominant point, a massive brown building. In person, I could see that the extremely realistic shininess of the road was accomplished with a few simple blotches of white-gray paint that were offset by some sharp lines of shadow. And Mr. Weeks has subtly favored an angle in place of a presumably straight foundation for this building. The angle points us back to the road and to a tree that almost billows up.

Many of the great masters of painting that we admire today used simple tools; only they used them with care – one might say that they dignified the medium by being precise enough with it that it would give their vision its full power.