That first impression was less about what Nancy actually said and more about what she did. Nancy rarely answered Sunday School questions with words. Fairly often she gave a sound–some of which were musical, others guttural, and others as “humphs” or “ah-ha’s.” Other times she simply gave a movement: a flip of the hand or a drop of the arm or a roll of the head. When she did answer with words she usually started with, “I don’t know where this is coming from but I just find myself thinking. . .” And then the blank would be filled in with anything but what the teacher was expecting. When she was called as the Relief Society chorister instead of leading the music with standard 4/4 loops or 3/4 triangles Nancy waved her arms in circles and walked the room as if she were gathering our voices and hearing them and mixing them in some sort of harmonic alchemy. She would then nod and look at each of us and smile as if thanking us. Our half-hearted sounds had somehow turned to gold in her ears.

Nancy isn’t your standard “Utah Mormon” or “Molly Mormon” or whatever other label we use to describe each other. Nancy is something else. Nancy is unorthodox, but in a truly unorthodox way. She isn’t jaded or disaffected (which seems to be the standard version of unorthodoxy). She is unorthodox in a real way. An honest way. A faithful way.

I was doing my second tour of duty on the Enrichment committee when I finally got to know Nancy better. She offered to run an “expressive arts experience” for the sisters and it was my job to help her set up and take down and make sure the opening prayer got said. It was an easy-peasy, run-of-the-mill, do-it-with-my-eyes-shut assignment.

When I arrived that evening Nancy had already draped the door to the gym with red and orange fabric and posted a sign that said, “Silence Only.” She was contemplating adding flames to the door frames–somehow it just seemed right–but didn’t want to scare anyone off. When I entered the gym she had set up tables with clay, tarps on the floor dotted with small, empty canvases, and a big drum circle outlined with scarves.

This Enrichment was going to be something else. I completely forgot about the prayer.

That night only a few sisters showed up, but each left with several pieces of her own “art” and a slight smile on her face. As they walked out of the gym Nancy commented on each work and what she’d remember about it. Basking in Nancy’s glow, I felt like a three year old–but in a good way. Like I’d just played harder than I knew I could and felt things for the first time and learned things that I didn’t yet have the words to describe but couldn’t wait to discover.

Nancy said, “Jesus created the Earth. He is an artist. THE Artist. And He made each of us just like Himself. He made us to be artists. Each of us is the writer and painter and dancer of our own experience. We may not be experts but we are artists.”

Tonight we had another expressive arts experience for Enrichment. This time it was folded into our annual Relief Society Garden Party and there was a great turnout. “What color is Christ to you?” Nancy began. There were a lot of sidelong glances and giggles. A few sisters even asked if she was serious. But each picked out a single pastel, closed her eyes, and meditated on Christ and let the crayon guide itself. Then Nancy invited us to put ourselves into the image. What color were we? How did we fit ourselves into our vision of Christ? What did He mean to us? Then, what words would we add to the image?

Women began to panic a little. How were they supposed to draw the right thing with their eyes closed? How could they pick the right words when (for some of them) English wasn’t their first language and (for the rest of them) they weren’t even writers? Coloring and free-associating seemed silly and more than a little embarrassing. What was everyone else going to think?

One by one, as Nancy directed us, we gave in and played at creating something. We let go of our everyday selves and tried to find out what color Jesus really was. Lots of sisters picked cool blues because Christ calmed them and held them up like water does. Some sisters picked yellow because Christ was the light. Some made Him circle, like a hug, and others drew Him like a river. One sister even drew a turnip (she said she couldn’t explain it but it just came out of the crayon. Maybe because Christ nourishes her?). In another picture the sister drew a mermaid and layered Christ around her in different shades of water–some of which were yellow because she remembered someone describing faith as a glowworm and Christ was like a glowworm to her. And maybe, just maybe, we were all like glowworms for Jesus.

At some point, the Spirit snuck in and sisters were bearing testimony through simple art and disambiguated yet meaningful words, without even realizing it. And I couldn’t help but think that this was Mormonism at its best. People with little in common leaving behind their skill sets and comfort zones to bear–to create–testimony of a real, living Christ and fumbling to incorporate His light into their lives in artful ways. And through the process becoming just a little more like Him.

Last summer I was very posh and attended frequent lectures at The Bridge Academy in Provo. If you’re not wealthy enough to take classes at the Bridge, I at least recommend attending their guest speaker and workshop events. It’s honestly kind of the best thing Mormon art has going for it.

Christopher Young was fantastic, James Christensen was inspiring, Walter Rane was lecturing the weekend I was leaving the country (fie!), but my favorite moment so far was getting to attend a presentation by Brian Kershisnik. And the moment I had been waiting for came at the end when he opened it up for questions and answers.

See, I’ve had this connection with Brian Kershisnik’s paintings for years. There’s something about his world inhabited by industrious, angelic Mormon women that just fascinates me. It connects to this Mormon quality that I saw in families in the ward I grew up in in Colorado, but has been harder and harder to find in recent years. I know a lot of Mormons, a lot of faithful people, but there is a certain quality in Mormon women that seems harder and harder to come by. I don’t know what exactly the quality is, but it’s shared by Mormon women who grow their own zucchini and/or wear their hair in one really long braid and/or dress their children in holiday-themed fabric from the discount rack at JoAnn’s and/or have those needlepoint covers for Kleenex boxes in their living rooms. Do you know what I mean? The quality isn’t defined by any of these practices of course, but it seems to be present in women who do those sorts of things. Women who have some sort of earthy connection to the divine, and you would almost think it’s just small-town fundamentalism but it’s not because these women also watch the Discovery Channel. Maybe it’s just some sort of surreal Southern Utah mineral that he eats and extrudes in his paintings somehow, and maybe the women in his life that he paints are just nutritionally primed to emit whatever serene righteousness rays it is that I’m picking up from his paintings. But there’s something behind it, and Brian Kershisnik knows what it is because he paints it, on purpose, over and over again.

Well, now was finally my chance. Here I was, with the man himself, and it was time for me to ask the question that had been burning within me: “Why do all the women in your paintings wear dresses?”

He looked startled. His eyes darted back up to the screen he had been displaying images on. “Do they?” he asked.

“Yes! They all do! I always imagined there was some sort of cultural message buried there. I’ve been wanting to know for years why your women look so Super Mormon; suspended between centuries.”

He flipped through a few slides, verifying that all of his women were wearing dresses. “Hmm,” he said thoughtfully, “it looks like they do.” He paused, and I sat breathlessly waiting for him to continue with his grand revelation. “I think it’s because I like to paint patterns and a dress is a big open space to paint a pattern.”

He smiled beneficently at me and then took the next question.

1. Admin: Bradly Baird on the artifacts of LDS memory
2. Anneke Majors: Minerva Red
3. Eric Russell:  In Defense of the Critics
4. Eric Thompson: Half Faked
5. Harlow Clark: Gadianton The Nobler, Reflections on Changes in the Book of Mormon, Introduction to Textual Variants Part IV
6. Jonathan Langford: The Writing Rookie #3: Off Balance
7. Katherine Morris: “Bread of Affliction” and Cultural Self-Consciousness
8. Kent Larsen: Why we need Mormon Culture
9. Laura Craner: Beware Brother Brigham (a review of the book by D. Michael Martindale)
10. Mahonri Stewart: Of Prophets and Artists: A Household of Faith Or A House Divided?
11. Patricia Karamesines: The Rhetoric of Stealing God
12. S.P. Bailey: The Things We Bring Home
13. Theric Jepson: The Hero’s Journey of the Mormon Arts
14. Tyler Chadwick: The Tragic Tell of Mormon Morality, Part IV
15. William Morris: Damn you Norman Manea!

Feel free to get all nostalgic and hagiographic in the comments. To peruse our archives by date or category, click on the drop down menus over there on the left. Or to see what each contributor has written, click on Contributors and the “posts” link next to his or her name.

Edouard Dantan's Un Coin du Salon en 1880

The strength of the Salon’s influence is perhaps most evident in the drama that ultimately tore down its authority – the  Salon de Refusés of 1863 in which many “refused” artists, among them the radical impressionists like Manet and Whistler, exhibited work that the Academy had sneered at. The Salon eventually splintered and waned in importance, but the concept of the juried show lives on. Each year, the Springville Museum of Art holds a Spring Salon, which is not exclusively Mormon art, but is definitely Utah art, and it is my personal belief that the Spring Salon is where Mormonism’s burgeoning Manets and Davids may well first show up.

I’m going to end the analogy there, though, because I don’t want to speculate about what on earth a Utah Salon de Refusés would look like.

The 85th annual Utah Spring Salon is on display in Springville until July 5th and I hereby exhort you with all the feeling of a tender stranger from the internet to get yourself there and take it in. It’s a wonderful exhibition every year, but this year it’s particularly grand.

There are themes emerging in Mormon art that are diverging widely from anything I think we’ve had before. One of them has a cousin over in Mormon lit and I think, though it’s a bit genre (they used to use that word pejoratively – the Paris art snobs that we’re pretending to be), it’s interesting. Two weeks ago I found myself at the Provo Library listening to a panel of LDS fantasy authors who were speaking as part of the Provo Children’s Book Festival. My friends had gone to hear  Brandon Sanderson, but he was accompanied by Jessica Day George, J. Scott Savage, James Dashner, Brandon Mull, Dean Hale, and Shannon Hale. I quickly texted my 12-year-old sister to tell her that I was in the same room as the Fablehaven guy, and it was then that it struck me that, even though Fantasy hasn’t been my genre of choice in my adult years, I was in the middle of a Mormon cultural phenomenon that has leaked out into the national literary market. And at Springville, I realized that it’s leaking into the visual arts as well. There’s not a market in fine art for dragons and sword-bearing maidens, but the fantasy consciousness is very much there. And its king (why didn’t I realize this before?) is James C. Christensen. Now, I don’t want to get too far into this because I have a whole separate essay that wants to be written about James C. Christensen and the marriage of the fantastic and the sacred, but I did notice that he’s developing a school and I met some of his disciples on Saturday.

One way in which Christensen has opened the door for something totally new is by allowing decorative art to be framed in gilt and sold as ridiculously overpriced limited-edition giclées. Until very recently, decorative art was something that you did at homemaking meetings and it usually involved your husband first cutting out a teddy-bear shaped piece of wood on his jigsaw. It’s also evolved through the scrapbooking phenomenon  and quite probably BYU’s prestigious graphic design, illustration and animation programs, to create a very hip illustrative aesthetic in casual Mormon culture. Did you notice the title designs in the LDS Pride & Prejudice and the cover art of the Pink Bible? We’ve got this entire, usually female, design culture that likes to eat at trendy frozen yogurt places along the Wasatch front. And now it’s finding its way into our art galleries. Christensen was the first one (and maybe he could do it because he is a man? I didn’t say that. I promise I didn’t vote for the ERA.) to market a frilly, decorative, illustrative style as fine art, and now it’s acceptable. Emily McPhie has a piece in the Salon titled Two Sisters and Melissa K. Peck has one titled Vivian. The two paintings are very different in style – McPhie’s is soft and resembles a Caldecott children’s book while Peck’s consist of bright color fields that would be at home on funky greeting cards or a Threadless.com t-shirt. But they are both reminiscent of Christensen’s women – sleek, high-cheekboned ivory-skinned women wearing fashionable frou frou. And they’re fun.

Another tell-tale sign of Christensen’s influence is this very marketable appeal to fantasy, and it his own special brew of magic and medieval Europe and Catholic kitsch. (Saints & Angels was particularly influential. “We can do that!?”) Christensen himself has a piece in the salon – a fantastical aristocratic family adorned in sumptuous golden robes eating glowing white fruit from the Tree of Life. And others have borrowed his characters – no one in Utah put wings on angels for a good hundred and fifty years until Christensen did. And so now Chris Miles can – his Muse sails blissfully over a landscape foliated by Henri Rousseau, playing a lute. I like her; she’s cute and her face is Dutch and I like the reminder that not all angelic women have high cheekbones and straight hair.  (There’s another winged angel in the show – a plaster piece that’s just lovely – but it didn’t make it into the catalog and I’m ashamed to say I left my notebook on the bus coming back from Springville. If anyone knows the artist name on that piece please let me know.)

Oh. Where to go? There are so many pieces at the exhibition here I want to show you, but the bus leaves at 1:34 and there’s just never enough time or space. A couple pieces that deserve their own brief mention before I attack another theme:

Philip Fisher Barlow’s Exchange Students; a title turns a still life into a delightful social commentary.

Vance L. Mellen’s Omphalos; edgy installation art breaks into a Mormon venue beyond the BYU MOA. I’m not sure whether it’s the LCD screen eyeball that creeps me out or the haunting feeling that postmodernism is stalking me.

Bruce H. Smith: The Bride and a Stack of Glittery, Sightless Bachelors Feigning Insight. You thought it was just an interesting still life of a Roman bust. But it’s not. It’s Orson Scott Card’s short story Inventing Lovers on the Phone, some serious oil paint skills and my social life, all rolled into a 25″ by 25″ frame.

When you first enter the museum, you’ll be greeted by Franz M. Johansen’s A Restoration of Spirit, and you’ll feel automatically rewarded for driving all the way down here. Lovely, lovely.

My homeboy Ben Steele is back in the Salon, with just the sort of postmodern pleasantness I hoped he would paint. It’s fun, like his Rembrandt coloring book images are fun, but it’s a little deeper. It’s whimsical, but it also makes you think.

OK, one more theme I want to address and then I want to show you the best painting in the Salon this year and then I promise I’ll let you get back to the rest of your RSS feed. Mormons are again looking at the female nude. With surprisingly heartening results.

We still don’t know what to do with the nude figure in our art. We’re a little prudish, but we’re not really, not doctrinally. We’re not in the Gnostic Gospels camp where the physical body is dirty. But precisely because of that, and because of our profound respect for women as human beings (Wyoming and Utah were letting the sisters vote before anyone else even broached the topic), we are naturally opposed to the lecherous gaze that was part of the good old boys’ club of academic European art. So we’re extra-vigilant. When Trevor Southey invoked Dürer in his portrayal of Adam & Eve, it necessitated a footnote on the SMA website that in the medieval period, nudity was a symbol of innocence and chastity. And we still tug at our neckties and turn away when the subject is broached today, perhaps because of the deep wound that pornography has inflicted on our culture.

But two artists in particular this year open the door again in a very powerful way, and they both do it by highlighting our mother, the first naked woman – Eve.

In the room with the abstract pieces, you’ll find a surprisingly representational painting that was so powerful it took a while for me to take it in. Nuditas, by Patrick Marco Devonas, is subtitled “the Burning of the Daughter of Eve.” The focal point is a nude woman, hands raised in a pose reminiscent of a crucifixion. There are crucifixes and superimposed pictures of Christ flanking her and obscured as watermarks behind her, and from the edges of the frame two Roman soldiers taunt her with puppets and smoking guns. It’s a little bit Dalí, it’s a little bit Hieronymous Bosch, but very original. It hit me solidly and if it’s not a scathing condemnation of pornography I don’t know what is.

The last painting I will mention is the best painting in the Salon, I say with absolutely no authority to say so. Sean Diediker, in The Condition #1, paints Eve, the apple, and the fall, and this, my friends, is what Mormon art has to offer the world. This is Lewis’s Perelandra, except this time informed by the restored gospel.

Our most unique doctrine is our understanding of the fall and what it means. We turned the Christian world upside-down when we asserted that it wasn’t a tragic mistake. (OK, we didn’t say that. Moses and Nephi said that. But we made sure it got translated into Italian.) And this is what we can offer the world with our art – it’s profoundly educational without being didactic, it’s aesthetically astounding without being trendy, and it’s genuinely and uniquely Mormon. And I love it. I’m going to keep my eye on Diediker, because I think there are some amazing things on the way.

The Condition #1, used with permission of Sean Diediker

Well, thanks for making the trip with me. I promise it will be a lot more fulfilling when you’re there at the SMA in person. If you’re a diaspora Mormon without the wherewithal for trips on a whim to Utah Valley, the catalog is available for sale for $14 and is lovely – very nice printing. I applaud the SMA for keeping the Salon tradition alive and I hope to see it produce wonders in years to come.

…thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
(Exodus 20:4)

This little verse has caused more turmoil in art and in history throughout the monotheistic world than perhaps any other. It characterizes Islamic art, which for centuries has avoided the depiction of any living creature, for the fear that the artist who tried to create was usurping the role of the One true Creator. It characterizes the turmoil in Byzantium, it crops up again in the Protestant reformation, which sees Netherlanders whitewashing their cathedrals to separate themselves from their Catholic Belgian cousins. Its subsequent transformation into anti-religious fervor is the battle cry of the French revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks, and the Communists in China. In more recent years, it rears an impious head as the Taliban government of Afghanistan destroys monumental Buddhist sculpture.

And faithful Latter-day Saints find themselves alternately sympathizing with both viewpoints.

Vern Swanson points out that most of the 19th century pioneer Mormons came from Protestant traditions of Northern Europe, and carried their characteristic whitewashed iconoclasm with them across the plains. The dearth of Mormon art in the 19th century may be construed as a curmudgeonly holdover of this culture, or it may be a legitimate doctrinal concern. Even when the church purposely conscripted “art missionaries” to study fine art in Paris, they studied the casual genre scenes of the Impressionists rather than the monumental allegory and mythology of the History Painting tradition that was always a staple of Catholic France. While Mormons may not have taken a violently anti-art iconoclastic stance, it seems that they did inherit the bourgeois sentimentality of the Dutch Baroque. The Dutch were adept at sublimating blatant depictions of religious stories into subtle commentaries on morality through still life, landscape and genre scenes which decorated the interior of middle-class homes rather than adorning the pulpits of cathedrals. This is a very sympathetic aesthetic for the family-as-cathedral Mormons, who led lives, not quite of stark aseticism, but of tranquil domestic simplicity.

Except for the notable exception of Minerva Teichert, who produced grand historical and scriptural scenes in the early part of the 20th century, there is no notable presence in the fine arts for Mormons until the 1950s and 60s. This is not to say that Mormons of the Great Basin era weren’t engaging in the arts – early Mormon settlements were renowned for their bands, choirs, and theaters – they just weren’t creating “graven images.”

Lest we think this was a mere cultural preference, Swanson illustrates how very profound its religious underpinnings were, even into modern years, by relating an interchange between artist Arnold Friberg and Church President David O. McKay. President McKay instructed Friberg not to paint pictures of Deity because “the Finite cannot conceive of the Infinite.” When Friberg challenged that the church was already using pictures of the Savior painted by others, the Prophet answered, “Those were not done by our people! Our artists are not to portray the Lord Christ!”

While the official prophetic prohibition was soon lifted, remnants of the revulsion against graven images remain to this day.

When I was in the MTC, a well-meaning mother sent me some little bookmark-sized versions of the newest Del Parson painting – Christ’s Love. It wasn’t really my style, but I thought the other sister missionaries in my dorm would appreciate them (since sister missionaries tend to be into such things) and I handed them around. I was a little surprised at the reaction I got. Sister Pyper laughed. “Sorry. It just looks like Jesus got glamor shots.” Sister Dance gave it back. “Sorry, I just don’t think it’s very reverent.”

Funny how something as seemingly simple as a smiling Christ, in an era where a lot of the more commercially successful artists are capitalizing on modern social sensibilities being translated to traditional subjects, as in this depiction of Christ embracing His mother by Liz Lemon Swindle, could evoke such a reactionary response. But I think even amid the sudden movement to embrace very frank and very Americanized views of scripture and Deity that seems to be selling so well, there is still a vast sea of unsettled angst and discomfort among the membership of the Church.

Another anecdotal experience, but it illustrates my point well, comes from an elder I served with. One day he came to district meeting with a very odd-looking, small spiral-bound book.

“What is that?” I asked him.

“Preach My Gospel,” he answered. It was about 3/4 the size of the copy I owned. I looked at it quizzically. “I got sick of it,” he elaborated, “all that note space on the margins. So I cut it all off. And I wanted to go through and cut out the pictures I didn’t like, but there was important stuff on the back.” He indicated a few of the pages, “so I just used a magic marker.” And indeed he had – he had blacked out every Simon Dewey painting in the entire book.

“I just don’t like the way they portray the Son of God,” he said firmly.

The Church itself has no official position on the depiction of Deity, and uses many direct representations of the Savior in its official publications. While for years it relied on Harry Anderson, a Seventh-Day Adventist, to illustrate the Savior in its media products, it eventually did give official sanction to the now-famous (and often urban mythologized) portrait of Christ by Del Parson. A definite reversal of President McKay’s counsel is obvious.

But what of the average Latter-day Saint who is trying to avoid idolatry in his life, trying to tear down the groves and the wooden fertility goddesses that so plagued the Israelites, trying to teach his children to worship a living God and not an image? What of the conscientious artist who sees the need to instruct and to testify but fears the potential to blaspheme? I imagine this is a discussion that will continue for years, especially as people from less pictoral traditions, or, more compellingly, those from very idolatrous traditions who were asked by the missionaries to remove shrines and statues from their houses, swell the ranks of worldwide church membership? It’s an issue that still lies at the heart of our visual aesthetic.

But I think, in our noble Dutch tradition, some of us are still approaching it very deftly.

Now, if that’s not a daunting title, I don’t know what is. It was enough to pique my curiosity, though, and I left work early on Friday, November 7th to attend Vern Swanson’s thusly-named presentation at the Biennial Art, Belief, Meaning Symposium, Picturing the Divine, at the BYU Museum of Art.

Swanson is one of my favorite Mormon Art Curmudgeons, and not a very curmudgeonly one at that. He’s a wacky art guy, yes, but he’s downright jolly. The afternoon presentations were limited to a half hour, and unfortunately so was the culmination of the day – the panel discussion featuring Swanson, painter Brian Kershisnik, painter/professor Bruce Smith and BYU-H religion professor Keith Lane. A test in Chinese class had prevented me from attending Kershisnik’s keynote speech in the morning, and I was anxious to hear more while we had all these fantastic Mormon Art brains together in one room. But the limited time was well-spent, and I was left with all kinds of buzzy little concepts floating around in my brain, not to mention the cramp in my hand from trying to get as much as I could into my little spiral-bound notebook.

While the presentations were all independently interesting, I’ve decided to share my thoughts on them all in one over-arching framework. And Swanson provided such a framework very handily – his presentation focused on what he called the six pillars of Mormon art. I would like to break my comments, interspersed with what the presenters had to say and examples and commentary from the contemporary Mormon art world, into six separate discussions, to be published here – well, let’s be realistic – whenever I get the chance to write them. The first one will appear within the week.

As an introduction, however, here are the six pillars defined by Swanson:

• The Bible’s injunction against graven images
• Wisehearted art as “curious workmanship” and “cunning wisdom”
• The Book of Mormon’s view of art as a sign of arrogance
• “There is Beauty All Around” – decorative and collaborative art
• Art as a showpiece – proof of greatness
• Art as an agent for “softening one’s heart”

I look forward to discussing them with you.

The theme for this year’s Arts Festival is “The science of art, the art of science.”  I’ve been charting the conjunction of these two disciplines for a while as I believe this is the way LDS artists can leap into the nature writing community and related stewardship activity in good conscience.  The featured visual artist this year was JR Lancaster, “a chemical engineer by training and an artist by desire.”  Experts having various cultural backgrounds and training in a wide variety of fields, including entomology, archaeoastronomy, and ethnomathematics, conducted workshops and offered other presentations exploring subjects like the preservation of ancient artwork and mathematical principles inherent in Native American basket weaving.  A variety of visual artists had wares on display throughout the town.  In fact, the whole village, confined to a narrow strip of real estate along the San Juan River — originally a Mormon settlement, by the way – was decked out with art.

My son and I attended two festival events.  The first was the two-hour writing workshop that Utah Poet Laureate Katharine Coles presented.  It had a clever title: “Writing What You Don’t Know.” The second event was the evening potluck dinner and open mic.  This post covers the Katharine’s workshop; a second post will cover the reading, which was quite an experience in itself.

Regarding the festival’s theme built around the intersection of art and science, Katharine remarked, “These are not disparate conversations.”  But before she dove into her topic and the workshop activities, she took a moment to remember Leslie and Kitty Norris, who have one time and another been the sun and the moon in the lives of many writers, Mormon and otherwise, for many years.  Leslie was my thesis chair back when.  I wrote an AMV tribute on the one-year anniversary of his death.  Kitty died just this last week.  Her funeral commenced in Orem, Utah during Katharine’s workshop in Bluff.

By way of remembering these two, Katharine read Leslie’s famous poem, “Hudson’s Geese,” which he wrote for Kitty.  Katharine said that because Kitty’s health was at times frail, she and Leslie believed she would die before he did, and that belief lies behind the story Leslie tells in the poem.  Katharine said that Leslie read the report of the two geese somewhere, wrote the poem, then when back to look for the source but couldn’t find it.  Katharine told us that if you google “Hudson’s Geese,” Leslie’s poem is what comes up.

It was a lovely moment of connection for me, sitting in a motel conference room in Bluff, Utah, remembering what Leslie and Kitty Norris brought to my life while preparations for Kitty’s funeral were underway in another part of the state.  It was good for my son, too, though he never met either soul.  But he knows something of Leslie’s influence on me and now has more dots to connect that to.

Katharine launched into her workshop, asking the question, “How do we write into something that we don’t know?”  At the center of each table, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and handbooks lay in jumbles.  Before the workshop started, my son and I had begun reading through The Oxford Book of Villains by John Mortimer, a book that attracted my attention as soon as I sat down and that, working upon my subconscious, might even have drawn me to that table.  It’s a clever book and I decided I must get one of my own.  Other books, such as encyclopedias of firearms, saints, and so on, lay heaped before us on the tabletop.

Katharine said that she collects “peculiar dictionaries.”  This fact was indisputable; the evidence lay all around.  Katharine told us to flip through the books and make a list of intriguing new words along with thumbnail definitions.  I had a hard time with this activity because I picked up the firearms encyclopedia.  I know nothing about guns and the book seemed to assume its readers understood basic terms like “service revolver” and “single action,” terms I’ve heard most of my life but out of lack of interest failed to grasp.  I did discover that a certain Dutch-made gun was considered a “handgun of questionable merit” and that a ”touchhole” is the word for that opening in cannons “permitting application of a glowing ember or smoldering timber to ignite gunpowder.”  My son already knew this.  It came as a revelation to me.

Following our listing of words new to us, Katharine told us to jot down five favorite proverbs or popular sayings.  Then we passed our lists to the next table.  We were assigned to write a fifteen-line poem where we used a new word in every line – words selected from lists we passed to each other – plus two proverbs or quotations, and one or more of the party words we’d written up on the board as a group activity earlier on.

The point of the activity was to play with new language because, as Katharine said, poets are obliged to simply love the language they write in.  She explained that she reads science, philosophy, theology, etc. to do that very thing, to see the “ways words strange to [her] explode when put together.”  Rhyme, she said, takes you places that you reach based on sound.  She admonished us to try to write something we wouldn’t expect to write, to give ourselves tools, such as dictionaries, etc., and to try to learn to light up with interest where we find vocabularies that are “charming with each other.”

The next activity I found very distasteful, and that was part of its point.  Katharine asked us to imagine a person we dislike.  I find the concept of imagining a person I dislike meaningless.  First, it makes assumptions about how I think and asks me to pass judgment on someone in a way I just don’t operate by: “Everybody dislikes somebody.  Whom do I dislike? Easy, I dislike X.”  The question of whether I like or dislike someone is irrelevant; it’s what happens between me and another person that I like or dislike, and I take my share of responsibility when matters go wrong.  I can’t focus dislike on another person’s being, only in how matters rise between us, and lacking a real event to consider, the exercise left me cold.

Second, I have a strong reaction against forcibly holding someone beneath the hot lights of artificial and easy moments of judgment, even as a flight of imagination; my thinking simply won’t go that way.  If I had had a choice, I would have opted out of the exercise.  But I understood its purpose – albeit rather bothersome – and engaged in it as a matter of form.

After telling us to write from the POV of the person we dislike, Katharine led us through a series of prompts that ran something like this:

Imagine you are this person doing some task this person commonly performs.
Describe the task.
Begin the next line, “I have always wanted …”
Begin the next line, “I’m happiest when …”
Go back to the task and describe something more about it.
Begin the next line, “I have never wanted …”
Begin the next line, “The thing I really love…”
Begin the next line, “My mother always told me…”
Begin the next line, “I always say…”

And so on.  This was a long exercise and my distaste for it did not diminish.  It felt horribly invasive, like I was imposing a foreign will on someone, and it took me to a dark place where I had to force myself not to destroy via language the privacy of the person I chose to profile – especially since the person didn’t happen to maintain his/her privacy in a healthy manner in the first place.  I’ll never participate in an exercise like this again.

But it did help my son develop sympathy for someone in his life who had caused him distress.  In fact, even though his piece was quite good, he didn’t want to read it aloud, his feelings about the person had changed so dramatically.  He had become sympathetic to his adversary’s plight.  For him, it was a meaningful exploration, a good venture into writing something he didn’t know.  Thus I count the exercise as successful and my aversion a small matter.  We went home satisfied, and as far as I’m concerned, Katharine succeeded in pointing us toward what she meant by her challenge to write what we don’t know.

In thinking about how to introduce my son to the world of writing workshops and writers, I had imagined I should start him off someplace “safe,” like maybe an Association for Mormon Letters conference.  But this festival, I think, got us off to a better start.  The artistic community whose spirit we enjoyed Saturday night welcomed him with gusto and encouraged him to participate in its activities.  It was a wider, more complex environment, culturally and spiritually, than the Mormon one I’ve frequented, and there was a lot going on for us to respond to.  Yet it is able to include Mormons who can contribute to the community celebratory pot, which I would like him to learn to do.  We’ll still go to AML meetings together, but that will be just one of the several banquet tables I hope to sit down to with him as we explore the arts.

Most of the works featured (7 paintings, 1 sculpture and 1 quilt) are from the Museum of Church History. Three focus on the fruits of the harvest in the home; the rest on the actual action of harvesting.

There is one painting that grabbed me, in particular, and I wasn’t surprised to find that it was by J. Kirk Richards. I have been a fan of his work ever since reading an LDS Today profile of him back in 2003 (although I think that that’s actually a shortened profile and that there was a fuller, earlier one, featuring more of his work, posted on an earlier incarnation of the LDS Today Web site from maybe 2000 or 2001).

The Richards painting featured in the Ensign article is titled “Laborers in the Vineyard”:

It is the only work that is listed as being from a “private collection.” Like the painting by Greg K. Olsen — “The Harvester” — “Laborers” is clearly less about the message of the article and more about the scriptural meaning. Unlike Olsen’s painting, Richards’ work is not awash in golden light and sheaves of wheat. In fact, it takes place at night, the only light coming from lanterns held by the laborers. The scene is an actual grape harvest. The setting a large terraces vineyard in France or Italy. A woman, her dress dramatically lit by one of the lanterns, a basket of grapes in her arms, faces the viewer. Several men and perhaps a couple more women, their faces obscured, are engaged in work. A manor house, complete with cupola and lit windows, is in the distance. The glow of many lanterns dots the top right part of the painting.

One gets the sense that these people are engaged in a massive, urgent undertaking.

The Web version above looks like it’s been lightened. It’s washed out. The magazine version looks better to me. I would encourage you to seek it out in print form — and look at the works as well.

I like that the Ensign went for the non-heavy message for the concept. I like even more that Richards painting got me thinking about the heavier, missionary-themed, Jacob 5-flavored aspect of the word harvest.

Incidentally, Richards has another work on the theme that’s more overtly symbolic and is simply titled “Harvest.”

Wyoming artist Charles Dayton, the show’s organizer as well as one of its participating artists, says, “We have been able to exhibit 20-30 Minverva Teichert originals from the families’ and friends’ collections.”

“Periodically,” he remarks, “someone will bring a painting to the show that has never been publicly displayed.”

The show’s goals include being “the least pretentious art show that artists and patrons will attend all year” and placing Teichert’s paintings “in the context in which they were created.” Attendees will “have an opportunity to visit her home (with murals still on the walls), meet her family, friends and students and breathe in the atmosphere of this cowboy community.”

Events include:

• Tours of the Teichert home
• Minerva Teichert painting exhibit (public and private collections)
• Presentation by Julie Rogers — Painter of the pioneer experience
• Friday evening silent auction and barbeque
• Plein air demonstrations by Michael Ome Untiedt, noted Colorado artist
• Artist demonstrations Friday and Saturday

For a schedule of events and lodging information, go here. The site will be updated as arrangements are settled.

Dayton remarks that Minerva was “a remarkably generous woman. My grandmother once commented on how much she liked a large floral painting so Minerva gave it to her.”

For a peek at Charles Dayton’s original western and wildlife paintings, go here. A descendent of Mormon pioneers who colonized the high-mountain valleys in Idaho, Utah and Wyoming, Dayton left an organizational consultant career to pursue his destiny as a painter of western scenes and wildlife.

To read more about Dayton’s life and what motivates his art, go here.

To see an online gallery exhibit of Julie Rogers’ art, go here.

To learn more about Michael Ome Untiedt and his work, go here.

I fear the connection here may seem tenuous. Lewis is not, after all, a Mormon author, as much as we’d long to appropriate him. But neither was the art exhibition I had looked forward to actually Mormon art. Come to think of it, the only Mormon factor in this entire train of thought is me. Let’s see how far-fetched we can get.

The most recent exhibition to open at the BYU Museum of Art is quite a departure from their previous featured exhibitions. Beholding Salvation was a collection so doctrine-centric that it seemed to pay no heed to any sort of artistic cohesion. Not that I’m criticizing – there is room for this unique curatorial approach, especially in the peculiarly insular Utah art scene. It was extremely popular with the viewing public, even (especially?) those who don’t usually consider themselves part of the Art Elite. Last year, they featured Pageants in Paint, a huge retrospective of Minerva Teichert’s work. Again – clearly Mormon art – but it was an exhibition that featured wonderful scholarship and a thematic cohesion that’s nice to see at the MoA. Last week, their newest exhibit opened: Turning Point: The Demise of Modernism and the Rebirth of Meaning in American Art. This exhibit makes no claims to be Mormon, nor does it take into consideration at all the doctrinal or even cultural foundations of Mormonism. It just happens to be in Utah. And it’s fairly successful, for what it is. It makes a clean, concise, didactic little statement about what happened to the Art Establishment in the 60s. It re-hashes Clement Greenberg. They even managed to get a Frank Stella piece on loan and it’s awful pretty. The exhibition as a whole is every bit as thought-provoking as minimalist statements and cultureless attempts at conceptual art tend to be. Which is, to say, it is entirely bankrupt of meaning and soul and it casts a dramatic spotlight across the gulf that separates Mormonism as a worldview from the secular fine art establishment.

It’s hard to argue the place of Modernism and Postmodernism in Mormon Art. (It’s not as important to distinguish between the two as one might imagine. Vern Swanson of the Springville Musuem insists that Postmodernism is simply another offshoot of Modernism, and I’m inclined to agree with him.) It’s hard even to pin down where and what the various movements actually are. But as I wandered through the surprisingly small exhibition, the garbled schools of Modernists and Postmodernists began to congeal a bit for me, and it was all thanks to my recent re-introduction to Belbury.

In That Hideous Strength, Lewis depicts a fictional but believable university in a small town called Edgestowe in rural England. The protagonist is a new fellow at Bracton College and is preoccupied with the politics of the school and becoming part of the “inner circle” of the college’s “progressive element.” This eventually leads him into getting caught up into the intrigue and conspiracies of the N.I.C.E. at their institute at nearby Belbury – a national scientific organization that turns out to be a den of plots and aspirations and loosely aligned wicked people whose main work is something akin to the destruction of humankind. The first time I read the space trilogy, I’m not sure I fully understood all that was involved, and kept looking for parallels with St. John’s Revelation. But upon re-reading it, I realized it was much more involved with the beginning of the end of the world than with the actual end. I noticed specific prescient observations of how diabolical things seem to organize themselves in latter-day society. And art movements started to make a lot more sense.

There were beautiful things to come out of Modernism. Minerva Teichert was a Modernist. So was Monet. In its beginnings, Modernism was simply an exercise in the way we view the artistic creation itself. It’s not a varnished portrait to be worshipped, a goddess in itself – it’s just a sheet of canvas with some paint on it! It also attacked the art establishment and their strict control of who was and wasn’t considered an artist. They began by holding their own salons – across the street from those of the Academy – but ended by breaking into the establishment, “modernizing” the notion of what it means to be an artist. It was about talent, not heredity. And this is the 20th century world we were born into; and not only in the arts.

This is where we begin – in Bracton College, in the Modern world. It’s the Oxford where Lewis lived; it’s the pre-war mid-20th century. But then we slowly start to watch things unravel, and it all begins with the overturning of traditional authority.

The Postmodern movement, BYU MoA reminds us, was born out of the last dregs of Modernism – the New York School. These were the abstract expressionists, the Jackson Pollocks and Mark Rothkos and Clement Greenbergs. They’re like the “progressive element” at Bracton College, and they proved its downfall. They were right at the cusp of the old authority. They still played by the rules of galleries and critics and museums, but they were biding their time.

The critical point comes in art and in culture and in That Hideous Strength when the old authority is thrown down and the “new order” arises. This works well in theory, but upon meeting everyone in the new order, you realize there is no order. It’s anarchy. It’s anarchy with a nice acronym for a name and it still manages to show up in the reputable museums.

After the abstract expressionists, the art world and the exhibition move on – we have the Minimalists, we have the Conceptual Artists, we have installation art. Similarly, Lewis’s protagonist meets the “inner circle” upon his arrival at Belbury. The Deputy Director Wither, the charismatic Lord Feverstone, the militant police chief Fairy Hardcastle, and others who keep confiding to him that they’ll help him out, pointing the way and telling him who to avoid.

And, following Lewis’s train of prediction, we get to see where it ends. There IS no inner circle. There is no order. The bigwigs run themselves into the ground because we know that, in the end, Satan does not support his followers.

Now, in no way am I calling Postmodern art diabolical. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing insidious waiting in the new BYU exhibition that’s going to jump out and steal your soul. But it is heartbreaking to see where art ends when the goal for the past 50 years has been to divest it of meaning, to kill everything organic that was growing on it, to shrivel and bully its soul.

The enemy of what we know to be right and true is sometimes that which is evil and menacing and immediate, but all too often it is merely the negative space – the absence of anything good and worthwhile that is most damaging. It’s not the occasional reactionary person who yells at you and tells you not to push your religion on him – it’s the huge mass of smiling, happy people who simply wave you away in apathy because they don’t care. That’s what really makes your soul weep.

That’s what Belbury tried to do to the human race. It was the cold, calculating Dr. Frost who proved to be the real threat. His vision of humanity was one of organic pollution. It wasn’t until we were freed from our emotions and cultures and chemical reactions that we would finally be fully evolved. And that’s what Postmodern movements have tried to do with art.

I can’t decide why the MoA decided to subtitle the exhibition “The Demise of Modernism and the Rebirth of Meaning in American Art.” There is no Meaning in any of the movements presented – especially not in the Minimalism that takes up so much of the floor space. The Minimalists purposely sought for years to strip art of any cultural connection, any inherent meaning, to the point where it was distilled to pure geometric forms. Conceptual art is about “Meaning” in the way that an empty refrigerator is about food. It was in this era that artists decided that they didn’t need to supply the meaning – they needed to confront the viewer with a giant mirror and let everyone “bring his own experience to the art.” Installation artists later began the fascinating Postmodern practice of muttering nonsense to themselves and charging us to attend.

Granted, some of these approaches are innovative. In the hands of some artists, they are interesting. Installation art can be at least provocative. Again, I can’t fault them for their motives. But they are ultimately empty, and they don’t suit themselves to the ultimate, if at times too large to be comprehensible, Meaning that is inherent in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The resolution of That Hideous Strength lies in humanity and in animals, in love and reproduction and warm buttered bread. It is organic, earthy, but it stands in awe of the incomprehensible Gods who stream down from the heavens. The redeemed man stands with his feet in the mud and his face heavenward. This is the beauty of Lewis’s art, and a good indication of where we should take our Mormon Arts.

We stand in a muddy, verdant spring grove with a glorious light streaming down from above. We are a sect who didn’t buy the gnostic gospels – we live in our bloody, lithe bodies and we know that God lives in His glorified body. We have cultures and languages and visual symbols and we use them to paint our polyglot pictures of His words, or the remnants of them we still have. Most importantly, we know that behind our varied human experiences, there is one, unified, ultimate source of light and Meaning. We know that there is an authority – a final accountability. And though we approach it from different backgrounds and holding different pens, we are writing and drawing and painting in the same direction, with our eyes single to the Center that holds.