Before the invention of perspective in art, an artist was limited in their composition to the surface plane of the wall or the canvas. With perspective, though, an artist could seem to place images deep inside the picture as well as on the foreground. The spiritual need of Sabbath is to open up the flat surface of our regular lives to make space within ourselves in which new creation can occur.
Although in July we have begun a new fiscal year in the church, the church year extends through July and August into the first week of September when we begin a new church year with our annual Ingathering service on the Sunday after Labor Day.
I like to consider July to be the Sabbath month of our annual cycle.
For 10 months, from September through June, we are busy with the work of the church. In June, the programs come to their conclusion with a month of looking back, celebrating, and thanking. And then, like every cycle of work, we need a rest.
The stretch break that comes after every hour or two of work when you push back from your desk and walk around for a bit. The nap in the afternoon. The intermission that comes at the end of the first act of Gotterdammerung
The sleep that comes at the end of each day. The day of rest at the end of the week. The holidays scattered through the year, and the vacations we take when we can.
The summer break from school. The retirement breaks that comes at the end of a career. The July break from church.
Lest the church feel like an endless series of demands: more committees, more commitments, more problems to solve, more potluck items to bring, more meetings, more planning, more rehearsals, more fundraising, more, more, more, until we collapse and quit; we take a time to rest, refresh, renew.
It’s not that the work isn’t satisfying. Hopefully, the programs of the church, the ones you attend, and the ones you create, are fulfilling and meaningful. But when work follows work, follows work, follows work, even if the work is enjoyable, valuable, and voluntary, eventually the constant content of life crowds out our ability to appreciate even the appreciable. We need space around the stuff of our lives in order to assimilate the content into our spirits.
Think of Lucy working at the chocolate factory.
The chocolates just keep coming down the conveyor belt.
You grab one and place it in the box. Then you grab the next and it goes beside the first. And then you grab a third, and then a fourth. The work is satisfying. Productive.
But then, if there is no let up, no Sabbath, you miss a chocolate. It goes on the floor, and trying to snatch that one you miss another. The candy box you’re packing fills up and there’s no time to start a new box without missing the next chocolate.
Soon there’s more mess than candy. The enjoyable, productive task changes to stress and panic.
Like Lucy you can stuff chocolates in your apron, or in your mouth, but eventually we run out of places to put the endlessly arriving stuff of our life, and even the pleasures become an unbearable and unappreciated burden.
So Sabbath is the break we give ourselves to appreciate what we had, and regather for what comes. July is the frame we put around the content of our church that signals the end of one set of programs, and the beginning of the empty space that allows for resolution, clearing, and anticipation before our attention is called back again.
July is the month where the doing stops. Our shoulders relax. We release ourselves from worry. If we think about church at all it is to revisit the opportunities for learning and growth we encountered during the previous year, rather than cramming in something more.
“Before creation a presence existed, self-contained, complete, formless, voiceless, mateless, changeless.” We’re in the before creation phase.
“I brought my spirit to the sea; I stood upon the shore. I gazed upon infinity, I heard the waters roar. And then there came a sense of peace some whisper calmed my soul. Some ancient ministry of stars had made my spirit whole.”
Instead of our attention captured by demands directly in front of us, we move them aside, look a little further, gaze upon infinity.
Jim and I returned earlier this week from a three-week vacation. We visited Venice, Berlin, and Munich. It was a wonderful Sabbath break for both of us.
In Venice, we attended the international art fair called the Biennale. Every two years in Venice for more than a hundred years now, countries from around the world showcase their artists in Venice in what feels like an Olympics of art.
Individual countries choose an artist, or sometimes a group of artists, to represent their country. The artist representing the United States this year was a man named Jeffrey Gibson. Some countries have individual country galleries, called pavilions. Other countries rent temporary space all around the city to show their art.
There’s also a guest curator selected for each Biennale who creates a museum-like show in two locations featuring dozens of artists based on a particular theme.
The title for the group show this year was “Foreigners Everywhere”. The theme was art by immigrants, indigenous persons, and queer artists. In other words, artists who ebgage with the experience of being foreigners in their lives, either because they had moved away from their home country, or because their home country had been changed by folks moving in, or because their identities made them foreigners of a kind even within their own families.
Because of the focus on indigenous artists, the group show featured a lot of art from artists working outside the western tradition, what we would call folk art. And what Jim and I noticed is that folk art wherever it’s produced around the world, by whatever culture, tends to look kind of the same. Whether is Appalachia, or the Andes, or African or Asian or Aboriginal, it seems that humans of all kind, naturally make the same sort of images.
Human figures stand up straight and face forward with their arms at their sides. The picture plane is filled with a lot of small images placed beside each other, with space around them rather than touching or overlapping. If there’s a building it’s presented square on. The same picture often portrays several different scenes happening simultaneously in different parts of the picture. So there are hunters in the upper right, and a camp fire in the lower left, and a person sleeping in one corner, and a boat, or a horse somewhere else. And all the figures are the same size, and they all occupy the same picture plane. So the figures at the top of the painting aren’t supposed to be understood as vertically above the figures at the bottom, nor are they meant to be further away horizontally, or behind the figures at the bottom of the painting. There’s no foreground and background. The figures simply use up the flat space available of the surface of the painting.
In other words, folk art from around the world, tends to look the way western art looked up until about the year 1415 when an Italian artist named Brunelleschi invented perspective.
Two years ago, Jim and I had also gone to Venice to see that year’s edition of the Biennale. And that year, after visiting Venice we went on to visit Florence and Rome. In Florence, that year there happened to be a show devoted to the artist Donatello, a contemporary of Brunelleschi and an early adopter and further developer of Brunelleschi’s innovation of perspective in art.
Walking through this show of Donatello’s art, which also included pieces by Brunelleschi and others, you could literally see from one piece to the next, the invention of perspective.
From the flat picture plane of gothic art, with figures either facing straight ahead, or turned in strict profile, suddenly figures seemed to bend, and turn. Instead of figures placed beside each other, now they interacted with each other. A foreground figure stood in front of smaller figures in the background. A Madonna actually seemed to hold her baby. The baby’s body had weight and volume. And when the baby pinched his mother’s cheek the hand seemed to actually be reaching back into the picture to touch his mother behind him, not simply across the surface of the picture.
Instead of a floor presented as a ledge under a flat, vertical space, using the tools of perspective, Donatello and his compatriots could present the illusion of a floor stretching back into a spacious room where the back of the room was further from the viewer than the front. Smaller figures placed in this perspectival space, didn’t just float above, they looked further away. A window could show a landscape stretching toward mountains that appeared to be miles away.
Previously, European artists painted like folk artists everywhere. The painted image and the surface it was painted on were co-equal. The available space for the image was limited to the height and width of the canvas or board. Now, with perspective, the artist could create the illusion of a third dimension: depth. Suddenly, the artist had additional room, within the painting, that could be as large as the artist’s imagination and painterly skill.
Imagine the excitement of an artist suddenly having this space available!
This new opportunity was the subject of a book called Working Space, published in 1986 by an American artist named Frank Stella.
Frank Stella was from the generation of artists that who arrived just after the first generation of American abstract painters like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and so on. Stella died just a couple of months ago.
Those first abstract painters had rejected the goal of western art that had begun with Brunelleschi and Donatello and were interested in creating the illusion of realistic representation in their art. These 20th century American artists instead wanted to make paintings that referred only to themselves and the actual material of paintings: paint, and canvas, color, and line.
A Jackson Pollock painting has height and width, but there’s no depth. The entire image of a Mark Rothko lies right on the surface of the canvas.
Frank Stella started his career making those kinds of abstract paintings that appear to be exactly what they are. His early paintings are completely flat. There’s no sense that you could reach inside the painting, the way you could with a Donatello. Stella’s first paintings were all surface like a gothic-era painting, or like folk art everywhere.
Although Frank Stella had success with his early paintings, eventually he grew to feel constrained by the limitations of this flat style.
He began to feel jealous of the space available in the paintings of earlier perspective artists, particularly Caravaggio. The artist could create an illusion of room within the canvas, and then place images throughout the space, where Stella and the abstract painters could only paint on the surface.
So Stella’s art began to evolve. First, he transitioned from all black painting that had made him famous to paintings using brilliant primary colors. And then he evolved from using only symmetrical rectangular canvases, to shaped canvases that had unusual curves.
And then, in this effort to make space available for his imagination, he shifted from flat canvas and paint, to what are called wall reliefs: art work that hangs on the wall but uses three dimensions like sculpture. By the 1980s Frank Stella was making very large wall reliefs using extravagantly painted elements of cut metal piled on top of each other and extending out into the room. You could now look at the sides of his art, as well as the surface. And you could look into the art, not just at it.
The critics who had admired Stella’s somber, all black paintings from the 1950s criticized these exuberant artistic constructions of the 1980s. But Frank Stella explained in his book Working Space that he was simply trying to do with abstract art what Caravaggio had done with perspective in his representational art, create space in the art for his imagination.
The limitations Frank Stella was feeling with his early art is what Brunelleschi and Donatello were feeling with the gothic art of their day: everything is surface, creation is constrained by the height and width of the canvas. There’s no depth. There’s no room. Life is dynamic and varied, but painting is flat. Bodies are stiff. Images exist beside each other but don’t interact.
They longed for available space.
It’s the same feeling, I suppose, that Lucy felt at the chocolate factory, and that we laugh at because we recognize the feeling in our own lives, too. Stuff keeps coming at us. It’s too much. There’s no room to appreciate. We need to stop the assembly line. We need time to dwell on an experience of our life before it passes, to lift it from the conveyor belt, and turn it in our hands, to see all sides of the stuff of life, the back as well as the front, the top and bottom. To look into our lives, not just at them. And to deal with our life’s experiences carefully and respectfully, before we set them down gently and continue to the next.
So Brunelleschi and Donatello figured out a way to open up the picture plane and let their images move into the picture.
And Frank Stella realized, despite the sneering of the critics, that he needed to bring his art off the wall into the room to give him the working space his creativity required.
And we, too, like folk artists everywhere, tend to consider only the surface of our lives. We need to find ways to make space in our lives. We need to pause the conveyor belt of our lives now and then, so that life isn’t an endless series of stuff, overwhelming, and eventually defeating us.
We need a break.
We need a Sabbath.
That’s what a day off is for. A day of rest. A pleasant hour in a comfortable chair in a shady spot on your back patio admiring the hummingbirds.
That’s what a vacation is for, whether to Venice, Italy, or Venice Beach.
On the flat surface of our lives, like the folk art apparently natural to all human beings, we can only cram in so much content before it all becomes a crowded mess. The images stack up. Everything appears the same size, and equally close, and the important stuff indistinguishable from the trivial. On the flat surface of two dimensional living, our bodies can feel pressed so flat there’s not even space to breathe.
A Sabbath makes space available. The gift to our spirits of a Sabbath day once a week, or a Sabbath month once a year, is to open up the flat surface of our lives where it’s just one thing after another, the same again and again and again, and to discover the depth dimension of life.
There’s something under that table. There’s something through that door. There’s something in that garden. There’s distance between me and the mountains.
Life has more to offer, hidden dimensions, unexplored spaces, distant views. If we push through the surface, if we reach in, if we make space available, who knows what wonders will appear?