4 October 2023
The God of Light
“Light doesn’t know itself until it comes into a room.” Louis Kahn, architect, 1901 - 1974
Who could not love this lyrical quote by Louis Kahn? Personally, I like how it relates to my own pictures, which despite their size, are full of unbridled light. What comes to mind particularly in this regard is that the canvas board, at a mere 30 X 25 cm, is the room, and it's both the structure and the restraint holding in the light.
Louis Kahn was a brilliant architect and creator (who also made two separate families concurrently, unbeknowst to either one of them). So, evidently he had a few quirks going on, but he was nonetheless very successful and a heavyweight in architectural circles. His buildings were rather masculine and muscular, and he used a lot of cement in his career to prove it. He worked around the world, and one of my favorites buildings is the library which he made for Philips Exeter Academy, though I’ve actually only seen it from photos.
But in any event, this quote rings a bell for me personally, because I didn’t know what light was until I arrived in the South of France as a student and began painting there. I had been there before as a child, and I’d certainly seen works by Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Monet in museums, but I hadn’t actually seen what they saw until I began to paint there for myself. To be really truthful, I didn’t know myself until I became a painter.
To take this allusion further, I wonder if perhaps God didn't even know herself until humankind created her through Art.
One can see this everywhere around the vast and complicated world, but mostly in those cultures that still feel gratitude for a deity at having created them. In today’s revisionist culture, isn’t it tricky to have to wade into all this murkiness to find light? But I do, because I myself, share this feeling of gratitude. God is a complicated idea to even mention in polite society. I’ve been a fan of the cryptic notion that ‘God is a mystery, and that only through mystery can we know God’.
One might need an imagination to swim naked in this realm of philosophy. Would it not perhaps be the same inspiration that engages us whenever we walk through our favourite museum? In fact, I sense that if more of us made the time to lean into our own imagination, the happier and more creative we’d all be, imagine that?
So, OK, what I really want to say is that this quote of Kahn’s, like a Freudian slip, indicates something that relates to his own feelings about humankind’s relationship to Nature.
Does Kahn believe that humanity completes God’s incomplete vision for this world? Or does God need humankind to complete its vision’? If so, I like this the best because it speaks to so many churches, temples, mosques, and all other holy sites around the world. But despite this, and however one thinks of God, it has little to do with religion or the Church, though many might not agree. For me, like I said, God lives in the creative realm of imagination, not in the world of humankind’s construct of religions and doctrines. That humankind has created these places in which to worship and pray seems already extraordinary to me. They had to have been first imagined, then constructed, in order to please their chosen deities. But actually, I certainly didn’t wish to wade into all this except to say that I’ve always loved the spaces of churches, temples and mosques, in my small travels around the world. But, I'll add that every space on earth can possess the sacred if we are invested that particular belief. Everyday, we humans walk around naked in the sacred, whether we know it or not.
But there are extraordinary places where the sacred and the profane all converge. I remember visiting the Romanesque church of Vézelay a few years back. Inside, it felt like a large and lively space full of sunlight. A few weeks later I visited the small austere church in the village of Conques, finished in the 12th century. In extreme constrast to Vézelay which had felt to me like a vast and sumptuous living room in the home of some very happy British family, this dim compact Romanesque church gave me the feeling of being locked inside a crypt. And yet it too, also held for me an air of the sacred. It’s stained glass windows were updated in 1994 by the French artist Pierre Soulages, which at the time created a great commotion due to his ultra simple ‘modernist’ design in pale off-white and greyish nuances that emptied the church of colour. I’ve never been moved by his paintings or drawings, his oeuvre leaves me cold, but in France, he still holds a high place in the pantheon of Contemporary Art. That said, I absolutely loved what he did for this small church, and it’s a reminder to me that every space houses a unique tonal structure of its own.
To clarify why I think of all religious sites as both sacred and profane, it’s because they were built by humans, perhaps with high ideals, but humans nonetheless. And the Middle Ages, let’s be honest, were dark ages, and dark instincts. It would have been an especially grim time to be a craftsman working on a church all one's life for the sake of the Church.
That said, in a perfect world, wouldn’t it be enough for humankind to makes its mark upon this heavenly earth by manifesting a purposeful meaning through each unique life? We call this Human Rights and it's a shockingly recent idea.
In Artistic terms, I think this would mean that for artists to create, it would be to both celebrate Life, but Nature too. Speaking as a painter, I need this modern and contrapuntal idea of a Picture that manifests this gift of Nature solely through the use of an abstract means with which to re-create it. Didn’t Claude Monet, after all, need to splice open the French countryside so the rest of us could also see God’s poppy fields? And didn’t Giorgio Morandi open us all up to the quiet Modernist but familial charm of a few cups and bottles intimately placed together? What I do know is that Vincent Van Gogh invented the Sunflower and unleashed it upon the world like he was the first Instagram influencer. He subsequently took over our calendars, postcards and bookshops the whole world-over.
Either way, in the end, isn’t all creation about how we give beauty back to God, however which way we understand it, her, him, they? I know it’s not fashionable to articulate any of this in Contemporary Art circles, but after all, isn’t all Indigenous Art everywhere around the world all about that? Have we Modernists in the West missed something?
But anyway, I suspect that in this Contemporary World of Art, we’ve sadly become a little too clever and vain to admit this sort of thing even to ourselves late at night when we’re all alone with our thoughts.
So, this very friendly-looking picture from a few nights ago surprises me today as I take notes. It was one of two studies from a blank sky that bloomed suddenly toward the very end of the session. The sea had been yellow, but almost in an instant, it turned blood red, then on to purple, as I tried to follow it into nightfall.
An empty canvas board is simply white noise. But fill it with paint and it becomes a room, will it be dark or full of light? Will it be sacred or profane? All these things depend upon the craft and vision of the artist.
As can often happen life today, I am asked once in a while if I believe in God, or am I religious, or spiritual? I usually respond that because I’m a painter, I mostly believe in Light, whether or not it’s found in a church, a temple, or on a tennis court. If there’s light somewhere, I’m all in.
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