Crashingly Beautiful

Climbing the Mountain

I burned incense, swept the earth, and waited
for a poem to come…

Then I laughed, and climbed the mountain,
leaning on my staff.

How I’d love to be a master
of the blue sky’s art:

see how many sprigs of snow-white cloud
he’s brushed in so far today.
—Yuan Me

This was beautiful to wake up to this Sunday morning. Thank you, Whiskey River.

William Blake

In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.

William Blake (from Parabola Magazine newsletter calendar entry for 28th November). Thank you, dhammanovice.

(Source: stillcuriosity)

Author and painter, Agnes Martin wrote “When I think of art, I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye, it is in the mind.” She devoted her life to living by inspiration. By contrast she described the life as the intellect as living “by comparisons, calculations, schemes, concepts, ideas – is all a structure of pride in which there is not beauty or happiness – no life. The intellectual is in fact death.”

The current issue of PARABOLA asks: What is beauty?

Is it possible that beauty can contain an energy that creates a little shock, a moment of hesitation, a soft space in which we remark aloud, “Wow.” Can it crack us wide open through a song, a poem, or a person that stretches our perceived notions, fixed ideas and limitations? Can it remind us to be more present to the unfolding of the mystery of life, both in and around us as author Don DeLillo describes in his book “Underworld:” Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.” Maybe beauty encourages us to embrace our lives more fully, through all of its savage beauty, and to not take anything that is given for granted?

Author and spiritual seeker, William Segal once wrote: “Both the advantage and the privilege of an artist is that he is forced to look. To see. People rarely see the beauty and the greatness around them. They live their lives in half sleep.” What if we approach the living of our lives as an art?

Explore the mystery of beauty with us in the Winter 2010/2011 issue by subscribing here or by finding the new issue in the marketplace.

—Luke Storms

From the PARABOLA Newsletter: “A Wordless Shock,” November 5, 2010.

Painting: Agnes Martin (American, born Canada. 1912-2004) The Tree. 1964. Oil and pencil on canvas, 6 x 6′ (182.8 x 182.8 cm). Larry Aldrich Foundation Fund. © 2010 Estate of Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Of the genesis of her paintings, Martin said: “When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I thought, this is my vision.”

Martin rendered fine vertical lines and lightly shaded horizontal bands in oil and pencil, softening the geometric grid, which in this case seems to expand beyond the confines of the canvas. For Martin the grid evoked not a human measure but an ethereal one—the boundless order or transcendent reality associated with Eastern philosophies.

–from The MoMA Collection

Painting: Agnes Martin (American, born Canada. 1912-2004) The Tree. 1964. Oil and pencil on canvas, 6 x 6’ (182.8 x 182.8 cm).

From parabola-magazine.

Eric Gill, Bookplate: Girl with Deer, 1920. Thank you for this discovery, yama-bato.

“British sculptor, engraver, typographer, and writer. He began to earn his living as a letter cutter in 1903 and carved his first figure piece in 1910. In 1913 he became a convert to Roman Catholicism and was commissioned to make the Stations of the Cross at Westminster Cathedral, fourteen relief carvings which he carried out in 1914-18. These and the Prospero and Ariel group on Broadcasting House (1929-31) are his best-known sculptures.

Gill was one of the chief protagonists in the movement for the revival of direct carving, and his work usually has an impressive simplicity of conception; he wrote that his “inability to draw naturalistically was, instead of a drawback, no less than my salvation. It compelled me … to concentrate upon something other than the superficial delights of fleshly appearance … to consider the significance of things.”
He tried to revive a religious attitude towards art and craftsmanship in opposition to the social and economic trends of the time, and in life, as in his work and writing, he was a vigorous advocate of a romanticized medievalism.

Gill was a major figure in the revival of book design and typography. He illustrated many books, notably for the Golden Cockerel Press, and his Perpetua’ and Gill Sans-Serif’ typefaces, designed for the Monotype Corporation, are among the classics of 20th-cent. typography. His books include Christianity and Art (1927), Art (1934), and Autobiography (1940).”

—from rockingham gallery

Courtesy of parabola-magazine.