Seeing with an Artist's Eye

Hello, I'm Dick Foth, and I'd like to welcome you to known stories to make sense of it all. These stories are what I call walking books, real-life people, different places, different ages, different cultures, and I want to have some conversations with them across disciplines and generations and cultures in order to encourage a kind of knowing fresh lenses through which to see the world. One of those lenses will be Scripture, or more specifically, Jesus of Nazareth, whose life, I believe, changed the course of the history of the world. So thanks for listening in. Great to have you with us. Hello again, this is Dick Foth with Known, and I have some friends with me today, Amor Olsen from Minneapolis, now in New York, and Melissa Moskovitz, who is in Los Angeles. And what we're sitting here, the three of us in the Texas Hill country, we're a little gathering together, and I don't get a chance to be with artists very much, and that's who you guys are, your artists. So talk to me, if you will, about art and God and faith or just let's just jump in, let's just have a little table talk. So, Amor, you're on. Well I have been thinking about this for a while as an artist, you know, from a young age even as having a gift of being able to draw and convey what I see, you know, it's filtered through me, but my goal from a young age kind of lofty was to sort of convey truth and beauty, just a couple of minor little details as well. And you're a painter. Yeah, so I paint in oils, I also, of course, draw and figuratively, I realism portraits, I actually love portraits most of all. I love people. Yeah, something about seeing that the person come out from that picture, capturing not just the physical lightness, but something of who that person is. Your works are tremendous. What I saw last night was tremendous. Thank you. So, now as I've grown in age, and also, however, in my faith in God and in wrestling with these questions of why God, have you given me this gift? What do you want me to do as an artist? What's the point? What's the purpose? And with some conversation, a lot of conversations with other people who think through these things as well, to me it seems that God has given all of us human beings a unique ability above all other creatures, I believe, to see beyond what's around us in this material world. To see something of the transcendent, of the spiritual world, you could even describe that as having imagination, being able to see what isn't there, to materialize even then not only to see it and think about it, but then to actually set your hands to it and create something like that and then show others how it can be done or what they didn't realize could be seen and how they can see it. So, you were referencing earlier when we had a private conversation that God shows up as creator first. Talk about that. Well, of course, in the beginning, I see that first chapter of Genesis is a very beautiful picture of creation, of creativity, of work of art. And, you know, people may argue as chapter 1 of Genesis, historically accurate and can we really count those years as a history of it? And maybe, but that's another conversation. Really, for me, that chapter is written poetically, so it's meant to be, it's meant to be listened to like a song, you know, to hear the cadences of it. And as an artist too, in my training I was taught, you know, don't get hung up drawing somebody's eyelashes or everything's going to end up out of proportion. Start with the general, you know, do the outlines and kind of narrow in little by little your details. And the book of Genesis chapter 1 does that amazingly God were told in the beginning created everything. And, you know, the heavens and the earth. And that's the broad brushstroke, so to speak. And then the first three days, he does certain things like separating the lights and from the darkness, you know, separating the waters from the waters, bringing about the land masses. The next three days are even sort of symmetrically matching to those first three days. He then brings from those lights, the specific sun, moon and stars. And then from the water, he creates the life of the sea, the creatures and from the land he creates, the people and the creatures that live on this earth. So I've never read it that way. Yeah, so you see this like he starts with a big canvas, lays down a big color, then he starts to lay in some details, then he goes back into those details again. That's how I looked at that chapter. And just realized that the God is, well, he's this great artist and in a way, he's also showing us how he's being this creative God. And then interestingly, too, as I read through the Bible, there's this, you know, people talk about the rua, the spirits of God. And interestingly, when God's spirit comes upon people sometimes. And we think of the Holy Spirit later on. But the first place in the Bible that God's Holy Spirit is said to, to sort of reside on somebody is in reference to a man named Betzelel, who's actually an artist, who's the man it got says, I want this guy to design the tabernacle. Because that's the space where people are going to come in and have this encounter with the transcendent, with the one who dwells in heaven, but it's going to be on earth. And so, and I really believe to, to this day, that the kind of the purpose of artists are people who have been given this extra gift in a way to help others as they, as they create something that that people just don't see or that they might look at all the time, but kind of miss it. Even if it's, let's say, a painting of a simple, you know, stump of a tree. Oh, I walk by that stump every day, but the way that artists made me look at it now, I see it in a whole new way. So, you're helping people to see your, your, your the, your the oxymologist of the, well, yeah, well, if we can, or at least pointing them in that direction. So, it's not that we have the unique ability as artists to see, but everyone does and, and we're, we're giving this job of saying, hey, let me help you see that. So, Melissa, just hitchhiking on that. You grew up in what city? In New York City, in the Bronx. In the Bronx. In your mom, did this unique thing with you? She was an art historian. So, my mother from my whole life worked in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So, I've been thinking about this while I was talking, you know, I never heard the word creativity. Maybe perhaps I heard it in college, but I didn't hear it while I was growing up. I just lived in a creative atmosphere at home. We had a very big living room, and we had floor to ceiling books, a lot of which were art books. And we were allowed, from the time we were very little children, we were actually encouraged just to look at any books that were, you know, in the wall, and so I read, you know, college-level books when I was 12 years old, because I was interested in words. And it also gave me a further interest in words, although I didn't consider myself a writer, because my mother had so many art books. I could just go and pull one off the shelf and look at these images. I really didn't know who the artists were, but then we had no money. My children just love when I say this. Mom, tell us the story about when you had no money. But the truth is, we had no money. My dad had three jobs. We were four children. And my mother worked in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and so she had a great discount. And my dad also, though he was a design engineer and he was not a creative person, he really believed that we should have books. So she took us. My parents didn't have a great marriage, and I don't know that I realized that we were growing up, but my mother was very dedicated to taking us to the museum every single Saturday. Like, our family, we didn't have a car, either. Yes, so we didn't have a car, and so we could take the train from the Bronx into Manhattan. So my mother took all four of us children to the Museum of Modern Art, which actually felt a little like a weird place to me while I was growing up. But, okay, these were my friends, these Henry Moore sculptures in the sculpture garden. You're allowed to lean against them. I don't know how we did it in those days. I can remember sitting there and eating and leaning against the sculptures, and also then the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was an enormous place, but I had it memorized. Sort of as a child, I had it memorized. Now, I was actually in my family, my mother wanted all four of us girls to have some interest in all the arts. So we all had to learn the piano. I took ballet, my sister took art lessons, then I took art lessons, and she did ballet. We switched things around all the time, but I think the thing that my mother was the most intent with me is that she was always pointing things out to me to see. I don't know if she did this with my sisters. She might have said, listen to that sound, two of my sisters are singers. One is a professional singer, even till this day. But with me, she would say, well, how many colors of green are in that tree? Now, people go, it's green, and I said, wow, it's like 20 shades of green. And so as I grew up, she helped develop my eye, but I didn't know that's what she was doing. I just thought that that's how people talk to each other. And so to bring this sort of around to, you know, Amor's talking about God as creator, I think that I saw it in my family, but I actually really believe it's in all people the ability to think creatively or to respond creatively. But many people don't have the opportunity to have another person help develop that in them. And so I see art. God has a relationship with us. He created all of this for us. And then he asks us to create for each other. And I benefit tremendously from my relationship with Amor because we love to talk about art. Although he is a fine artist, he's considered a fine artist. I don't paint, I don't draw, I do calligraphy, but I got interested in photography. I found the thing that I could see the best. And that was through the lens of a camera. And I have a lot of confidence in it to this day. Now I have a grandson, take a lot of pictures of him. But I think that creativity is born and then developed in relationships. And you're a very fortunate person if you have a mentor or could see them mentor or you find someone in a book and you go, I love this person's work. And you read, I read everything about a particular artist if I like them. Then that artist is mentoring me even though they could be dead. And they probably are dead. But they're mentoring me through how they saw. And then I want to see like that as well. I had some young guys who work on university campuses walk into my study the other day and said, what old dead guys are you reading? Which is because they have a view and a purview, if you will, of how that works. So let me see if I'm hearing correctly here. I don't want to overstate this or over simplify it. What I hear you saying is that an artist is a person who expresses the world he or she sees or captures it. And in so doing helps other people to see. Yes, and I might have the helps them to see not just the world, but the transcendent within the world around us, the intersection of, and it doesn't always if every painting doesn't have to be a religious painting or spiritual, but I think even a simple painting. There's another many great artists with many dead guys that I read. There are books anyway. I mean, Rembrandt was the one who was a little child inspired me when I would open the book. And of course I discovered in my birthday was the same as Rembrandt's birthday. But okay, it was meant to be. But I realized then also that this was a man who lived 300 years before me. And here I am being touched by his painting. So I just thought to myself, if I don't have to ever sell a painting my lifetime, but if I could help touch somebody in 300 years, then I've accomplished my purpose. So some studies have shown, and I can't remember where I read this, but I did read it somewhere, that if you ask a first grade class, how many of you are artists? Virtually every little child will raise his or her hand. By the time you get to sixth grade, and you say, so how many of you are artists like you have one or two? What happened between first and sixth grade in your mind? Because definitions are scary. So when you are given a definition, you have to then meet the expectation of that definition. I was sent to ballet school, and I would hear my mother tell people, my daughter is a dancer, and I would think, I'm not a dancer, like I like art, or I like writing. And so then I was a terrible dancer, but I danced till I was 20, and then I went, I'm not doing this anymore, but then I taught dance. I discovered that I actually had the ability to teach, and I do have the ability to teach what I know. And so I think that the label of artists is so scary, but I keep going back to this. We have, you know, we're with a group of people who are very bright today, you know, this group that we're at, this conference, I believe everyone of those people has creativity in them. They don't have it developed or they don't have it's brought out of them. And yet the way that God created is he brought out, he brought out light, he brought out, I feel like God brought out the trees for us to look at, like look at these trees, but the title of artists carries with it huge responsibility, huge weight. And so a sixth grader doesn't think perhaps they're good enough to be called artists. First graders, they don't know, they just go for it. They go for it. And so that simplicity might not sustain them their whole life, but, you know, if we are to live with a child like spirit, it means we ought to be willing to try or to listen or to go to a concert, you know, some people laugh the classic, the husband doesn't like opera, his wife sleeps into opera. Oh, then he starts to love opera. But why didn't he love it before? Because they never went. Just things like that. So I think given the responsibility is a big deal. So I have a friend, interestingly enough, who is a world-class maxofacial surgeon. His specialty is cleft palettes and babies. When I first met him and I asked him, so Mark, what do you do? He looked at me and smiled and said, I'm an artist. I give people new faces. It's this powerful thing. Can we just go off just a little direction here? I find it fascinating that the very first thing said in scripture in Torah and you both have Jewish roots, your Jewish friends. The first words that God has recorded as saying in Genesis are, let there be light. I have a friend who's now gone to be with the Lord, but he was a spectroscopist. That is the use of light for a scientific measurement. And I asked him this one day, you know, why? Why do you think that's the first thing? And he said, well, it's like one of the bases for the universe. Einstein's theory of relativity, energy equals mass times squared speed of light. The squared speed of light is the constant in that equation. There is a phrase, and I'm not sure how to say the artist's name. Is it Daubler or Doibler? Something like that. I think he said that color is suffering and structured light. And of course, on the color spectrum, on the electromagnetic spectrum, that part you can see is Roger Bitt, you know, it's the rainbow. Talk to me just a little bit as we sort of wrap this up about color. Talk to me about light and color because I think any person who walks the planet loves light and color. Yeah, for me, it's interesting. My paintings are, I use a very limited palette. What does that mean? It means I have a few colors on my palette, brown or blue. I'm not going to specify the kinds of browns and blues, but I just speak because it's not that interesting. And in the end, you know, I try to make, to me, I try to make color out of less color. Try to make more color. I try to make something that doesn't look quite colorful and to make it in juxtaposition up here to have color. But of course, I have some artists friends who say you just have some pretty, you know, mucky looking paintings. Yeah, see your shadows as color and that's true because light is everywhere and even in the darkness, it's so many varieties of color. And it's a very powerful movie to me that came out a few years ago called Mr. Turner about the painter. You love that painting. Yeah, and the movie was about a very broken person, a man who was a was a stodgy old guy who just made mistakes all the way. But he had this passion for his painting and he was, you know, recognized for that. And this idea of color and light works its way throughout the film. A woman comes in with a, you know, a prism and casting these ultraviolet lights and then they're talking about how colors are created in that way. And this just recurs throughout the movie. And on his deathbed, Turner actually cries out in his last breath, the sun is God, which just ties the whole thing together. Not that the sun that we rotate around is God in itself, but that that there is this the light, you know, God said in the beginning, let there be light. There's this connection and Jesus is. We're told the light of the world. And so, yes, I think we that's that's part of what we see as as Melissa was talking about just all the colors that that are created through through this light that filters through one of my favorite painters is Titian, Italian, Venetian Renaissance painter. And Venice was famous for importing all of these beautiful pigments from the east, the far east and all around the world because of its location. And so the Venetian painters became famous for the rich and vibrant colors, the beautiful rich colors which they frescoes. Yeah, frescoes, but when when oil painting came along and during which time Titian was kind of new on the scene, he became very famous for these beautiful glazes. He would glaze these colors over the under painting. And the light actually passes through those glazes which contain these these fragments of, you know, very tiny fragments of stone essentially crushed together and light refracts back out. And through that again, so you're kind of seeing whether you know it or not, you're seeing several layers of light being filtered through other colors as it comes back into your eye. And there's a I mean, I don't know enough of the technical aspects of that to explain it well, but other than say it's just incredible. The more you learn about that and see how the magical properties of light to just enrich everything. So let me ask you one last question. This is for both of you. And you say you're not an artist in the sense of fine artists. I'm not a fine artist, but if you could pick of all the stories of older new testaments, any any story in the Bible, if you could pick a scene or a face just to paint and say this would be my my deal, you know, I want to I just like to be able to paint this. Which of the stories or faces would you would you like to paint? If I could paint, right? If I could paint the story of the woman caught in adultery, I would want to paint because it has a lot of motion to it. Not emotion, which of course it does, but it has a lot of motion. You have the woman who is approaching Jesus, not because she wanted to, but because other people are making her. So there's motion that has tension in it. And you have Jesus is kind of listening. You know, there's tension in him as well. And then they give up. They leave him. So the motion away. I mean, if I could capture like all of those bits of the whole scene. And there and then he is writing on the ground. That has motion to it. It's actually funny. You're talking about painting. I'm actually seeing these photographs. I'm realizing because I'm so locked into it. But the face, what I would love to capture is the face of the woman when he said, neither do I condemn you. How do you capture like she must have been so puzzled that puzzled and relieved. So I wish I could paint that. Okay. Great. Anyway. Despite the fact that Melissa claims to not be a painter or a draft person, she is such an inspiration. And we talked about this earlier of having those creative people around you. So I think as God draws out, Melissa really draws out. And when we work together and talk together, she's inspiring. And inspiration means, you know, filled with the spirit. And so she she inspires. So I guess one of my favorite scenes stories, especially from the New Testament, is in John chapter 9, where where the blind man is healed by Jesus. And the story goes on. You know, so it's not like you captured all the wood painting. But there's just so much wit and humor and yet spiritual kind of heavy realities and everything. And you know, the man who was blind, he's a little bit sort of, you know, snappy here with the Pharisees who were sort of upset at him and the parents are just about, you know, very Jewish scene. They're like, he's a vege, you know, we're not responsible for his own guy. Yeah. And just knowing also what was going on in that that time in Jerusalem, let's say it takes place during the Feast of Tabernacles during the lighting of the lanterns, the brilliant lights that would light up the temple area. And so here's this man who's blind and darkness. And he comes up from washing and he can see. And maybe this comes back to this whole question of being able to see. And so I don't know what part of that painting I would do. I want to capture some of the humor and the indignant, you know, the religious people around them, but also, you know, Jesus said, as long as I'm in the world, I'm the light of the world. Yes. Well, from Minneapolis to the Bronx, Amor and Melissa, thank you for being with me. And thanks for being some eye openers for us so that we can think about both Jesus and scripture and the world in a different way. Thank you. Thank you for helping us to see better. God bless.