Sacred Time: Sacred Mind Journeys of Spirit
Sacred Time: Sacred Mind Journeys of Spirit
An exhibit of paintings by Robert M. Sarly
at Andover Newton Theological School
in the Wilson Chapel and the Meetinghouse Gallery
2 September – 31 December 2008
The difficulty of paintings, Plato once lamented, was that they “stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence.” Of course, the philosopher was not so simple-minded as to imagine that texts, once written, behaved any differently: “You might think that [written words] spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know more about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing” – which is to say, they remain silent. Is this sufficient as a way of thinking about the “voice” of paintings, and particularly abstract paintings? Do they reveal a form of meaning to us not in discursive language but through the quite different language of the image itself? In other words, do images have their own kind of voice, one closer to that of a poem which reveals its meaning slowly and in a tongue we know not as the poet’s but as our own?
Such questions are unavoidable when standing in a gallery filled largely with abstract images such as those comprising this impressive and wide-ranging exhibit of Robert Sarly’s paintings. Gathered under the ambitious theme, “Sacred Time: Sacred Mind,” this collection invites us into what the artist calls “journeys of spirit,” with a deliberate emphasis upon plurality. If we ask what it is that we might encounter in such paintings, we might initially wonder whether we are to make meaning by reading something into such images, or expect that we are to take some meaning from them. But such approaches miss the deeper truth of such paintings which, precisely in their formal abstraction, ask of us an altogether different vulnerability: they invite us to encounter, precisely in the depth of their form, a deep meaning Wallace Stevens points toward when he wonders, “Is there a poem that never reaches words?” They remind us, in the same way a good poem does, that what is at stake is not what words – or images – say but how they speak, which is to say how they gesture in their silences and in our own.
How do these images “mean” for us, and gesture in our silences? If we are patient with them, if we learn not merely to look at them but to gaze upon them, they might begin to speak from a depth that touches something “other” – not only beyond but within us, that “Gestalt” or form which Mr. Sarly refers to as “the soul’s inner landscape.” In gazing upon such images, in discerning the shape of this interior “landscape,” we begin to see that outer and inner, surface and depth, form and meaning, are not finally two things but one. In such a unitary encounter, we begin to find within ourselves a presence which does not reveal itself to us ordinarily, given the frenetic pace of our living. And yet such awareness arises, when it does, primarily within the cradle of the ordinary. It reminds us that the way that we look determines what we see. Call it attentiveness to the silent voice that “speaks” within the image. Call it a sense of the numinous held within and revealed by a painting’s “Gestalt.” Call it prayer.
Mark S. Burrows, curator and
Professor of the History of Christianity
Andover Newton Theological School
An exhibit of paintings by Robert M. Sarly
at Andover Newton Theological School
in the Wilson Chapel and the Meetinghouse Gallery
2 September – 31 December 2008
The difficulty of paintings, Plato once lamented, was that they “stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence.” Of course, the philosopher was not so simple-minded as to imagine that texts, once written, behaved any differently: “You might think that [written words] spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know more about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing” – which is to say, they remain silent. Is this sufficient as a way of thinking about the “voice” of paintings, and particularly abstract paintings? Do they reveal a form of meaning to us not in discursive language but through the quite different language of the image itself? In other words, do images have their own kind of voice, one closer to that of a poem which reveals its meaning slowly and in a tongue we know not as the poet’s but as our own?
Such questions are unavoidable when standing in a gallery filled largely with abstract images such as those comprising this impressive and wide-ranging exhibit of Robert Sarly’s paintings. Gathered under the ambitious theme, “Sacred Time: Sacred Mind,” this collection invites us into what the artist calls “journeys of spirit,” with a deliberate emphasis upon plurality. If we ask what it is that we might encounter in such paintings, we might initially wonder whether we are to make meaning by reading something into such images, or expect that we are to take some meaning from them. But such approaches miss the deeper truth of such paintings which, precisely in their formal abstraction, ask of us an altogether different vulnerability: they invite us to encounter, precisely in the depth of their form, a deep meaning Wallace Stevens points toward when he wonders, “Is there a poem that never reaches words?” They remind us, in the same way a good poem does, that what is at stake is not what words – or images – say but how they speak, which is to say how they gesture in their silences and in our own.
How do these images “mean” for us, and gesture in our silences? If we are patient with them, if we learn not merely to look at them but to gaze upon them, they might begin to speak from a depth that touches something “other” – not only beyond but within us, that “Gestalt” or form which Mr. Sarly refers to as “the soul’s inner landscape.” In gazing upon such images, in discerning the shape of this interior “landscape,” we begin to see that outer and inner, surface and depth, form and meaning, are not finally two things but one. In such a unitary encounter, we begin to find within ourselves a presence which does not reveal itself to us ordinarily, given the frenetic pace of our living. And yet such awareness arises, when it does, primarily within the cradle of the ordinary. It reminds us that the way that we look determines what we see. Call it attentiveness to the silent voice that “speaks” within the image. Call it a sense of the numinous held within and revealed by a painting’s “Gestalt.” Call it prayer.
Mark S. Burrows, curator and
Professor of the History of Christianity
Andover Newton Theological School
posted by Andover Newton News at
4:53 PM
