 Time and Transfiguration© 2003 Ginger Henry Geyer Glazed porcelain with gold and mother-of-pearl 6" x 4 ½" x 6 ¼", in 5 parts Adaptations from Monet's series, Rouen Cathedral "Certainly no photograph, and least of all no words, can convey the peculiar quality of the paint in these pictures." --George Heard Hamilton, 1960, in his book, Monet: Rouen Cathedral. This began as a simple art joke. "Light, Cubed" was my original title, pointing to the three uses of light in the piece: the camera’s dependence on light, the Impressionists’ revolutionary use of light in painting, and the classic spiritual metaphor that equates God with light, as represented by a cathedral. And Rouen is not just any old cathedral, it is from the Gothic period which developed an entire symbol system around light in architecture and theology. And, if I were so skilled, the porcelain could have been rolled thin enough to be translucent, another light form. Then there's another pun in it, the one about instant gratification. Surely that’s what a Polaroid provides, a miracle of immediacy, in the days before digitized photography made that commonplace. And wasn't capturing the instantaneous a key feature of Impressionism? And, heaven knows most of us attempt to experience the divine as a quickie. Drive-by spirituality. It finally dawned on me that this combination of light and speed was all about time. And then, a short study on Monet led to questions of presence, matter, change and transfiguration. The simple joke became complicated. It was Joaquim Pissarro's beautiful book, Monet's Cathedral, that enlightened me. Here he depicts Monet's entire series painted in Rouen in February 1892 and February 1893, then finished up in Giverny with all paintings dated 1894. Monet painted around thirty versions, by far his largest series. Their compositions and surface treatments are similar, but the color schemes dramatically range from pink to green to gray. What, I wondered, compelled Monet to turn out such a large number? A photographer could take thirty pictures of one thing in different settings (and some snappy websites reconstruct this in time-lapse). But constructing thirty large paintings is a much different task. Clearly, Monet was not interested in emulating the camera’s quick take. This debunks the notion of Impressionists en plein air whipping out quick finished studies before the light changed. Maybe some of them did that, but any oil painter knows you don’t get Monet’s scumbled impasto rapidly. These paintings are meticulously worked out over time; Monet’s letters even say so, as he complains about their difficulty. Is one of several paradoxes here—the pictures look immediate but they are not. Furthermore, images of a cathedral evoke religious narrative, but Monet was agnostic. Perhaps he is taking on the Church here. For what he is painting is not a sacred immovable, permanent fixture. He has dematerialized the church with light. The subject is not so much the façade of a building—and here it is the western façade, the one traditionally reserved for the Last Judgment. That is a very loaded subject. Monet’s subject, rather, is the space between the facade and himself. This ethereal distance he called the enveloppe, that invisible mass of air, light, moisture and temperature that alters our perception…thus, the invisible thing is the subject, and it almost dissolves as time passes. Monet’s intentions were not necessarily theological, and he knew nothing of contemporary physics, but his work suggests the spirituality of the everyday, a big movement these days that evokes particle physics and the sacramentality of time. In these paintings it is not the church that contains the divine light; that light is found outside of it, in the present space that transforms whatever it touches, hour by hour. Every moment is thus transformative, the miracle of light is the miracle of time. Medieval monastics knew that. They practiced it in their discipline of honoring the hours by worship, in their glowing illuminations of the Book of Hours, and in their belief that matter is composed of the spiritual. Perhaps they were furthering the Byzantine Eastern Orthodox theology of divine light, as mysterious as any current strain of spirituality. Perhaps Monet got that by osmosis, who knows? The great 20th century theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar said that divine encounters begin in the moment of aesthetic perception. We get a glimpse of radiance, and both humbled and astounded, we exclaim "I saw it in a new light!" It is a theophany, a sudden collision of beauty, meaning and mystery. A transfiguration is a pleasurable and radical theophany brought about by illumination. It is said that when Jesus was transfigured, he became dazzling and his luminosity momentarily blinded the disciples. But he didn't leave them stunned but changed. A great work of art does this too—it transfigures our immediate world. A lesser work of art may act on us more like a flash cube that stuns our eyes into red spots. And once the shock has worn off, its done. That is a far cry from Monet's cathedral series where time is so full it stands still, beyond chronology. Some call that kairos, or God's time.
Indebtedness: |
