A twist of the lens
A subtle shift in a painting, or in your perspective, can bring familiar things into focus.
When my youngest was very small, he always carried a kaleidoscope to church. Technically, it wasn’t a kaleidoscope but a teleidoscope for toddlers: a solid wooden toy he could keep in his pocket. We went to a large church with columns, candles and stained glass windows, and every Sunday, he’d inspect the sanctuary through his prismed lens. I wondered then if it made the large space more manageable for him. Maybe seeing it broken up, multiplied and turned into patterns was less overwhelming for a very small person.
This morning, I rooted around in his old toys and found the lens. There are more nicks and scratches on it now than in my memory, but that’s to be expected. Its owner will be turning thirteen this summer. But it is a solid toy, as I said, and still feels nice to hold in my hand. It is a small, familiar weight.
When I hold it up to my eye, I see the world turned into wheels, the image broken and mended as I turn the toy. The act and the vision are both satisfying and strange.
Strange beauties
I recently visited an art exhibition celebrating the 150th birthday of the Welsh painter, Gwen John. Her life overlapped with that of the more familiar artist Emily Carr. Both women studied in London at the turn of the twentieth century, but their work is very different. While Carr gave us vast landscapes, John painted repeating rooms and quiet women who turned their gaze inward. In this exhibition at the National Museum Cardiff, many versions of the same composition are displayed together. Five paintings line one wall, each depicting a young woman seated comfortably, wearing a blue dress, reading a letter. The paintings are all the same and yet different. The position of the woman’s hands, the fall of her hair, the placement and colour of the objects on the small table beside her – each of these shifts subtly and the feeling of the painting changes.
Gwen John described herself as a “seer of strange beauties, a teller of harmonies . . .” In the gentle repetitions I found on the exhibition’s walls, I feel the artist asking me to linger and look for those grace notes, those faith-filled inner moments when it is easier to see our deep reasons of being.
Returning to reality
In her notebook, John copied these words from the Times Literary Supplement: “the value of religious experience goes to confirm the witnesses of the human consciousness that its final values belong to the very nature of reality, that is, to God.”
She doesn’t include any attribution, though this sounds like William James, who argued that our individual experiences anchor us to the ultimate reality. Turning and returning to experiences helps us see God more clearly and not be overwhelmed. We return to the same view. The same gospel story. The repetitions of the turning liturgical year. With each small change, each small twist of the lens, the pattern changes slightly, bringing reality into clearer and clearer focus.
