Airbrushed from Art History (26)

"We no longer live in an era where being an artist automatically means being a religious artist," notes Maria Walsh in Open the Door to the Redeemer:

"In the great age of faith, religious themes provided a ready made and universal image-repertoire for artists to draw on. To be a religious artist at the beginning of the twenty-first century, at a time when the universal values of faith are being challenged, is to embark on a personal spiritual quest. Images produced as a result of this exploration will undoubtedly resonate with the religious beliefs of others, but, unlike the universalism of a classical artist like Raphael, the vision of the contemporary religious artist also runs the risk of being a lone cry in the desert. This conflicting position is a little like the one occupied by the self-taught artist in relation to the contemporary art world establishment. On the one hand, because of the seeming naivete of his formal skills, the self-taught artist is marginalized, but, on the other hand, he is valued for the very things which make him different from the mainstream, i.e. the simplicity and sponteneity with which he communicates his internal world."

Walsh's point is doubly magnified for those self-taught artists, of which there are many, who are also religious artists. 

"The emergence of self-taught or vernacular artists, as the confusion about their name implies, followed several entwined paths," writes Leslie Luebbers in Coming Home! Self-Taught Artists, the Bible and the American South, "from outsider (or psychologically abnormal) artists, promoted by French artist Jean Dubuffet, to a renewed interest in living American folk art traditions, to an effort, similar to the feminist endeavor, to recover and present the work of black artists, who rarely had access to academic training."

Walsh unpacks the spiritual thread within this development:

"Many mainstream artists working in the early part of the twentieth century, Such as Jean Dubuffet (1901 - 1985), Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944), and Paul Klee (1879 - 1940), were very interested in so-called 'outsider art', (art by self-taught and folk artists, children's art and art by the psychologically disturbed), because they felt that this work was creatively inventive as opposed to the rigid traditions of classical culture. They attempted to incorporate the innocence and raw vision of untrained artists into their own work in an attempt to revitalize creatively deadening traditions. They also thought that this work resonated on a spiritual level that was missing in academic art. While the spiritual levels in Kandinsky's or Klee's work is often very abstract and cerebral, in the work of Expressionist artist, Georges Rouault (1871 - 1958), the innocance and rawness of simple form was used to convey a much more humanist spiritual message ... Both the religious artist and the self-taught artist can be said to combine fragments of inherited traditions with an intensely personal inner vision to invent a pictorial world that is resolutely spiritual."

In some sense, Alice Rae Yelen writes in Passionate Visions of the American South, "all self-taught artists might be described as visionary, as they each draw primarily on inner resources, and all work created from internal inspiration can be said to be motivated by a spiritual force, which may or may not be interpreted as a religious impulse."


Rae Yelen writes about the religious visions of self-taught artists from the American South and suggests that "... religion and spiritual inspiration are so important in the southern way of life, it is hard to imagine a more fertile environment for the creation of religious and visionary imagery." This is because, "In the South, religious practice is dominated by evangelical Protestantism and is far more homogeneous and integral to daily life than in other areas of the country":

"Most evangelical southern Protestants, whether black or white, rural or urban, restrained or charismatic, Baptist, Pentecostal, or otherwise, believe in the Bible as the ultimate moral authority. They consider access to the Holy Spirit and thereby conversion to be direct; they uphold traditional morality as defined by their church; and because church authority is decentralized, they accept informal worship. Each of these conditions finds a corollary, subtly or straightforwardly, in the work of many southern self-taught artists ...

Many artists who produce narrative biblical subjects claim direct communication with God. Others simply tell Bible stories, commonly learned in childhood, Sunday School, or church. Some are lay preachers, often leaders of their own churches; others have no conventional religious affirmation. Self-proclaimed preachers abound in the ranks of self-taught artists, including Sister Gertrude Morgan, Howard Finster, Anderson Johnson, Rev. Benjamin F. Perkins, Rev. Johnnie Swearingen, Elijah Pierce, Josephus Farmer, Edgar Tolson, and R. A. Miller."


Carol Crown notes in Coming Home! that:

"Unlike the religious art of earlier eras, the creations of unschooled artists working in the South are not normally commissioned by nor intended for an institutional patron. Rather, these works are highly personal expressions, made by artists who have in mind a variety of functions: decorative, critical, didactic, proselytistic, or contemplative. Many of these artists identify themselves as evangelical Christians and share common religious beliefs, but even the work of those who do not espouse this brand of faith or who believe themselves untouched by its influence does not always escape the impact of evangelical Christianity in the South."

However, religious art by self-taught artists is not restricted solely to the American South. Matt Lamb, an "internationally-recognized Chicago artist whose work is ... in the Vatican Museums, is a religious artist and a self-taught artist." Walsh writes of his work:

"To build his densely scumbled surfaces, Lamb coarsens oil paint by adulterating its sensuousness with grit, sand, tar and other non-art materials. In this, Lamb continues to explore the innovative techniques brought into the tradition of oil-painting by the aforementioned Dubuffet who used similar materials on his canvases, as did the American Abstract Expressionist, Jackson Pollock (1912 - 1956). Here there is a meeting of two worlds - what the self-taught artist adopts to invent a style, the trained artist adopts to escape style. Often in Lamb's work, the flame of a butane torch is played across his canvases allowing heat and combustion to sear his images. Lamb's synthesis of disparate elements into a unifying meld, by this and other methods, is a process which echoes the message of spiritual transformation voiced in his work. Lamb does not work from drawings but searches for the forms of his images in the shapes suggested by the blottings of paint he smears onto the blank canvas. To achieve these blottings, Lamb will often press a new canvas against the face of an earlier finished work. In this way, he destroys the silence of the blank canvas. There is something rather than nothing from which to create. The challenge of the chaotic unformed surface to Lamb's inner imagination could be said to parallel the challenge faced by the spiritual traveller to give form and conviction to the tenets of his or her faith."

William Kurelek's "struggle to find himself, to become a painter, led through the depths of a personal hell, depicted in such paintings as "I Spit on Life," "The Maze" and "Behold Man without God" (1955), the latter painted before, and named only after, his conversion to Roman Catholicism" writes Ramsey Cook in Kurelek Country:

"The period spent in psychiatric care in Great Britain led to the resolution of his personal crisis, and he emerged a totally committed Christian and a man resolute in his vocation as an artist. Convinced that his recovery was a miracle of God, not science, he rejected suggestions that his account of these years would have been improved by blue-pencilling the lengthy theological discussions. That, he insisted, would have meant "cutting the heart out of the body." Kurelek had now found his mission: it was to use his talents, as he believed God intended that he should, in supporting the cause of Christian belief and action. "What I am sure of," he wrote at the end of his autobiography, "is that I am not really alone anymore in the rest of my journey through this tragic, wonderful world. There is Someone with me. And He has asked me to get up because there is work to be done ...

One of his finest paintings, "Dinner Time on the Prairies" (1963), was included in a series entitled "Experiments in Didactic Art." A note he scribbled made plain his determination to give immediacy to Christian precepts:

This is an intuative painting. I was wondering how to paint a western religious painting and suddenly this idea came to me, so it is open to interpretation. A meaning I put on it that which crucifies Christ over and over can just as easily happen on a summer day on a Manitoba farm as anywhere else. The farmer and his son doing the fencing may have had an argument just before dinner or one of them may have enjoyed a lustful thought. Or got an idea how to avenge himself on a neighbor etc."

He knew that some critics would be unhappy about this kind of painting, even those who praised his farm scenes, so he issued an explanatory manifesto, in which he pointed out that many artists - Bosch, Bruegel, Goya, Hogarth, Daumier and Diego Rivera - had painted pictures of a didactic kind, and they were accepted as great artists. "I don't pretent to put my work on a level with theirs," he explained with his usual modesty, "but I nevertheless do have something to say just as they did."

Not only are self-taught religious artists not solely from the American South but, as Erika Doss argues in Coming Home!, "Artists who are labeled "modern" and "contemporary," like Rothko, Tobey, Warhol, and Weisberg, and those called "self-taught" or "outsider," such as Rowe, Murray, Morgan, and Finster, share interests in faith and spirituality and express them in visually diverse strains."compares the spirituality found in the work of such artists with that found in the work of mainstream artists:


"... compare the stylistically similar paintings of John "J. B." Murray and Mark Tobey (1890 - 1976), both of whom adopted distinctive compositions of "all-over" calligraphic patterning for specific religious purposes. Murray began creating "spirit drawings" ... after experiencing a vision from God to move his hands "in a manner willed by His power." A member of a Southern Baptist church where glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, was not uncommon. Murray's glossographia were the visual embodiment of his personal religious beliefs: painted prophecies of good and evil, visually elaborate incantations of a deeply private faith.

Transferring the word of God into visual form, Murray's work is similar to that of Southern evangelical artists such as Sister Gertrude Morgan and Howard Finster, whose paintings ... are similarly crammed with dense script and obsessively detailed imagery ...

These comparisons suggest that American artists of all varieties are clearly engaged in visualising faith. Some, such as Murray and Tobey, are drawn to the subject of religion as a means of defining and expressing the dimensions of their beliefs. Others, including artists ranging from William Hawkins to Kiki Smith (b. 1954), select religious subjects as a means of interrogating the institutional boundaries of mainstream belief systems. Hawkin's Last Supper #6, 1986, for examples challenges traditional Western European notions of the participants in that biblical scene by painting Christ's disciples as a diverse group of men and women, black and white ... Similarly, Smith's Virgin Mary, 1992, diverges from conventional representations of the mother of Christ as a divine conduit of grace by depicting Mary as a fleshy, vulnerable, and distinctly human figure.

Some artists engaged in the intersections of art and religion see themselves as visionaries whose art mediates between a mysterious physical universe and their personal, subconscious, and imaginative understandings of the universe. Howard Finster recounted many times that he was a "man of visions," divinely appointed to "paint sacred art" after experiencing a visionary call in 1976. Likewise, Minnie Evans turned to religious art after experiencing vivid dreams and revelations and hearing the voice of God command her to "draw or die".

As a result, Doss argues that "such ... exhibitions as Testimony: Vernacular Art of the African-American South, 2000, and Let It Shine: Self-Taught Art from the T. Marshall Hahn Collection, 2001, highlighted the importance of religion, particularly evangelical Christianity, among a number of Southern "self-taught" artists. However well-intentioned, by featuring painters and sculptors who have been arbitrarily categorized as "different" from "mainstream" artists on the basis of formal art education, such exhibitions reinforce assumptions that the visual expression of religious belief lies mainly in the purview of a seemingly isolated group of "self-taught" artists living primarily in America's Bible Belt."

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Talking Heads - Road To Nowhere.