Seeing in new and different ways

John Dillenberger's A Theology of Artistic Sensibilities: The Visual Arts and the Church remains a significant contribution to our understanding of the visual arts and faith with its summaries of the engagement that the Church and theologians have had with the visual arts throughout church and art history.
'Since the church has had little regard for the visual arts as such and only a partial interest in architecture, the result has been that the arts and architecture have not had the nourishing spirit of the church. They have been left to themselves - indeed, to the creation of their own spiritual perceptions, whether nourished within or without the church. The artists did not desert the church; the church deserted the artists. this means, of course, that those in the church believe that fundamental realities are expressed elsewhere, namely, in its verbal, word-forming, defining, and naming activities.'

'... language lost its powers of imagination and became that which declared, defined, set limits. In contrast, painting is a suggestive, showing-forth modality, which in the light of what we know, wrests nuances of meaning.'

He quotes Langdon Gilkey: 'Art makes "us see in new and different ways, below the surface and beyond the obvious. Art opens up the truth hidden and within the ordinary; it provides a new entrance into reality and oushes us through that entrance. It leads us to what is really there and really going on. Far from subjective, it pierces the opaque subjectivity, the not seeing, of conventional life, of conventional viewing, and discloses reality."' 

Similarly, he quotes David Tracy: 'In a genuine work of art, "'caught up' in its world, we are shocked, surprised, challenged by its startling beauty and its recognizable truth, its instinct for the essential ... We recognize the truth of the world's disclosure of a world of reality transforming, if only for a moment ourselves: our lives, our sense for possibilities and actuality, our destiny."'

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Jan Garbarek - Molde Canticle.