This Weeks Sermon: Art Imitating Life? Or Life Imitating Art?

I was sitting in the bank the other day, waiting for paperwork to be drawn up with regards to a house purchase. That’s quite a “spiritual moment” on its own, but in this case, the drawing up of paperwork has nothing to do with the sermon, it is the waiting part that is the basis for the words this week.

So during my wait I was trying to figure out something to do… anything to do. I was completely bored, and I’d read all the book I’d brought, so I had nothing. That’s when I started looking around and saw these paintings on the walls. They were landscape paintings, very “real” looking and very not like most “real looking” landscape paintings.

Let me try to explain. Most real looking landscape paintings are done with tidy strokes, and the artist doing his or her best to capture a photographic quality in the scene. You know, the ripple on the water, the breeze in the trees, the dappled shadows through the branches… that sort of thing. This artist did not even attempt to do that, but I wouldn’t have even come close to classifying this as any sort of modern art… no it was just landscape art, very realistic landscape art. In this case the artist had used broad strokes, with varying sizes of brush. One of the big rock face formations looked like it had been done with a house painting brush. The strokes weren’t smoothed out, and the washed out sun was leaving odd shadows on the rock face of the painting. The trees looked almost like they were floating above the desert landscape. Everything looked sunburned and faded. The land looked tired. It looked real but at the same time you could tell it was very fake. It was art. It made me wonder about life and art. I mean, is life imitating art, or is art imitating life? Is it one way or the other without a shadow of a doubt. These paintings were portraying a realistic setting. The sun looked like the sun looks most days when it’s so hot there are heat waves coming off the ground and it is hard to breathe. The trees looked exactly as they would if you were driving along the highway looking out across the desert… slightly detached… slightly twisted… almost as if they were floating… washed out… hot and trying to live through the sunlit hours. The rock face looked colorful with bands of red and purple and yellowish rock all across it’s length and at the same time like you were looking through a layer of burned sunlight… glazed into being… stuck in reality… shadows frozen in the temperatures that would make a kiln look like an air conditioned haven. It was real life in the desert. It was art… or was it life? These sanely twisted images that the artist conjured from his or her imagination showed life through landscape scenes more clearly than any photographic replica shot ever could. They showed a twisted world of heat, and shadows, or life trying to stay alive and not give in. Is life imitating this art? Did the artist draw this and suddenly that is what the world became? Or did the artist drive through the same patch of road I drove through, see the same thing, and instead of trying to do the tidy brush strokes and create a photograph decide to make the art true, and imitate life?

This whole thought process lead to more things… life and art, art and life… does it matter? What’s it all mean anyway? Is life as twisted as those paintings showed it to be? Is that art just imitating what it is and all the other art fake happy representations of reality? Is that art imitating life? Could be…

On the other hand… is that life imitating art? Is god just some big artist, and we’re some world where people are looking at the girl in the bank looking at the art on the wall thinking that they’re looking at a familiar scene and wondering if that is art imitating life? Or life imitating art?

Which is it?
A little food for thought..
Thought it might help take your mind off the Vegemite!!

AMEN
 

the word was delivered at:
¶ 10:07 AM