Faith and Art

I suspect any readers I might have are tired of my travel blogs.  They are sort of a delayed journal for me.  Frankly the month since we have been home is not nearly so interesting as the travel.  The tomatoes fell to the  blight - kind of a tomato famine.  The wet spring weather meant no beans or peas.  The abundance of slugs got the basil.  The zuchinni was not so productive when it didn't have a partner (- like me.)  The raccoons are digging up the lawn and competing with the squirrels for the apples and prune plums.  The flickers are pecking on the attic vents.  We have had way too few days of sunshine and I applied for an open position on the school board.  The screening committee passed me through to the interviews.  They are Monday night.   We have a new bishop and David is a counselor.  That pretty much summarizes September at home.  So you see the title of this blog and it's eventual topic could be much more interesting.

While we traveled, I mused on the nature of "church art."  Our churches are relatively unadorned and I found myself a little overwhelmed by many altars and tombs and paintings and windows and ...... I found it disconcerting to go into churches as a tourist and be surrounded by other tourists.  It disturbed me that in some places I didn't feel like an intruder, because it seemed everyone was an intruder.  Other places had a more worshipful feel.  But I started thinking about the art that I was seeing.  I suppose that most of it was commissioned by wealthy men.  Though at least one statue on the Charles Bridge in Prague was  created as a punishment.  I wondered how much of it was an expression of faith; how much was an expression of pride. I wondered if the artist was lost in art for art's sake or if he felt some measure of faith as he worked on these projects.   I thought about how little role religious art plays in the world today. 

Anyway, I thought I'd share a few with you.  Even ordinary seemed ornamented as this door shows.  


Sometimes the meaning is not clear to the casual observer.  These crosses commemorate 27 martyrs in Prague.  











 




Exteriors were not as ornate as interiors, but still....

 Out door statuary honors the saints who brought Christianity early to Ukraine. St. Olga was a royal family member who embrassed Christianity.  St. Andrew prophesied that the "the light of the gospel would come to these hills."  Cyril and Methodius were instrumental in making the Bible available in Cyrillic.











Doors ...

 
                                                   




And floors.....




Compete with windows.....

                         




And ceilings.....
                                        

 

And glowing spaces for attention....

Walls have their share of ornamentation...  The walls of St Francis in Krakow were painted in an art nouveau style with daffodils, pansies and lilies.   This picture was from St. Michael's in Kyiv.  It was pretty dark in there - this was about as good as I good do.

The walls tell stories too.  One church (no pictures) had the story of the creation on the ceiling in the outer area of the larger space, which became more holy as you went further into the space.

One of the stars in most churches were the altar piece paintings or carvings or icons. 

Some were carved wood as is this one in St. Mary's in Krakow, some gold work, some iconic paintings.  They depict saints or scriptural scenes.  They are not always true to the scriptural era.  King David is depicted as a more medieval war hero in this sculpture from Wawel Hill in Krakow.

Many churches had some small macabre feature.

 some of the art was auditory/musical as we heard the sounds of evensong in this small church and the ringing of bells across the cities.

You feel as you travel that Christianity was a significant part of community life.  Statuary in wood ...

and marble....

 

 ... depict Christ.  This kindly looking Christ with an infant  near St. Mary's in Krakow was one of my favorites.

 My favorite painting looked like it could have been painted by Norman Rockwell.  It was in an Armenian church in Lviv.  Notice the recognition of this church man's heavenly friends as well as his earthly friends at the end of his life as his ghostly friends carry candles.

Lastly I will share a description of the picture I didn't take.  Lots of these churches charge a fee to take pictures.  We only paid the fee a couple of times.  A couple of times I regret not paying the fee.  St. Vlodymyrs church in Kyiv was one of these.  It was too dark on the interior to do any photo justice, but the picture I wish I had taken was of a young woman blue eyed woman with reddish blonde hair.  She was dressed in two shades of blue.  The darker shade was pretty much the Ukrainian flag blue.  Her kerchief and pinafore were this color with the plain unornamented underdress a lighter shade.  She was working with a long handled tool with a flat blade to scrape the warm golden beeswax drips from the white and black marble floor into a  black metal bucket.  I think her work was art.  I think we create art in the way we live, if we live with honest work and do it well.  Maybe I haven't been seeing the art all around me.




Then there was this simple church in Lviv, with Linoleum floors and stacking chairs and simple lines.  It is the home to two branches.  All the art was simple reproductions from the church catalog.  It seemed quiet and reverent and worshipful in a way that all those ornamented churches did not.  There were no tourists, just a young man cleaning the building before he left for town for the temple dedication.  Cleaning it for the people who would be unable to leave town who would watch from Lviv.  Not unlike the beautiful young woman cleaning beeswax - living life as an art devoted to Christ.