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Maureen Mullarkey: Studio Matters

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Our Present, Our Art

The feeling for things in themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures. —Vincent Van Gogh   This is the day that the Lord has made; let us be glad and rejoice in it. —Psalm 118:24 I love the words of that psalm. They repeat in my heart like a mantra. This is the day —not just today, October 10; not yesterday or tomorrow but the entire span of our days. And the times in which our days are lived. Continue Reading

What is Beauty?

What is beauty ? The question is better left to philosophers. It is a bootless one for artists to brood over. It does nothing to enhance the work of an artist’s hand. It is the experience of beauty—sensory, emotional, psychological—not any definition that makes an artist’s work intelligible to himself. Herself. Creators of the greatest beauty possess it by instinct. Yet, the question has become a species of branding device among Christian, particularly Catholic, artists. It is the asking that matters more than the answer. Continue Reading

Tu Belleza, Tu Misericordia

VII. Tu belleza se llamará también misericordia, y consolará el corazón de los hombres. —Gabriela Mistral, Decálogo del Artista The beauty that you create shall also be called compassion, and shall console the hearts of men. I painted that seventh commandment of Gabriela’s “Decalogue of the Artist” across the old built-in china cabinets that line one dining room wall. I sketched it first in pencil to get the spacing right, then brushed over the sketch with ivory black in a version of chancery hand. Continue Reading

Beauty, a Double-Edged Sword

What appears below is not what I had planned for today’s posting. The press release came through email as I was pouring my second cup of Barry’s Irish tea. Broadcast by the San Francisco MOMA. it is worth a look for a specific purpose. Beauty has become a seductive catchword among Christian artists. But. like any seduction, it obscures as much as it displays. Beauty is truth? Not necessarily; not here on the ground where Platonic categories smother in the earthbound air. Continue Reading

Louis Bouyer, Or.

  Father Richard Neuhaus kept on his shelves several books by Louis Bouyer, a priest of the French Oratory. Like Fr. Neuhaus, Père Bouyer (1913-2004) had been a Lutheran minister before his conversion to Catholicism and ordination to the priesthood. In the Vatican II era, Fr. Bouyer would have needed no introduction. Professor of Church History and Spiritual Theology at the Institut Catholique in Paris, he published books on liturgy and patristic theology that are classics in their field. Influential at the Second Vatican Council, he was quick to express dismay at post-conciliar interpretations of the Council’s statements on liturgy. Continue Reading
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