CCR: Comment, Chase and Romaine

It is always a good day when new articles arrive in your email inbox from Comment. Today was especially welcome since it included an essay by James Romaine about artist Guy Chase. Romaine writes: "Chase's art specifically addresses issues that are central to the process of art appreciation: visual inattentiveness, personal incognizance, and spiritual complacency. His art not only exposes these tendencies—which we all have—but, even more significantly, models a life of prayerful faithfulness."

You can read the article here.

Artist of the Year!

Mary McCleary—featured in It Was Good, Objects of Grace and After Paradise—has been selected as the 2011 Texas Artist of the Year by Art League Houston. As Texas Artist of the Year, Mary McCleary will be featured in an exhibition at Art League Houston, which opens on September 9 and runs through October 21, 2011. We are very proud of Mary and glad that she is getting the recognition that her work deserves! If you are unfamiliar with her work, we encourage you to get After Paradise first. In that title you will find many recent works by McCleary. Older works and a lengthy interview can be found in Objects of Grace. And in It Was Good you will find an essay by McCleary on craftsmanship.

Square Halo's FIRST E-BOOK

It is an exciting day today for Square Halo Books. Our first e-book is now available! You can get Gregory Wolfe's Intruding Upon the Timeless for your iPod and iPad through iTunes. or visit Amazon to get it for your Kindle.


Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek says: Gregory Wolfe’s vision is the animating force behind Image, one of the best journals on the planet. Intruding Upon the Timeless, a collection of his pieces from Image, takes its title from a phrase of Flannery O’Connor. That’s apt, because not since O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners has there been such bracing insight on the pile-up where art and faith collide. This book will rev your engines and propel you down the same road.


For those of you who still crave a book to hold in your hands with real pages to flip (and who want to look at the Barry Moser engravings up close), you can still buy the book from Hearts & Minds.

The Art of Guy Chase

We are excited to announce that our next book will soon be coming out. This new project, The Art of Guy Chase, explores the visual, conceptual, and spiritual complexities of one of the most provocative contemporary visual artists of faith. Chase’s art is characterized by intentionally cultivated contradictions between humor and sobriety, contemplation and irony, material tactility and sacred meaning. Lavishly illustrated, this book documents Guy Chase’s faithful response to an artistic calling and his methodical engagement with the history of Christianity and the visual arts as a strategy of renewing that relationship today.

This book is edited by Dr. James Romaine and has essays by Romaine, Wayne Roosa, Ted Prescott, Albert Pedulla, and Joel Sheesley. Dr. Romaine is going to lecture at Bethel on February 26th as part of the Monochrome Plus: Guy Chase Retrospective. Here is a link to a Facebook Event invitation.

Makoto Fujimura has said, "Guy Chase’s art is full of surprises, twists, humour, candor, inventiveness and delight; Chase takes the postmodern visual language to its ends of hubris and significance; always turning our assumptions upside down. This marvelous collections of his work and essays by friends/scholars creates a humble dialogue that lays a track for generations of future artists who wrestle with art and faith."

About this book Sandra Bowden wrote, "In a time when painting is suspect as an art form, Guy Chase’s subtle nuanced paintings celebrate the hand—the paint, the brush stroke, the surface texture and the very act of making art. A conceptual thread gives a spirit of modernism, yet each piece is an invitation to come close and enter Chase’s meditative world of devotional reflection. This book chronicles his spiritual and artistic journey and is a valuable contribution to the growing collection of books on artists of faith."


As soon as this book is released, it will be available through Hearts & Minds.

Courage

New York City photographer Krystyna Sanderson has an online store up now that is featuring her piece "Courage" from our book Light at Ground Zero. As we get closer to the tenth anniversary of the horrible attacks made against our country, it is good to be able to look at  Light at Ground Zero and see how God's work of mercy was carried on behind the closed doors of St. Paul's Chapel.

The Four Holy Gospels

The artist Makoto Fujimura is quite a favorite of ours. We first featured him in It Was Good. Then he was interviewed (twice) in our book Objects of Grace. And just recently we did a small book showcasing his art alongside the paintings of Georges Rouault.

But enough about us.

This post is to let you know that Mako has recently partnered with Crossway to create a an illuminated harmony of the Gospels to celebrate the KJV's 400th anniversary. It is easy to imagine how lovely the book would be, based on the reproductions of his paintings in our Square Halo titles, but to see it in your hands is breath taking. It is like holding a new Book of Kells. It is a joy to page through and discover the decorated caps at the beginning of chapters, the marginalia gracefully littering the pages, and of course, the full paintings. My favorite of the larger works was the piece that begins the gospel according to John called In the Beginning.

Mako's art is what I'd call semi-abstract because he often brings in visual elements that the viewer recognizes—like a tree, or a fish, or a flower, etc. This made it especially delightful to page through The Four Holy Gospels. The marginalia is a combination of representational and abstract paintings. The art draws you in, making you want to discover what aspect of the text Mako is bringing out visually. There were so many of these "incidental" pieces that captured my imagination, but I was especially pleased to see the last page, where Mako had painted a blood-stained tree reminiscent of the Shalom lithograph that hangs in our home.

This amazing new book looks lovely displayed on a bookshelf, but it resists becoming merely a decoration. Seeing it makes you want to come up with reasons to take it down and read it (when my eldest daughter saw this book she commented on it by saying, "THAT'S what it should be like to read the Bible").

So I urge you, if you are able, get a copy of The Four Holy Gospels. When you read it your heart and your mind will be changed as the words of our Lord mingle with the beauty in the art. Soli Deo Gloria.

Duke Divinity School . . . and Zombies

Our book, "It Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God" was included on a list "of key texts which treat the arts from a theological perspective" compiled by DITA's Director, Dr Jeremy Begbie. To see our book on the same page as books by Begbie, Dyrness, Rookmaaker, Ryken, Seerveld, etc. is quite an honor. 

But it isn't just deep thinkers about theology who are mentioning our book. Recently IWG was mentioned favorably in a response to a blog about zombies!