Carla Rachman’s “Monet”

In May we had visited the exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum on Impressionist France, which assembled a considerable number of art works and photographs from the 19^th century into a fascinating display of art, history, nationalism, industry, nature, and other themes. It was a wonderful exhibition; we actually went through on two occasions.

In the last room, devoted to works about industry and economics, was Claude Monet’s “Railway Bridge at Argenteuil” (shown above). Many of the Impressionists, including Monet, were fascinated with the changes being wrought by industrialization. That bridge was one, but not the only one. I spent some time studying the painting, and realized that I really didn’t know much about Monet except his penchant for painting water lilies at Giverny (and a wonderful exhibit of the three works that were collectively one, which was held in 2011 and 2012 at the Cleveland, St. Louis and Kansas City art museums).

My wondering about how little I knew about Monet the man and artist found a ready solution in the art museum’s gift ship: a book. Simply entitled Monet, it was written by Carla Rachman, a lecturer on 19^th century art at the University of London. It is published by Phaidon Press, which publishes a lot of books about art, artists, and related subjects (and if you go to any art museum, you’ll likely find books for sale by Phaidon Press).

I bought the book, and what’s more, I read it, and not long after we saw the exhibition.

I loved the book. It’s a highly readable, engaging, and fascinating account of Monet’s life and art. What Rachman presents, and it fit incredibly well with the theme of the Impressionist France exhibition at the museum, is an artist who became bound up in France’s notion of itself as a nation. Monet, for many of the French people, became synonymous with France.

Rachman walks us through the key events of his life – his family, how he came to paint, the various moves around France, his unconventional living arrangements after his first wife died, how he came to settle at Giverny, the trials and tribulations he and the other Impressionists had with the Salon (i.e., the establishment), the alternative shows, the rather daring show of the 37 paintings of haystacks, and, of course, the water lilies.

We learn of his concern that so many of his paintings were being bought by Americans and taken back to the United States (to the extent, Rachman says, that you cannot study Monet without an extended visit to America). We see that while he had periods of financial concern, he was no suffering artist, and he became a successful artist long before many of his fellow painters. We learn of his style and how it developed, and what influenced him. We even see Monet painting his first wife as she was on her deathbed.

It’s a work of insight and knowledge. Rachman knows her artist and she knows his context, and not only his artistic context. She places him in his time, in his country (and he was nothing if not a loyal Frenchman). And she explains how, in so many ways, he effectively became his country.

Monet is a wonderful biography, and more than that, a wonderful overview of the man, his art, and his time.

Related:

Navigating Monet’s Water Lilies (poem)

http://faithfictionfriends.blogspot.com/2011/12/navigating-monets-water-lilies.html

The artist ignores Monet (poem)

http://faithfictionfriends.blogspot.com/2011/12/artist-ignores-monet.html

Painting: Railway Bridge at Argenteuil, oil on canvas by Claude Monet (1873), Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Spirit of Necessity

The birth of our first grandchild in 2010 included an event that still gives me shivers. 

My son, daughter-in-law, her mother, my wife and I had gone out to dinner, and then we went to the hospital for the start of our daughter-in-law’s induced labor. After she was settled into the birthing room, we went home to sleep – it would be some time before the baby would arrive. 

About 11:30, I was starting to drift off to sleep when the phone rang. It was our daughter-in-law, telling us our son was in the emergency room at the hospital. She hurriedly explained that he had fainted (empathy for her dislike of needles) and hit his head on the floor. Within minutes I was on my way to the hospital. 

When I got to his beside in the emergency room, I knew his condition was serious. He recognized me, but it took him some time to tell the doctor who I was. And he kept asking, over and over again, “Where’s my wallet?” I answer that question at least 20 times. He was x-rayed, and the doctor could see a small hematoma, or pooling of blood, beneath the skull. He was kept overnight; I returned home, seriously shaken. 

Late the next morning, our daughter-in-law in labor on one floor of the hospital, my son was x-rayed again. The hematoma was growing, putting pressure on the skull. He was having a severe headache. Within a few hours, the neurosurgeon came in while the pastor from the church was there in the room with me and my son (my wife was in the labor room with our daughter-in-law). And he said our son needed surgery, and as soon as possible. Brain surgery. He described exactly how they would get through the skull to relieve the pressure. 

This isn’t happening, I kept telling myself. This is a bad dream. 

The doctor left, the pastor looked at my son and I and said, “Let’s pray.” The pastor and I went down on our knees next to my son’s bed. And we prayed. 

It was the first moment of absolute calm in a tumultuous day. From that moment on, I knew that it would be okay. I didn’t know how, but I just knew.  

Sometime around 4 p.m., my son was being wheeled down to the surgical floor. The nurses made a stop on the second floor, for him to see his wife, now well into labor. Then he was taken to surgery. The surgery was successful; they were able to stop and control the hematoma. Very early the next morning, they wheeled him in his bed to the labor room, where he was able to coach his wife through the final 30 minutes. And then came our grandson Cameron. 

“From my own experience,” writes Francis Chan in Forgotten God: The Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit, "I have felt closest to God when nearness to him was a necessity. The Bible says that the Spirit comes through in situations where we would normally be afraid. We experience the Holy Spirit guiding us in desperate situations."  

 

What Francis Chan has written here is true. I can testify to it. I should have been a basket case. I experienced the full range of emotions – anxiety, concern, worry, shock, fear. The concern never left. But I knew it would be okay. And it was. 

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Chan’s Forgotten God. To see more posts on this chapter, “A Real Relationship,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines. 

Top photograph by Paul Brennan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Poetry of World War I

The 100^th anniversary of the beginning of World War 1 is officially July 28, the day Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and attacked, in retribution for the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and Archduchess Sophie in Sarajevo by a Serbian teenager. By the time the war ended, more than 70 million military personnel had been involved; more than nine million combatants were dead; and the German, Austrian, Ottoman, and Russian ruling families were swept from power.

It seems odd to associate poetry with war, but it is a fact that no war is more connected to poetry that World War I. And for that we mostly have the English to thank.

From 1914 to 1918, poetry went to war. But it went to war in all its possible permutations – jingoistic nationalism; nostalgia for a world being fought for even as it passed away; the cynical response of the men in the trenches to their incompetent generals; the mourning of civilians; pacifism and opposition to the war; and the reflection of what it all meant, or didn’t mean, years after the war was over.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Emily Wierenga’s “Atlas Girl”

A story of being a caregiver for a mother afflicted by brain cancer.

A story of the daily battle that is anorexia.

A story of falling in love, getting married – and bringing anorexia into the marriage.

A story of the deep desire to have children

A story of missions – of being involved in missions in places like the Mideast where the murder

of Christians is not unknown.

A story of being a PK – a pastor’s kid.

And a story of finding hope in the one place you didn’t expect to find it.

One could write a book, or a series of books, on any one of those things. Emily Wierenga chose to write a book on all of those things. Welcome to Atlas Girl: Finding Home in the Last Place I Thought to Look.

Atlas Girl is a memoir, yes; at least, that’s probably the genre you’d find it on Amazon or in the bookstore. But it is more than that, too. Brutally honest; occasionally shocking; sometimes so raw you can feel the roughness of it. But all of it real.

It’s the story of a life.

Wierenga has talked about her battles with anorexia in Chasing Siilhouettes. Atlas Girl puts those battles in the context of her life, her family, her husband, and her missions work.

She doesn’t tell her story in chronological order. We may live our lives chronologically or sequentially, one event or one day after another. But it takes an approach like she demonstrates here to knit those chronological events into a cohesive, integrated whole. And this is true for any of us – we don’t make sense of our lives by examining them chronologically.

And Wierenga travels (it’s not called Atlas Girl for no good reason). Across Canada. The United States. Korea. The Congo. Amsterdam. Lebanon. Jordan. Japan. China. Australia. Dominican Republic. Italy. Mexico. Part of her travel has to do with missions. And part of it has to do with a restless spirit that is looking for something.

Memoir, autobiography, meditation, personal journalism. Atlas Girl is all of these things.

And it’s the story of young woman who’s honest enough to tell it.

Related:

My review of Emily’s Chasing Silhouettes.

Book trailer for Atlas Girl.

Atlas Girl web site.

Image by Dawn Hudson via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The touch of wings

The lion, the ox

the man, the eagle:

four are left, four

from the beginning

or near the beginning.

Four unfurl their wings

until tops are touching,

bare sensations

at nerve endings sounding

with the peal of thunder,

the crackling of the current

of lightning. The sound of wings

touching becomes

deafening.

Photograph by Roland Ally via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Thrones are not a game

Thrones turning slowing

in the air, pivoting on a throne

shining white, blinding white

or blinding light (is there

a difference?) (likely not)

(it’s all blinding white, light).

Blindness of purity

blindness of holiness

blindness of the sacred,

blinding until the eyes adjust

enough to accept

what they see.

Photograph by Vera Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Mud Pit Queen

When my youngest son was in second grade, our church needed Sunday School teachers. So I volunteered to teach, and was paired with the father of another boy in the class. The father’s name was Mark; our sons had known each other since they were in toddler nursery together. 

Mark and I taught Sunday School together for three years. He held the firm belief that Sunday School should be fun. Our class became known as the mutant class – we zigged when the administrators said zag. Not impressed with the standard curriculum, we’d often create Sunday School lessons from scratch. We’d alternate teaching, and then Mark would handle the competitive games (the prizes were usually candy) and I’d do the word games, usually pitting boys against girls.

The big event for our class was the camp-out, held in May at the end of the Sunday School year. Mark would manage the entire event while I did whatever he told me to do. It involved about a dozen tents for the Saturday sleepover and parents volunteers. It was sleeping in tents, games, horseback riding, a worship service on Sunday morning (which Mark put me in charge of, including the sermon), campfires, and – what was likely the highlight of the weekend – the mud pit. Mark would fill a hollow place in the dirt with water, and then there would be a competition for who could be the best mud king and best mud queen.

As you might expect, the boys loved the mud pit. As you might not expect, so did the girls.

The third and final year we taught together, we had a new student join us. Her family was new to St. Louis and our church. She was painfully – painfully – shy. She was tall, taller than most of her classmates (including the boys). She spoke very softly. She had been placed in another Sunday School class but it hadn’t worked well – she spent most of her time crying. So the Sunday School director, who usually considered Mark and I somewhat suspect, moved her to our class.

She didn’t immediately come out of her shell, but she did stop crying. She watched everything the class did but rarely participated herself, except for some of my word games and Bible quizzes. We also had the children memorize the books of the Bible, and she did really well with that.

One day after class, her mother told me and Mark that she was seeing a transformation underway in her daughter. She liked coming to Sunday School, and she was often waiting by the car for the family to drive to church. “That’s never happened before,” she said. “She’s always dreaded church.”

And then we started talking about the camp-out, spending the night in tents, the campfires and the games. The class was wildly enthusiastic. With one exception. Our shy girl was terrified. She had never spent the night away from her parents, not even with family. But we kept talking it up. She finally asked if she could come and not spend the night, and we told her that was perfectly okay.

So she came. Her mother drove her to the park, confiding in me that she had hidden extra clothes in the car trunk in case the girl decided to stay overnight. It helped that the other girls squealed as soon as they saw her arrive and dragged her off to the games.

Her mother came back at dark, and her daughter told her she had decided that she would like to stay, that the girls had found her a spot and a sleeping bag in one of their tents and, more importantly, she didn’t want to miss the graham crackers, marshmallows and chocolate S’Mores.

She spent the night. 

On Sunday after our worship time, came lunch and the grand finale – the mud pit competition. Imagine coating yourself head to foot with as much mud as possible. The kids had a blast.

As parents arrived to pick up their children, I was helping to hose some of the mud contestants. Our shy girl’s parents drove up, and began looking for her. When they didn’t immediately see her, worry began to cross their faces.

“She’s here,” I said. “In fact, I think that’s her coming now.”

They looked up to see an approximately five-foot-plus log of mud running toward them.

“Mother!” she screamed in absolute delight. “I am the Mud Queen!”

Her mother burst into tears. So did her father.

Teaching those three years of Sunday School was the best unpaid job I ever had. In fact, it was likely the best job, paid or unpaid, I ever had.

The High Calling has a community link-up on “Working for Free.” Submissions are open until tomorrow. Check the site and if you have a story on working for free that you’d like to share, consider joining the linkup. Several of the posts will be selected for features on the High Calling’s home page.

Photograph by Kevin Casper via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.