Resisting and Reconciling through Paintings

Resisting and  Reconciling through Paintings

A Short Introduction about Art:

                                                             

Art is normally described as a human’s expression of his/her inner thoughts and feelings .The first and broadest sense of art is the one which remains closest to the Latin meaning, which roughly translates to skill or craft as associated with words such as artisan. Later in the 17th century scholars defined the word art, to mean creative art or fine art, referring to the skill used to express the artist’s creativity. A work of art conveys a message, mood, or symbolism from the artist’s point of view. Art stimulates an individual’s thoughts, emotions, belief or ideas through sense. Art is also defined as a vehicle for the expression or communication of emotions and ideas through the senses. Art is also defined as a vehicle for the expression and communication of emotions and ideas. Art builds bridges between past, present and future. Ernst Cassirer wrote “The response to art may have as many individual variations as that to faith. For great art demands serious efforts on our part; it discloses itself as little to the causal glance as the mystery of the faith. The enjoyment of art does not originate in a softening or relaxing process but intensification of all our energies”. The work of art becomes a meaningful part of our life when we are ready to answer it, not merely intellectually but with our whole being when it leads us to look at the world with new eyes. The work of art that liberates us from the helpless agony of silence will assume a highly personal significance for us.

Art in Christianity:

Any technique of communication could conceivably serve as well for secular as for religious ends. St. Augustine could interpret it thus:“Art is a symbol of God’s perfection”. Jacques Maritain has said “Art itself goes spontaneously to God. Both art and religion are expressions of human sense of the spiritual significance of the universe. Both are human attempts to express things unseen and eternal.” Clive Bell says “Art and Religion are the two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy.” Michelango said: “The true work of art is but a shadow of the Divine perfection.” The uniqueness of an artist is that they see beyond nature and reality.  So somehow it will take us to divine status, towards the Reign of God. The artist’s basic commitment is to the ultimate truth as he/she perceives it: the truth beyond appearances, the reality behind the look of things, which he/she unmasks by restoring the extremes of creative expression. Art is not an end itself: it is only a means for finding out the truth. The Bible clearly says that God is truth. So creative arts are taking us and leading us towards God. Jesus Christ is not Gothic as so many people like to think. Friends Christianity claims truth not reality, because the Gospel is truth not reality.

William Blake says   that a poet, a painter, a musician, an architect: the man or woman who is one of these is not a Christian. The famous French Painter Georges Rouault had earned worldwide respect among laymen and art critics long before he was given his first opportunity to work for a church. Most of his religious paintings are in private or public collections. The newly Protestant world drove all the art forms except music away from the church to create an other-worldly  intellectual purity as the ambience for worship. But in the Roman Catholic world a sugary Baroque style rapidly become the uniform expression of religious art, a sad degeneration from the work of its founder, Caravaggio, the Roman low-life painter, who used newly  available intuition about human sexuality to give a sense of other-worldliness to his religious work. It was in the art of the romantic era of the 18th and 19th century , however that the arts slowly took off on their trajectory to theological glory. The theology of art continues to be  a popular topic in western theology; when a former Archbishop talked about an artist, he appreciated her impatience with the critics of her picture of God as cruel, failing to generate or separate hunger and uncompromising passion in human minds. Finally he points out that the artist’s freedom is deeply connected to God’s: but connected as something no less deeply other to God,. Here there was a conversation not only on the theology of art but also on the relationship between art and theology. Further Blake says that the great problems of contemporary art are emotionalism and intellectualism.

Colonised perspective in the church &Christian Theology :

The colonisers not only colonised the land and resources from India but they also colonised people’s minds ,because people were thinking that Jesus the Son of Man should have white skin and e should look like a westerner; people were trained by western missionaries. But Bishop V.S.Azariah’s claim that we need foreign friends, not bosses, made in the 1910 Edinburgh Conference, made the important point that we should talk about self governance of the Indian churches. It was a turning point in Indian Church history. On that period of evangelisation Sadhu Sunder Singh talked about Indianisation, saying “We should drink in our own vessels”. This kind of new thought was stimulating churches to think about  God in their own ambition, so other theologians like  A.J.Appasamy, H.A. Krishnan, P.Chenciah, V.Chakkarai and even Sadhu Sunder Singh all came to Christianity from high caste backgrounds. But 70% of Christians were from a Dalit background, who are the major communities from pallas,Paraiahs, arunthathias,nadars and fishermen; they were all hard working people. They were not well educated, and they were not allowed to wear sandals or upper cloths: even their women were not allowed to wear upper cloths. In this context these theologians were speaking vaithaadvaitha philosophy in the midst of these poor people, and here the problem starts.Indian society is a caste-based society, and the caste system is deeply rooted in it. So early converts to Christianity thought that this Christianity would liberate them from the bondage of the caste system.But unfortunately Dalits were caught by high caste non-Dalit Christians. Thus they were fooled by Christianity, not by Christ Jesus.

B.R.Ambedkar when he and his thousands of his followers decided to convert from  Hinduism considered joining Christianity as an option. But he was disappointed by the way Dalit Christians were received when they approached on Dalit Christians, by the church’s failure to overcome caste and by the denominational and other divisions in the church; here the Church missed great opportunity. The problem was that God was portrayed as a High Caste man. However, the Bible clearly says that God is God of the poor. Like High caste Indian Christians, contemporary painters also painted Jesus as a Brahmin boy ,so the Dalits thought that they could not easily touch him, because they were treated as untouchables.

Sprouts of Dalit Christian Art:

“DALIT ARTS ARE FOR LIBERATION”

In the early period of Christianity in India, most of the artist did not come from poor or oppressed backgrounds. They were forced to draw Christian paintings from a Brahminic ideology, ,so we see in the earlier Christian art in  India that most of the pictures do not speak about Christ’s mission to the poor: it really tells that Jesus is for high caste people, so he is indigenized as a Brahmin boy. In the 1980s a few Dalit artist broke away from these fundamental ideas, and here small sprouts of Dalit art came.Actually they are showing their angry inner burdens and their Dalit experiences through their paintings. They were not taking violence as a weapon to kill the caste system and its ideology but they took the non-violence method to destroy the caste system.

Brain laul an artist says:“I have always thought of Christ as a person of Eastern origin.He was a Jew, an Asian. I have invariably conceived of Jesus as a bronze figure: that comes naturally to me, and then I add in other colors:marron, orange, deep orange, yellow, even black to suit my compositions.Christ has stood out as a suffering symbol of pain for centuries. I feel an artist must be totally aware of the goings on around him, if he decides to communicate through his work.”Paul Gaughin says: “This is the only means there is to ascend toward God, to do as one Divine Master himself does, to create.”

Art , like love, is an expression of personality at its most intensive level of involvement.

Emerson said: “The Artist must work in the spirit in which we conceive a prophet to speak or an angel of the Lord to act, that is he is not to speak his own words or do his own works or think his own thoughts but he is to be the organ through which the universal mind acts.

”Nicolas Berdyaev says: “the meaning of art is that it anticipates the transfiguration of the world. This is the meaning of art, of art of any kind.Human creative power is not human only, it is divine human, and he could therefore state “All the great creative works of man enter into the reign of God.The history of art shows many instances of neglect or open hostility; artist and prophet alike are frequently without honour in their own country, so as an artist should work with passion and love.

 Luke 9.62: Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God”.

 Bonhoeffer says:“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”The Cost of Discipleship .

As a painter I like to paint Jesus as a Dalit, I believe Christ Jesus came to this world to liberate oppressive structures of this society. On this perspective Jesus had been journeying with the Dalits (lepers, socially excluded, sexually harassed, so on ). Jesus ‘s motif was very clear that is “ proclaiming good news to the poor and sharing of life is missing “. So Jesus explicitly lived as Dalit. Painting is a weapon to show our protest against those who discriminate against us. 

Caste matters still today in our society as well as in the church which claims the body of the church, if the church is truly the body of Christ, it should throughout and resist the caste structure which deeply rooted in the church and also in the society. 

Art has the great communication tool to eradicate the caste system. I believe that I can at least make small changes in the people’s mind through my art, it’s a resistance as well as the call for reconciliation.