When I teach my class at Thomas More College I use a definition I heard in a talk from Fr Rob Johannson of the Diocese of Kalimazoo in Michigan about the Evangelisation of the Culture. He described it as that activity of man that reflects and in turn nurtures the core beliefs, values and priorities of the society. It is derived from the Latin word for field because traditionally it was always seen as something that has to be nurtured in order to preserve those core values, and hence preserve the society.

When we ponder on this, we can see that all activity of man constitutes the culture. It is not just high art, it is the most mundane activities – how we pick up a knife and fork when eating, how do we design our road signs…even how do we drive. And here’s another critical point: given that free will is involved, how we do these things can potentially be destructive to society, as well as constructive. I have never held the view, for example, that we must return to an agrarian society. Industrialisation, as high-tech as you like, could be a beautiful thing if it is the product of a truly Christian society. The reason that we tend to assume that it is intrinsically desctructive is that the industrialisation of the West has taken place in post Enlightenment society and so reflects that worldview – the result is ugliness and suffering.…

An architecture student who attended a drawing class in last summers the Way of Beauty program at Thomas More College in New Hampshire tells how what he learnt about traditional proportion has improved his designs and enabled him to get a prestigious scholarship.

Last summer an young Catholic architecture graduate, Geoff Yovanovic attended one of the Way of Beauty Atelier drawing classes. As well as improving his drawing, he hoped that what he would learn might give him insights in to how architecture can conform to a culture of beauty; and give him an edge in his search for placements with architecture firms that had more traditional work. He was recently graduated from university, looking for a placement to work towards full profession qualification.

The lectures and talks were given helped him, but also because he expressed this interest to me, I did my best to give him as much additional reading as I could. You can find out about this year’s program of summer retreats and the iconography classe here. I also encourage him to believe that using traditional proportion would allow his work to stand out in the pack even if he was doing mundane projects, as I wrote in the article Proportion Adds Value to Property. He took what I said seriously, did work to learn more about his (even writing an article for this blog during the year, here). Then just this past week I got the following email from him describing his latest success which he attributes, in part, to what he learnt on the course.…

I am regularly asked by parents how they can teach an appreciation of good traditional art to their children. One father recently went further than that and asked me if there was anything I could do to unculturate them in such a way that their sensibilities are in tune with a catholic culture in its broadest sense. These are the  ideas that I offered to him as personal thoughts. I do not have a family so cannot say that I have direct experience of this.

1. All traditional training in art involves drawing by copying from nature and then copying the works of Old Masters. Ideally children would do both but precisely what they try to draw depends on how old they are. Very young children could colour in line drawings based upon traditional forms – I illustrated a couple of books with this in mind, see Meet the Angels and God’s Covenant with You. The more sophisticated might be able to try some tonal work on a copy of a baroque painting. A great start for anybody would be gothic or Romanesque illuminated manuscripts. These are line drawings with limited modelling.  They are great fun to draw and my experience is that Catholics relate to these Western icons more readily than to Eastern iconographic forms. If you to get hold of examples type ‘psalter’ into the Google Images search engine. You don’t need to feel bound to sacred imagery.…

An architecture student who attended a drawing class in last summer’s the Way of Beauty program at Thomas More College tells how what he learnt about traditional proportion has improved his designs and enabled him to get a prestigious scholarship.

Last summer an young Catholic architecture graduate, Geoff Yovanovic attended one of the Way of Beauty Atelier drawing classes. As well as improving his drawing, he hoped that what he would learn might give him insights in to how architecture can conform to a culture of beauty; and give him an edge in his search for placements with architecture firms that had more traditional work. He was recently graduated from university, looking for a placement to work towards full profession qualification.

The lectures and talks were given helped him, but also because he expressed this interest to me, I did my best to give him as much additional reading as I could. You can find out about this year’s program of summer retreats and the iconography classe here. I also encourage him to believe that using traditional proportion would allow his work to stand out in the pack even if he was doing mundane projects, as I wrote in the article Proportion Adds Value to Property. He took what I said seriously, did work to learn more about his (even writing an article for this blog during the year, here). Then just this past week I got the following email from him describing his latest success which he attributes, in part, to what he learnt on the course.…

Does the means invalidate the end? Shortly after moving the US I was contacted by someone I knew when I was studying if Florence. When I was in Florence Martinho Correia had been teaching the academic method at one of the ateliers in Florence. He contacted me because he had just converted to Catholicism and was keen to tell me about it. It was good to hear from him, especially with such good news! More recently Martinho told me about a two-week course he was offering, now back in his home town Calgary in Canada called Painting People from Photos. You can see the details here.

This raises the question as to whether or not an artist should paint from photographs? Many of those who were trained to paint from nature in ateliers would say categorically, no! to a highly trained artist working from photographs feels like cheating; and there is the sense too that the proper way to represent something is to percieve it directly (even though practically no icon is painted through direct apprehension of the saint).

I always used to think this until I reluctantly had to admit that if I had to make a living as a portrait painter I would probably have to paint from photographs some of the time. The advantage of photographs is that you don’t require the sitter to be available as much and so you can produce a cheaper portrait.…

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A composer tells us his approach in composing works that are fresh and new, while reflecting the timeless principles that constitute sacred music. Listen also to his beautiful newly composed Mass. 

The following is an essay written by the composer Paul Jernberg. Paul has composed his Mass of St Philip Neri for the new translation of the Mass. In the essay below he discusses the principles that guide him in composition and which enable him to compose new music in accordance with timeless principles. We have been singing his compositions at Thomas More College – I have been working with him in creating psalm tones for the vernacular that are modal and so sit within the tradition.This has enabled us to chant, for example, the traditional Latin proper for communion and then a communion meditation in English without any sense of disunity.

What characterises both the compositions you can hear here and the music he has composed for us at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts is how simple it is to perform, yet how good it sounds. He really has hit that standard of noble simplicity – music that is so beautiful that you want to sing it, and so simple that you can. Furthermore, there is not even a hint of sentimentality in his music. I have punctuated the text of his essay with links through to audio of the St Philip Neri Mass so that you can pause and listen as you read along:

Introduction

I have composed this work in response to the need for a fitting musical setting of the Ordinary from the new English translation of the Roman Missal.…

It seems at first an unlikely connection but it is made directly in a book called the Wellspring of Worship, by Jean Corbon. I read it because I heard Scott Hahn recommend it recently. It was Hahn’s excellent book the Lamb’s Supper which first made clear to me how the Book of Revelation relates the heavenly and earthly liturgy to each other and first opened the door to a sense of the cosmic dimension of the liturgy upon which so much of the Way of Beauty program rests. Corbon was a Dominican in Beirut who was an Eastern (Melkite I think) Catholic. He is also the person who wrote the section on prayer in the Catechism.

Corbon wrote the following: ‘Work and culture are the place where men and the world meet in the glory of God. This encounter fails or is obscured to the degree that men “lack God’s glory” (Rom 3:23)… If the experience is to be filled with glory, men must first become once again the dwelling places of this glory and be clothed in it; that is why, existentially, everything begins with the liturgy of the heart and the divinisation of the human person.’ Elsewhere he states that an absense of communion through Eucharistic liturgy ‘that is at the root of injustices in the workplace, with its alienating structures and disorders in the economy.’ (pp 225, 229)

Is the answer to economic problems and injustice in the workplace really the liturgy?…

A composer tells us his approach in composing works that are fresh and new, while reflecting the timeless principles that constitute sacred music. Listen also to his beautiful newly composed Mass. 

The following is an essay written by the composer Paul Jernberg. Paul has composed his Mass of St Philip Neri for the new translation of the Mass. In the essay below he discusses the principles that guide him in composition and which enable him to compose new music in accordance with timeless principles. We have been singing his compositions at Thomas More College – I have been working with him in creating psalm tones for the vernacular that are modal and so sit within the tradition.This has enabled us to chant, for example, the traditional Latin proper for communion and then a communion meditation in English without any sense of disunity.

What characterises both the compositions you can hear here and the music he has composed for us at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts is how simple it is to perform, yet how good it sounds. He really has hit that standard of noble simplicity – music that is so beautiful that you want to sing it, and so simple that you can. Furthermore, there is not even a hint of sentimentality in his music.

I have punctuated the text of his essay with links through to audio of the St Philip Neri Mass so that you can pause and listen as you read along.…

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A composer tells us his approach in composing works that are fresh and new, while reflecting the timeless principles that constitute sacred music. Listen also to his beautiful newly composed Mass. 

The following is an essay written by the composer Paul Jernberg. Paul has composed his Mass of St Philip Neri for the new translation of the Mass. In the essay below he discusses the principles that guide him in composition and which enable him to compose new music in accordance with timeless principles.…

How do we authenticate traditional number symbolism? I was recently asked to contribute an icon to an exhibition. The exhibition is about ‘the Blessed Virgin Mary and the number five’.…

The promotional flier lists examples of how the number five is associated with the Virgin Mary. For example, one of her titles is Morning Star, which is the planet Venus and this links to five because the planet Venus traces a path across the sky that has a fivefold symmetry. The Lady Chapel at Wells Cathedral, it said, has a shape that constitutes three sides of a pentagon; and there are five decades of the rosary.I would like to believe that this association is part of our Catholic tradition, but I cannot find any reliable written evidence of such a traditional association. I would consider the above examples insufficient in themselves to prove such a connection; and the are many other associations that someone could point to in order to make the case for other numbers, for example, seven – the seven joys and the seven sorrows of Our Lady. I am hoping that some knowledgeable reader might be able to help me here. Do we have anything from, for example, St Augustine, in which he makes this connection between five and Our Lady?I asked the writer of the flier for some further and more conclusive evidence. I was hoping he might be aware of some reliable Catholic source that I didn’t know about, but disappointingly he was unable to give any.