August 2020
I’m really grateful to be with each of you today and to be able to share this insight about what I want to speak on. I’m going to speak on History and Art: Mediating the Rocky Relationship. I purposely did not call this presentation Solving the Rocky Relationship, because it will not be solved, I’ll just say that. This is a question that’s been talked about and discussed for a very long time, that I don’t think I can solve in the next 40 minutes, but what I do hope I can do is provide some insights for you, whether you tend to lean in the artist camp or the history camp, the scholarly camp, about trying to understand why there’s some tension, and trying to resolve the tension a little bit.
Just so you know a little bit about my background, my original plans were to be a full time painter. I have a BFA in painting and drawing from the University of Utah, and I joke that I wanted to be a full time artist, I wanted to be Walter Rain and Caitlin Connolly and Brian Kerschisnek and Kirk Richards, and artists like that who I greatly admire and who I consider friends, but I joke that God saved me from a life of poverty and led me into the big money of religious education instead. So I went on to get a PhD in curriculum and instruction, and how we apply educational theories to religious education, but I haven’t lost my love for art, nor my practice of art. As a matter of fact it’s kind of come together. Here’s a little bit of my student work. What I’ve become more known for now is how I research how art influences how we learn Church history and Church doctrine, but I’ve also incorporated both my role as a teacher of Church history and doctrine, a scholar of it, and also an artist. For the last seven years I’ve engaged in a project trying to depict scenes from Church history that are really important, that are often either undepicted or under-depicted.
This is one of my images that I did about seven years ago. I did it for a book called From Darkness Unto Light, about the translation and publication of the Book of Mormon. This image has gotten a lot of play being passed around, and I want to try to give faithful rendition that wasn’t pejorative of the Book of Mormon translation, of Joseph using a seer-stone in a hat, or images like this such as the ordination of Q. Walker Lewis, one of the black men ordained to the priesthood during the 1840s, during Joseph Smith’s lifetime.
Not all of my images are mantelpiece images. I like to paint things that are even uncomfortable. President Kimball in his classic talk on the gospel vision of the arts, said that we should also paint and portray the difficulties, the apostasies, the arguments. And so this is literally an argument. I wanted to do a painting of when Joseph brought home the revelation we know as the revelation on eternal and plural marriage in section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants. I wanted to do an image trying to express the difficulties that showed in Joseph and Emma’s marriage. Or this is a recent painting that I did. For many who don’t know, and I’m sure many in this audience do know, for a hundred years women in our Church practiced healing blessings of faith, and we didn’t have any imagery of that, well much imagery; there’s a few out there, but I wanted to give an image to show that wonderful part of our history, showing women of faith. So those are the kind of images that I do and the kind of things that I’m interested in as a whole.
Now one of the things, as I paint history, people say things like, Oh, I love your images because they’re so historically accurate. I want to be the first to say, no, they’re not historically accurate; they’re historically accurate in substance but not always in style and not always in detail, and I’ll talk about why that may be the case, and why that’s the case for many other artists as well. But before I do I want to establish the premise that there are tensions, necessary tensions, and as human beings we always want to resolve tensions; we want to get rid of the tensions. Let me just give you my thesis up front. Let’s not resolve this tension. Let’s not try to get rid of it. In business there’s tensions like growth and agility. Do we want our business to get big? Yes. Do we want to be more profitable? Yes. How do we stay agile and flexible? That’s a tension for everyone out there who runs a business; they know about that. Or maybe in Christian history, grace and works. How long has this tension been discussed and tried to be settled, and literally blood spilled over this tension. Even within our own faith, we’re still trying to reconcile or understand this tension. In our own faith tradition more in particular, don’t you think it’s always a little interesting that we are a church that says that you can receive personal revelation and you have your agency, and yet we are a hierarchical, authoritative church as well. How do you balance the tension of agency and authority? You’re never going to resolve it, but we do try to understand it. And in this case, art and history. I want to talk about that tension, because I think the better we can understand why the tension exists, we can better understand how to use the tension for our good. That’s my goal.
Terryl Givens likes to call this, he doesn’t use the word tension as much as he uses the word paradox in the book that he’s written about people and paradox he says, “Paradox is the sign of a healthy universe [or maybe I would say that tension is the sign of a healthy universe], voracious enough to insist on having its cake and eating it too. Paradox is a sign of richness and plenitude… Those not intellectually adventuresome enough to embrace such paradox find easy refuge falling to one side or the other of the tightrope.”
So for any who may be watching or listening to this, can I invite you to not fall to one side or the other of the tightrope? Don’t immediately jump. I would assume based on this audience, most people are going to be more interested in the idea like, “Yeah, why aren’t those dumb artists painting history more accurately?” Be cautious about your own assumptions there. And for any artists who might be watching this, saying, “Yeah, why don’t those dumb scholars just leave us alone and let us be expressive artists?” There’s some caution there as well, that I hope that I can try to talk about for both sides.
This is one thing that I’ve written on it that I just want to read, that summarises where we may be coming from about art and history. “True art and true history rarely if ever fully combine. History and art are intertwined entities (history needs to be visually represented, and artists need meaningful history to create impactful images), but their connection more often creates difficult knots instead of well-tied bows that serve both art and history. These knots result because the aims of history and the aims of art are not aligned, often pulling in entirely different directions. History wants facts; art wants meaning. History wants to validate sources; art wants to evoke emotion. History is more substance; art is more style. History wants accuracy; art wants aesthetics. The two disciplines often love yet hate each other as they strive to serve their different masters.”
Now, why are they so necessary in terms of art and history? This is from a book called The Ministry of Art by Leon Alberti. He said, “Painting contains a divine force which not only makes absent men present, as friendship is said to do, but moreover makes the dead seem almost alive.” And that is why history wants art and needs art. They make the past come alive, and art needs and wants history because it brings to life things that people care about. So there’s a problem however with it. In everybody’s minds right now, I invite you to picture Jesus. Just get an image of Jesus. And probably, consciously or subconsciously, even if you didn’t want to, you probably had an image something like this pop into your head, of a man with longer hair, parted down the middle, with a beard, higher cheekbones, strong facial features, in a robe. That’s probably what popped into your head. That’s not necessarily informed by history; that’s informed by art. There’s a lot of discussion right now in the art world, and given current social events, about why we depict Jesus the way we depict him. And should we? This is not a new discussion, by the way. This discussion has been around for a long time. Or picture in your mind the 2,000 stripling warriors. Now I would venture to guess that almost every one of you pictured a bunch of extremely (I think the exact scholarly term is “ripped out of their mind”) men. Probably you pictured something like Friberg’s depiction. We’ve almost, by the way, turned “stripling” into a colloquial; we’ve changed it: we think “stripling” means strapping. Helaman and his 2,000 strapping warriors. Now, Freiberg said that the reason he painted people so muscly is because it was symbolic. He wanted it to represent the spiritual strength that they had. But the irony of it is, we’ve turned it literal, and when I say picture them, you actually picture the opposite of the word stripling. From the 1828 Webster’s Dictionary, it means stripe, or a pole. Literally a bean pole! Stripling warriors are pre-pubescent teenage boys, if I can say it bluntly. They are boys who haven’t reached manhood. Picture your local congregation’s teachers quorum. That is 2000 stripling warriors. Now the beauty of it is, Friberg painted such powerful images that we know the story, we remember it. But his images affect the way we interpret the story that actually takes away the miracle. If you have 2,000 guys that are built like that, by the way, you don’t need God to win a war. They’re going to win anyway. But we have 2,000 teachers’ quorum boys who are little bean-poles and have never been to battle, suddenly you get the miracle back in the message. Or if I told you all who are watching to fill in the blank, In the millennial reign the enmity of beasts will cease and “the ___________also shall dwell with the lamb” (Isaiah 11:6; 65:25). Almost every one of you filled in the blank with “lion”. Why? Well, because however many Latter-day Saint congregations have this image in their foyer, right above a cheesy flower-covered sofa, and we see images like this But that’s not what the scriptures say. The scriptures actually say, “The wolf will dwell with the lamb”. And so, for being more scripturally accurate we would do an image more like that. Well, therein lies the problem, and the problem is that we often learn history and doctrine and scripture from art. We know something, but we don’t often know where we got it from. This is called “Source Amnesia”. It’s like trying to figure out where you and I got our height from; we don’t know, we can’t trace back the meals we ate that turned us into who we turned into. The same thing happens in our mind. We form so many conceptions; we can’t always quite trace where they come from.
This is Church historian and BYU professor Steve Harper and Elise Petersen, “When the Saints rely too heavily on visual or cinematic arts as the catalysts of their memory, the problem of source amnesia can be compounded…It is common to hear Latter-day Saints talk about, even testify of, elements [of LDS scripture, doctrine or history] that are suggested by artistic or cinematic representations (“Forming a Collective Memory of the First Vision,” in Eye of Faith: Essays in Honor of Richard Cowan, BYU Religious Studies Center, 2015, 15; emphasis added).
Let me just show you one more historical example. If I told everyone who is listening right now, “Tell me about the prayer at Newburgh, New York.” I would highly doubt any of you can, no matter how smart you are. Maybe only a few could. And the prayer at Newburg, New York, is a prayer that George Washington wrote down. It’s such a powerful prayer, by the way, that it’s read every day at the wreath laying ceremony in honor of George Washington at Mount Vernon. And yet not one of us can recite it. Not one of us even knows about it, but there’s an actual historical document produced by George Washington with this prayer. But if I told you to tell me about the prayer at Valley Forge, every one of you can, and the only reason why is because we have dozens and dozens and dozens of powerful paintings that are perpetuated, which, by the way, the Valley Forge Commission calls nothing more than a mere myth. In the thousands of pages of letters and documented history coming out of Valley Forge, there is not one contemporary source, by the way, to validate the legend or the tradition of the prayer at Valley Forge. It comes from much later, second and third hand, late reminiscent sources. This happens in our teaching of Church history and doctrine. One day when I was wrapping up a class at BYU a student came to me after we had looked at historical sources on the translation of the Book of Mormon, and this sweet student came up to me and expressed her difficulty and then sent me an email about it. And she said when she heard about the “stone in the hat” she dismissed it and said to herself, “No, that can’t be true; that’s not what the illustrations of the translation look like.”… This time in my life turned out to be a huge trial of my faith.
So I’m showing you these to show how art alters our understanding of doctrine, or our understanding of history. It can even turn problematic for some people, based on our depictions that we show. When John Adams learned that the famed American artist John Trumbull was going to paint an epic scene of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Adams immediately wrote Trumbull a letter. On March 18 of 1817 he said, “A few question[s] or two. Who, of your profession will undertake to paint a Debate or an Argument…in the Legislature?… Here the Revolution commenced. Then and there, the Child was born… Truth, Nature, Fact, should be your sole guide. [And then, the zinger.] Let not our Posterity be deluded by fictions under pretence of poetical or graphical Licenses…” (https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6730)
And Trumbull listened to Adams so much that he did not do that at all. He did not paint historical reality. He painted all the signers in one room, calmly standing there. Now that image is so powerful and beautiful that it’s on the back of the $2 bill that Grandma and Grandpa give to the grandkids, that they immediately spend. But we didn’t get history. We got Trumbull’s painting that preserves the idea of it, but not the literal nature of it.
So sometimes for those who lean in the scholarly camp, these are the frustrations. They say, “We need accurate visuals because truth, facts and history should be our sole guide.” That’s what scholars do, right? That’s what artists should do as well. Because we’re leaning on these. Scholars say, “Hey, I recognise that there are things that we don’t know. I hear that sometimes in the discussions of how we depict Jesus, for example. Well, we just don’t know what He looks like, as though that gets away from painting anything we may actually know from the time period. And so scholars say we should try to depict what we do know. Scholars say, hey, if you re-depict something and put it in a different scene, or way, or context, it changes meaning, because context gives meaning. We know that, as scholars. When I was talking with a friend who’s been watching the really successful video series called The Chosen, about Jesus, one of my BYU colleagues was upset and almost pulling his hair out. He said, “Jesus was not with Nicodemus in Capernaum! Why when they did that series, did they put Nicodemus with Jesus, depicting John 3 in Capernaum?” And he talked to me about how that changes the story. So for scholars, we say that intellectual honesty says that we don’t change facts and data and results to fit an agenda or a message or propaganda. That’s why we get frustrated sometimes when we feel like artists are participating in intentional or often unintentional revisionist history.
From a simply theological perspective, I would add this one. Remember that “Truth is a knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come,” not as we wish they were, or wanted them to be. So there’s some scholarly perspective. Another colleague said to me one time, “When are artists going to take responsibility for the falsehoods they perpetuate under the guise of artistic expression?” Those are his words, not mine, but I want you to understand the frustration of where some scholars come from, and some consumers of art. And I think that’s a valid question, but I also think it’s a slightly uninformed question, if I can be blunt, and it’s a slightly ignorant approach to art.
I spoke for the first 10 to 15 minutes here from the side of my personality that’s a scholar and a teacher, and I’m going to speak a little bit from the side of me that is an artist and a painter as well. And by the way, let me just say up front, I’m not going to pretend to speak for every artist out there. They need to speak for themselves. I don’t know why every artist depicts scenes the way they depict them. I can’t speak for the art that various entities within the Church use. But I do hope that I can share some things that might help us temper some of those frustrations or understand a little bit better.
First of all, understand this: complete historical accuracy in art is an impossible — and I’m going to say this bluntly, even in fact an undesirable — artistic ideal. Most often, we just don’t know certain things. Unless we’re perfectly recreating a photo, some artistic license is almost always taken when a painting is created, or this could apply to film as well.
So let’s do a little exercise together. Let’s paint one of the most oft-depicted scenes in the Restoration, something that has nine contemporary accounts; four that were first hand from Joseph Smith himself and five that are second hand. We can go right on the Joseph Smith papers and look at the documents themselves. Let’s be great historians. And now, let’s create a painting of the First Vision together. I even took this photograph for you. I went to the Smith farm in early spring on a beautiful sunny, clear day, so I’ve already given you the background for your painting. You’re welcome. What do we know, if we’re going to do a painting of the First Vision, one that we’ve never done before? Well, we know that Joseph was somewhere between 14 to 15 years old, depending on the source you want to consult. We know that Joseph says it was the early spring on a beautiful clear morning, so we should depict it that way, right? It was in the woods near his home, near where he left his axe, is what he says in one of the accounts. We know that he knelt down and prayed. We know that a dark force attacked him. He says in one account, from behind. He said that he thought he was going to be destroyed, or that he couldn’t speak in another account. We know that he saw God and Jesus. Three accounts, by the way, suggest that they were not at the exact same time, FYI. One Being appeared and then shortly thereafter another Being appeared and came to the side of the first. And also in the 1835 account, Joseph said he saw “many angels”, and that when he came to, he was lying on his back. So there’s some good solid historical data for us. So now we’re going to go and pick up our paintbrush, my fellow artists out there, and now we’re going to start to paint the scene. Some questions, though. Is that where it happened for sure? We know it was in the woods near his home. Are we absolutely confident that he went behind the home, where we typically take the First Vision trails? Was it over on the other side of the farm, more where the temple is right now? Was it another grove nearby? Do you know what the grove looked like? What are the trees looking like at that time?
How did Joseph pose? Right now, in your mind you can almost all picture a pose, but that’s because you are recycling past artistic expressions. Most often most of you will probably do this (raises hand in front of face), I’m speaking in front of bright lights and we do this pose, right? That’s become the Joseph Smith First Vision symbol. By the way, if you look at the earliest First Vision artistic expressions, the Tiffany Window, some of the other early chapels in Salt Lake and Brigham City. Rocky Mountain Saints is the book; ET Harrison’s images are in there. Joseph doesn’t have on a white shirt and brown pants, by the way, and he’s not doing this. He almost always has his arms open. One of the earliest films has Joseph’s arms reaching straight up. Is that what he did? How do you know? How are you going to pose him? You have to pose him somehow, by the way. How are you going to pose him? What was he wearing? What clothes did he put on that day? Do you have any actual data of Joseph Smith’s wardrobe, or are you just going to go off time period clothing from roughly the area? What was his hairstyle like? How did he wear it that day? My hair is twice as long right now as it was four months ago because of Corona. Did he wear a hat? Did he put it there? What did he look like as a fourteen year old? We can get his death mask when he was 38. What did he look like as a boy? I look very different now than I looked as a teenage boy.
By the way, he says that his mind was taken away from the objects from which he was surrounded. We call it the First Vision. Was it a vision or a visitation? Did God come to the grove, or was Joseph taken to God? How are you going to depict that? How are you going to show that? How are you going to try to get into that? By the way, are you going to show him lying on his back as he says he was? Is he standing? Kneeling? In three of the accounts, Joseph said “I saw a pillar of fire” – he crosses out fire and writes the word “light”. Orson Pratt wrote that he thought the grove would be consumed in flames. Are you going to show it as fire? Are you going to show it as soft, white light as we typically do? Why? What’s your basis for that? What’s your source for that decision? How about God’s appearance and God’s clothing? Are you going to put Him in white? Does Joseph ever say that God was wearing white? What does God look like? What are His facial features? What was His hair like?
Starting to see the difficulties here? Starting to see how many decisions have to be made to do one of the most basic historically documented scenes in the Restoration. And every decision you make has implications, by the way.
Joseph in 1835 said, “I saw many angels.” What were those angels doing? Were they around God? Were they in the grove? Were they flying? Were they standing? Were they male? Were they female? What color was their skin? How are you going to show Satan? By the way, was it Satan? Does Joseph ever say literally, Satan attacked me? Or is that just an assumption we make? Does Satan have a body? Are you going to make him bodily? Where are you getting that from? You get the point.
This is my image of the First Vision, that I painted, trying to bring better in the nine historical accounts. You can see I made a lot of decisions that are merely artistic. I did my very best. I have studied those nine contemporary First Vision accounts literally hundreds and hundreds of times. I can quote many of them almost from memory. And yet still when I sat down, I had to make a lot of decisions. Some artistic ones, well obviously some ones that match the historical record. I did show it more as a pillar of fire and not soft white light. I included “many angels” from the 1835 account. I put his axe in the bottom corner there. I showed Satan on the opposite side from the axe. There’s a little image of Satan fleeing. I tried to depict the grove as it would be in early spring. Anyone who’s been to upstate New York knows that the leaves don’t shoot out until sometime in early May. I did put it in the grove. Some things that aren’t historically accurate, some artistic license that I took. I’ve painted this yellow fire. I don’t know if it was yellow, but it’s a cool color. It draws your eye in, which is what art is trying to do, and it creates a great sense of motion, which is what good art tries to do. I depicted the Father and the Son not side by side, to try to suggest that it was not a simultaneous appearance. But I don’t know – I put the Son on the left of the Father. I had people write me and they’re, like, “Why did you put the Son on the left of the Father? He was on the right of the Father.” By the way, none of the sources say that. But I wanted to try to get it almost like the Father was done speaking to Joseph now he’s turning to talk to [Jesus]. I tried to ignore Alexander Neibaur, who says in his account that God had light complexion and blue eyes. I painted God and Jesus a little bit more bronzed, darker toned in their skin color, as you can see, a noticeable difference between them and Joseph, because I want them to appear broader to the God of humanity, because most people on earth are people of color. I purposely painted angels, male and female. I don’t know that! But I wanted women in the grove. That’s an artistic expression. I painted them different, representing different races and nationalities, trying to connect to the broader international Church and its message.
I painted Satan in the corner. I made him nude, strategically in an LDS style with his bottom half covered by a dark pillar. But does Satan have a spirit body? I assume so; section 130 says “All spirit is matter”; but I put him without clothing, as clothing is often symbolic as “clothed with robes of righteousness.” These are all just the little decisions that I had to make.
So to get to the point, this is what Arnold Friberg said: “There’s no tube of paint that says, “Don’t know.” I wish I could get a hold of that tube of paint, by the way. I have to come to grips with it. You have to decide, in context of the Book of Mormon, if the Liahona is going to be this big. Now I don’t know any more than the next person, but I have to paint something. (Vern Swanson, “The Book of Mormon Art of Arnold Friberg: Painter of Scripture,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies: Volume 10, No.1, 2001, 30).
Remember that art speaks a different language than history. Art is trying to express, provoke, inspire. It’s not merely meant to be decorative. Art is at its very, very best, when it causes interaction, reflection, emotion, provocation even, and communication on levels that words cannot do and documents cannot do. To communicate in art, an artist uses certain principles and elements of design. They don’t use words, grammar and common punctuation and rhetorical devices and logical syllogisms. They don’t use multiple sources and contemporary accounts. They use things like line, shape, form, color, texture, space, value, pattern, contrast, emphasis, balance, proportion, scale, harmony, movement. Those are the kind of things, when you read a piece of art, you have to read using that language, not the language of literalism and the language of direct historical representation.
Let me just show you one more example; this is a painting that I did of the washing of the feet in the School of the Prophets in the winter of 1833 when Joseph started. We don’t have any imagery of this, and I wanted to do an image. Well, historically accurate, what did I do? Well, I took a photograph literally from the Newel K. Whitney store. Anybody who’s been there knows that red of the interior room and how it’s shaped. I looked at who was there. I know Joseph Smith Senior was there, William Smith was there, Oliver Cowdery was there. And Joseph girded himself and washed their feet. So I tried to represent that. But let me just show some artistic decisions I made. I’m not only concerned with representing the scene; I want the scene to try to say something. So I made a deliberate decision to place the viewer outside of the room, because I wasn’t there and you weren’t there, and these ceremonies that Joseph was doing with the School of the Prophets were for a pretty closed private group. But they’re later, by the way, going to form some of the basic premise for later temple rituals, and washings and anointings that take place in the Kirtland temple; and the broader idea of a School of the Prophets is a temple endowment. So I purposely placed the viewer outside of the room. But I left an open door, saying, hey, eventually this is going to open up to everybody. That’s what that’s trying to say. I used the perspective lines of the floorboards. Look at those lines, and you know that, in perspective, straight lines will converge to a vanishing point, and I used that to converge you and lead your eye into the room. I deliberately contrasted the red with the blue on the outside wall. There’s artistic language being spoken here. Look how different the painting would be had I just painted this (the room only without the open door). I don’t think it would have been as effective. It may have been just as accurate, but not as effective, and art has to be effective in the language that it employs.
Or, I want to do this painting in Section 8, when it says that Oliver Cowdery had the gift of Aaron. As many of you know, the earliest sources say, he had the gift of the rod or working with the sprout. Maybe, as some scholars have suggested, that meant that Oliver Cowdery or some people in his family used divining rods. So I wanted to do a painting exploring that idea, but as you can also see, I also placed Oliver in some strategic ways. Why didn’t I place him in the middle of this scene? Well, because there’s this thing called the “rule of thirds” in art, where thirds are visually pleasing and create a sense of motion. So I placed him on the left third of the painting to push him forward, because then your eye fills in the rest of the space. So artists have to use devices like that.
There are some who operate under the assumption that the best art is always the most photorealistic art. Get away from that really primitive assumption. It’s a basic assumption. That might be the goal for some artists, but it’s not for most. Abstraction is sometimes desirable for many arts, because then people don’t confuse it with reality. This is a painting I did of the chamber of Father Whitmer, and I particularly abstracted it, the voice of God. I made God really big, because God’s big in my mind. How do you portray the voice of God? I don’t know. I did it with this yellow coming down. You can see I’m purposely abstracting it so it sends a message to somebody, hey, this is not a photo; this is art, trying to communicate a concept.
OK, so as I conclude, by the way, I will say this; there’s power in symbols. Artists often use symbols. They want to use symbols. I had somebody one time who was upset with me about the way that we show Jesus. This is literally on my whiteboard. I sketched this and I said, “How’s that speaking to you?” And she said, “I don’t understand.” And I said, “That’s Jesus.” And she said, “No, that’s not.” And I said, “yeah, it is.” And I said, “well no, that’s not the symbol of Jesus.” Then I sketched this quickly. That’s the symbol of Jesus. Symbols have to speak to people. Symbols are not historically accurate, but symbols communicate information really quickly. So let me just skip ahead to the point. To conclude. Maybe one day I can talk to you about the need for beauty in art as well. So let me give three things to conclude. Well, I will show this one. Is this image historically accurate? I don’t know. But I know it’s artistically awesome. And aren’t you so glad that we have this in St Peter’s Basilica? I am, too. It carries something, that scripture alone and history alone can’t do, that is captured in paint.
I will just say one thing about beauty. Often we want art to be beautiful, because we associate beauty with God, and we’re drawn to beautiful things, and so if we want to draw people to God we make something beautiful, which answers one of the reasons why we portray Jesus the way we portray Him. It’s possible that Jesus isn’t as beautiful as we make Him, but sometimes artists make Him beautiful out of reverence. I love by the way, that Jesus sometimes is depicted as black or that sometimes that Jesus is depicted as Asian, because sometimes we make Jesus beautiful in our culture to connect with our people and our way of seeing beauty. And so just remember that too, when we try to get too historically accurate with things.
For those who lean more towards the history camp, three suggestions.
- Strive to be more visually literate so that you don’t see everything literally.
- Understand and appreciate the language and goals of art, and that they’re different from that of history, and that art often serves different purposes and audiences that history can’t, and be grateful that it does.
- Let me give you a little homework. Try to create a religious, historical scene yourself. Pick up a paintbrush before we become too critical. Make some decisions. Compose a scene. You’ll develop a little bit more empathy and understanding for all the complex issues at play.
For those who lean more towards the art camp, if you’re like, Yeah, give it to those historians, Brother Sweat! Well, let’s give it to ourselves as artists too, and I’m including myself in this.
- Realize that your images have historical, doctrinal, cultural implications. Take responsibility for that. Think about it. Remember that we are all historians and religious educators, whether we like it or not.
- Study history. Do deep research. Then you can more informedly decide what you will and won’t depict and why, instead of just perpetuating things that have been done in the past.
- If historical accuracy interferes with your artistic aims, create work in abstraction or allegory, whimsical and expressive in nature. Move away from realistic historical representation.
And my last piece of advice for us all is this: Don’t try to completely reconcile the tension. History and Art are two separate religious ties pulling in opposite directions. Their end-hooks necessarily meet and link. But it’s the tension between the two that gives the strength and allows the cargo of our faith to be carried or to be strapped down with that tension. If we tried to make them go the exact same direction, we would lose the tension necessary to carry religious cargo and payloads that neither discipline alone has the strength to secure. So God bless each of us as we try to understand these two important and needed worlds. Thank you very much.
Q&A
Scott: Thank you for that inspiring talk on art and such. You know, I had a conversation with one person who felt strongly that the Church had lied to them, because there was a picture of Joseph Smith translating the gold plates, and the gold plates were sitting next to him on the table, and he said, “That never happened.” So, my thought was, “How does he know?” I love the symbolism of things. More can be expressed in art sometimes than expressed just by words.
Anthony: Yeah, and frankly using that very example, there are some things that work better visually and some things that don’t, and as one who’s represented Joseph using the hat, I’ve done some really ugly compositions with it. It’s just not flattering. It doesn’t communicate inspiration, revelation, to have someone’s face in a hat. It communicates, I had a bad lunch. So sometimes, even in my own scene you saw I didn’t put his face directly in the hat, because the face carries a lot of emotion, expression and communication.
Scott: It’s an interesting thought. So, question: Are you aware of any art that recasts scenes of early Church history in the aesthetic of other cultures, like the Nativity and New Testament scenes?
Anthony: Oh, I think that’s wonderful. I think we’re at the point, I appreciate that question. Whether people want to acknowledge it or not, we are a baby Church; we’re very young, and our artistic tradition is very young. We’re just now truly starting to develop an artistic tradition, and the next hundred to two hundred years will really influence – what is Latter-day Saint art? What’s its purpose? What’s its goals? How is it used? And as the Church becomes more international and truly a global Church, there will be a need to depict important scenes in other non-Western European styles, which are how most Church artists up to this point have been trained. And by the way, there are artists who are out there who are doing things like that, but don’t confuse that with art that is often used by the institutional Church. The institutional Church for the most part has stuck with very representative, realistic, didactic Western art, but even now they’re trying to use people like Jorge Coco, and a few decades ago Minerva Teichert, trying to embrace abstraction and other styles a little bit more, and it will be interesting to see where it goes in the future.
Scott: I remember several years ago a non-member looked at LDS art and music and her comment after she’d looked at it was that she was really disappointed, because she said there are so many wonderful things among the saints, and so many wonderful artists, and she was hopeful that she would see a lot more cultural representations of that. And that we haven’t made our path in a lot of ways.
Anthony: Yeah, and we need to.
Scott: So, one of the challenges to even approaching the tension between history and art when it comes to depicting the Book of Mormon, is not being able to pinpoint a cultural and geographic setting. What Book of Mormon art would you like to see more of?
Anthony: That’s a great question. I’ve literally heard people say we shouldn’t paint any Book of Mormon scenes because we don’t know where it happened. I disagree with that position; that’s coming in my opinion from too tight of a history and literalness side. We need visual scenes to express Book of Mormon events and ideas. My response to that would be to maybe, like I mentioned in the presentation: let us, number one, be more visually literate. Visual literacy is a skill we have to acquire so that we’re not reading everything so factually literate, and then number two, let tradition develop multiple ways to interpret Book of Mormon scenes, since we don’t have a pinpointed geographical location or clothing, aesthetic. When you allow diversity in art, it opens up more possibilities, so that we don’t get pinpointers saying, oh, Nephi wears a headband every time.
Scott: I get frustrated by the critics who say things like, Jesus standing on the wrong side as you said in your picture.
Anthony: We need to allow more diversity. Being reverent, I think it was wisdom in the Church’s decision to, when they had the three temple films that were developed a few years ago, to deliberately put them in different settings and clothing, and dialogue, almost to send a cue to the Saints of, this image isn’t the revealed doctrine and position. And that’s what diversity in imagery allows us to do. So I will counter by saying, let’s put it in a bunch of different settings to open possibilities.
Scott: I recently, within the last year, went to the Oakland temple open house, and I was really pleased with the number of culturally diverse works of art they have there. They’ve really expanded; for example they have an African American man blessing his son. The works of art are just beautiful, beautiful works of art. Could you perhaps comment on the tensions, cautions or challenges for artists depicting Heavenly Mother?
Anthony: Oh, wow, what a wonderful question. Back to the tension of history and art, I had somebody say to me, “Are you going to depict Mother in Heaven in a First Vision painting?” I literally was asked that question, and I said to them, “Do you want me to be theologically accurate? Or do you want me to be historically accurate?” And they gave me their answer, because none of the sources that exist, if I’m being truly historically accurate, none of the sources confirm that. However, theologically that’s one of the richness of our belief system. So if you’re going to incorporate Mother in Heaven into any sort of a scene, then just be mindful of how you’re representing it, and why you’re representing it the way you are, and be careful to not, well, just be mindful is all I’d say. There’s no one accurate way to do so, and there would be ways to depict Her and even our Father in Heaven in a much broader sense than sometimes we do, but I do think it’s necessary; we need visual imagery of Mother in Heaven, in my opinion.
Scott: This is your last question. Have you seen the First Vision comic book Pillar of Light by Andrew Knaupp and Sal Velutto, and if so, what are your thoughts on the artistic choices they made in their effort to balance historical accuracy and artistic expression?
Anthony: I know that they’ve presented already, and I applaud them in that effort. I think their skill and their approach to it, I love it. I love what they’re doing with it. I applaud it one hundred per cent. I love that they’ve gone at it trying to research, and based on what is known, but they themselves would be the first to say there are artistic choices in substance and style also. So, as consumers of that let’s just be mindful of that. I applaud their effort.
Scott: Thank you so much for your presentation. I know it’s not often we get to be educated in areas of art and culture and such, but I think it’s important. I think it opens more than one way to understand something; it opens our mind up to other avenues of learning, and feeling things of the gospel. Thank you very much.
