About my faith.

May - 2010

I was raised Catholic by logical and scientific minded parents.  The word “Catholic” is important because the argument for the Church dogma was founded (more or less) using logic as handed down from Aristotle to Aquinas — thus Aristotelian Thomistic Philosophy.  While it is true that Church theology at times appears more rationalistic than rational, as a 2nd grader I was unaware of these nuances while reading the Baltimore Catechism.  My world was neatly constructed around the “fact” that our world and our religion were products of a logical super-being who was as precise at creating the metaphysical as he was at creating the physical.  It would seem that we could see all the cards on the table “face up”, so we had no need of resorting to “faith”.  Faith was a word bandied about willy-nilly, but it was not given the genuine credence that it was within evangelic religions.

At Loras College while working on an art major, I studied theology in a time when theologian Harvey Cox (an ordained Baptist Minister at Harvard) questioned the very foundations of all organized religion. He encouraged studying all religious ideas. By graduate school (at Notre Dame) I was an atheist.  However my logical thinking (the residue of Catholic schools) continued to drive my paintings — paintings which tried to be sufficiently logical that no previous artistic knowledge was necessary for them to inform the viewer.  Barnett Newman, Frank Stella and Robert Mangold were my model artist.  Particularly Mangold whose works could have been inscribed into a tablet on Voyager and sent out into the far reaches of space.  These works used a language that was so universal it would most likely be understood by any being possessing visual or tactile senses.  Wittgenstein provided the philosophical direction that encouraged Stella and others to produce works in this genre.  I loved doing this kind of painting but I knew that love and emotions had nothing to do with art — so I backtracked to Barnett Newman — and through him to Kant and The Sublime.

A year or so ago I ran across a podcast of a course by Hubert Dreyfus on Existentialism in Literature and Art .  I had always been interested in existential philosophy, but I just could not understand what it was all about.  In short - my logical thinking was in the way.  Through Kierkegaard I learned about the leap of faith, and the knight of faith and I was hooked. From there I went to Dostoyevsky and the novel I could never get through —  The Brothers Karamazov  .  It took me almost a year!

My 30 foot painting Brothers Karamazov chronicles my reading.  

Logic is no longer on my list of necessities for good painting.  

I now have faith — but not in a God.