Brushes with Faith

Reflections and Conversations on Contemporary Art

Aaron Rosen

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781532649332
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Contemporary artists are engaging more deeply than ever with religious imagery, themes, practices, and audiences. With a bracing, jargon-free style, Aaron Rosen--a leading scholar, art critic, and curator--takes readers into studios, galleries, and worship spaces as he paints a compelling picture of art and religion today. Focusing on individual artists, from eminent names to emerging stars, Rosen's essays and interviews tackle key questions, from how art might sustain communities to how it might offer new approaches to conflict resolution. Drawing on years spent developing relationships with artists around the globe--from Algeria to India to the United States--Rosen gets artists to talk, often for the first time, about how religion impacts their practice. Whether inspiring or unsettling, these brushes with faith challenge and invigorate the artists in question, and those who ponder the results. Replete with more than seventy color images of works ranging from video art to outdoor installations, this volume is indispensable reading for those looking to see contemporary art in a new light.

Part I

Reflections

Origins

1. Govinda Sah: Divine Eyes

It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works. —John Ruskin, Modern Painters1

The sky was the insipid color of skimmed milk as I poked my way through the faintly dystopian premises of an industrial park to meet Govinda Sah at his South Wimbledon studio. Surely, I thought, an artist who grew up in southeastern Nepal, not far from the foothills of the Himalayas, then lived in the Kathmandu Valley, must feel uninspired gazing out at this less than dramatic vista. From the home of the world’s highest peaks to the penultimate stop on the Northern Line seemed a rather precipitous decline in natural wonder.

Looking out the artist’s studio window, I posed a rather cynical question to him: had he found inspiration in England precisely because of such banality? Had the dreary indignities of British winters forced him to look inwards to conjure the kinds of sublimity he once had on his doorstep? Impervious to sullen self-indulgence, Govinda refused to take the bait. With infectious enthusiasm, he insisted that there was something truly remarkable about English skies. Where I saw fog, Govinda spied clouds capable of racing across the horizon, an unusual phenomenon in the deep valleys of his homeland.

Clouds have long been a source of inspiration for Govinda. In his student years, he recalls painting en plein air in the early morning, watching the rising sun melt away the mist around Kathmandu, with molten clouds bubbling up like froth over the face of the mountains. He was just as enraptured by the cloud studies of John Constable and the stormy seascapes of J. M. W. Turner, which he saw reproduced in the art books he assiduously saved up to buy. After earning his Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Art in Nepal and an MFA in Bangladesh, he moved to London in 2007 to pursue a second MFA at Wimbledon College of Art. Stepping into Tate Britain, he realized for the first time that Turner was English. He recalls:

I hadn’t bothered to read the text in those books, but just went straight to the pictures! When I first saw the actual works, it was as though I was filled with the spirit of this artist who taught me so many things. What Turner did was really extraordinary, and I consider myself—honestly—to be one of his disciples . . . Later, when I saw Constable’s paintings at the National Gallery, I realized I was living in the place which produced these two great masters . . . it definitely confirmed how right I was to come to England. That’s karma, if you like!

During his studies in London, Govinda’s disparate sources of inspiration began to coalesce into a singular vision. The insights he had gleaned from his studies of nature, both in Asia and Europe, fused organically with the images he admired from past art. Indeed, some of the appeal of Govinda’s paintings lies precisely in our inability to disentangle the two. As Ruskin observed, our mental picture of clouds is replete with “blue and white reminiscences of the old masters.”2 Govinda does not just paint clouds, he paints what we believe they look like, observed through the prism of the art historical past.

Yet it would be a mistake to think of Govinda’s paintings simply as skyscapes. In recent years, Govinda has become just as interested in cosmology as meteorology. While never simply illustrative, many of the paintings Govinda has produced this decade evoke the extraordinary phenomena witnessed by the Hubble Telescope. Apocalypse (2010) and Illusion and Truth (2011) blast outwards like supernovae, while Begin (2010) and Untitled (2012) crackle like nebulae, an effect he achieves through his signature process of blending acrylic and oil paints—an anathema to most painters! At times, Govinda makes cosmological connections explicit in his titles, as in Birth of a Star (2010; Fig. 1.1). On several occasions, the artist has spoken at international conferences dedicated to exploring the intersections between art and science, and enjoyed fruitful conversations with astrophysicists.

Figure 1.1

Rather than obviating the need for artistic depiction, recent discoveries have required the imagination of artists more than ever. This was powerfully demonstrated recently when a team of scientists announced that LIGO had for the first time detected gravitational waves, as theorized by Albert Einstein, in the form of minute variances in space-time from the collision of black holes a billion light-years away. For many people, the only hope of grasping some sense of such esoteric phenomena was through the rendering of artists. One could easily imagine Govinda being tasked to depict such phenomena, and indeed his canvases with cut-away centers strikingly evoke, among other things, the nullity of black holes. But what I suspect inspires scientists the most about Govinda’s work is not how his images parallel their discoveries, but how they anticipate spectacles yet to be experienced, or even imagined.

Guided by what the painter Wassily Kandinsky called the artist’s “inner need,”3 Govinda imagines a cosmos of boundless possibilities. The questions he asks in his work are just as much those of the theologian as theoretical physicist. And indeed, Govinda does not see a radical difference between the two disciplines, which both pursue truth, as they understand it, at the outer reaches of human conception. “Knowledge exists outside all of us,” comments Govinda, “and for me, painting is the activity by which I reach out to discover it. The truth isn’t within us: it surrounds us.”4 While many contemporary artists shy away from talking about truth, preferring instead to speak of culturally constructed meanings and the incertitude of signs, Govinda feels completely at home with such diction, unabashedly invoking theological concerns. His titles confirm these interests, including Illusion and Truth (2011), Salvation (2011; Fig. 1.2), Transcendence (2013), and Infinity/Depth (2018; Fig. 1.3). What is notable in these names, and even more so in conversation with the artist, is his deep yet eclectic approach to religion. He moves nimbly, without anxiety, between Western and Eastern points of reference, invoking Milton’s epic Christian poem on the one hand, and the Buddhist concept of maya (illusion) on the other.

This equanimity owes a great deal to the religious milieu of the artist’s native country. Nepal’s 2011 census confirmed Hinduism as the faith of an overwhelming majority of Nepalis at 81.3 percent, with Buddhism at 9 percent and much smaller percentages adhering to Islam or ancestral religions.5 Despite these numbers, which suggest clear divisions between Hinduism and Buddhism, a strong connection with the Buddha runs across religious boundaries. Siddhartha Gautama, as the Buddha is otherwise known, is believed by many to have been born in the region, and is worshiped as a divinity by many Hindus in Nepal. Growing up, Govinda recalls, no one he knew overtly identified themselves as either Hindu or Buddhist, and if there was a difference it was best measured by a spectrum of beliefs, rather than dogmatic boundaries. The lives of his family and community were saturated with religion—witnessed in a widespread commitment to social duties entailed by dharma, and a range of devotional practices—but untroubled by definitions.

Figure 1.2

Figure 1.3

Govinda remains proud o...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Reflections
• Part II: Conversations
• Works Cited