An announcement first: The August newsletter will feature Tara Wright. She’s generously shared her wisdom on beauty and living the creative life. The newsletter will come in two parts because it’s worth reading slowly and deeply and reflecting on her questions. I am so excited to share it with you because her words always speak right to my heart and jostle me out of lukewarmness when it comes to how we see and share our creative gifts. Stay tuned!
After a week or so of experiencing air quality problems in Wisconsin, I was grateful one morning to wake up and see light dappling the sidewalk again. Noxious air wafted for weeks on and off, casting a wan glow from sunlight hidden by smoke. There was a longing for something as simple as clean air, sun, and those painted summer clouds.
When I was a young girl, my grandmother gave me this Monet painting. We both shared a love of gardens and Monet. One of my favorite things about this painting was the sunlight—an idyllic summer day with a deep blue sky with a few cotton-like clouds and light dappling the path. The ordinary of summer—sunlight, warmth, blooming gardens—doesn’t shock us with a sublime sort of beauty, but rather irradiates small moments, and that’s what I’m interested in now—beauty in mundanity, hope and joy amid brokenness.
How did Impressionists like Monet come to value the mundane as holding an eternal sense of beauty?
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Impressionists like Claude Moment, Edgar Degas, August Renoir, Berthe Morisot, and others took up subjects that were not the norm. Rather than looking to history or mythology for subjects, they looked to ordinary moments from modern life that held something just as beautiful as the extraordinary and sublime. They were concerned with reality more so than ideal forms demonstrated through traditional three-dimensional perspective. Many critics like Louis Leroy dismissed their work as unfinished, low-brow “impressions,” unintentionally naming this new movement.
But the Impressionists saw time differently. What appeared as a “sketch” to critics was art that captured a moment in time through a specific natural condition, like glistening rain, plumes of smoke, ephemeral clouds, or body movement (especially in the case of Edgar Degas).
In order to take up art subjects like nature, simple moments, mothers, children, dancers, industry, and workers and see them in a new way, they had to be content with giving the world something they were still working out. It was a radical way of looking that positioned them on the margins of the art world, which didn’t recognize the beauty and reality in how they executed their impressions.
To see like an Impressionist is also to learn how to honor our gift of sight by delighting in the details of our lives. It also means understanding that no moment is too small, too unworthy to be captured. The story they told is not of what was being made or done, but rather the making and living as good in itself.
To Ponder
What small moments captivate you?
Does it ever seem radical to attend to something that the culture might dismiss as unimportant?
What I’m Writing
“The Value of Keeping a Commonplace Book,” Catholic Women in Business
I started a commonplace book before I knew what it was called. I was always drawn to the idea that others’ ideas could live indefinitely in a small notebook and that those ideas could be generative—generative in how they serve my own writing and in how they reveal my curiosity, interests, and sense of awe. It’s my intellectual scrapbook, preserving everything that holds my deep attention.
What I’m Reading
I love the glimpses in this book of not so much what it takes to be a master of something but rather what it is about mastery that we love. What is it about great artists, musicians, cooks, etc. that we find so captivating?
Every brush we make, every note we play, every sentence we craft . . . betrays and engages the totality of ourselves and even of our time. . . . We search for the signs of a unique human presence. . . . We never really love an artist’s virtuosity, or if we do, it feels empty. We love their vibrato, their unique way of entangling their learned virtuosity within their unique vulnerability.”
Thanks for subscribing to A Holy Wonder. If you’ve enjoyed the newsletter or something in it resonated with you, I invite you to share it with others.
I always love your reflections, Jody! I feel when I leave my computer I'll be putting on my rose-colored glasses and seeing my experience of the world as a masterpiece :)