Art is a window into the transcendent… and other thoughts…

Holiday posts

I’m on holiday this week, so for the next few posts, I’m re-posting some older stuff from my studio blog…

The first for our Monday post for paid subscribers is a mash-up of a couple of short posts I wrote a few years ago while I was in a long process - through lockdowns and all that - of teaching myself sacred art, egg tempera painting and gilding techniques. I was not just working to learn the painting, but to understand what it all meant.

I’m scheduling our three posts this week to be automatically published while I’m away on holiday - as I mentioned, up to Liguria to visit some Benedictine nun friends of ours.

We’ve got a full month for July with posts pencilled in about:

• the massively important-to-western-sacred-art Carolingian Renaissance,

• more central Italian trecento painters you probably haven’t heard of,

• a conversation with a young American Catholic painter teaching himself Gothic and early Renaissance painting techniques; “But seriously, how are we going to revive the sacred art tradition in the west?”

• a big and so far very unwieldy think-piece on connections between Dante and Tolkien and the long-long term civilisational consequences of the Medici invention of modern finance

• an eye-candy post on the gorgeous Romanesque Lambeth Bible…

You’re gonna love the Lambeth Bible…

But I’m just going to be taking the week off entirely. I think I haven’t had a paid holiday… actually now that I think about it I don’t think I’ve ever had a paid holiday. The closest I ever came was when I got laid off for a summer from the wedding caterers I was working for in Vancouver, doing high-end wedding cakes, and got some kind of government compensation. They wanted to hire me back when things picked up again, but that was the summer I pulled up stakes and left BC for good. That was 1997.

So, yeah. I think a week off is probably OK.

But I couldn’t bring myself to leave you all hanging. So, I thought it would be fun to revisit some old posts from the studio blog…

Hilary White; Sacred Art

from before I started this site.

This is a post for paid members. Join us to start exploring these ideas.

The Sacred Images Project looks at art history and culture through the lens of the first 1200 years of Christian sacred art.

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So, enough preamble…...