Art

Review: Jazz Trash

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Cover image of "Jazz Trash" by Michael S. Moore.

Jazz Trash

Jazz Trash, Michael S. Moore. Crumpled-paper.com (ISBN: 9798985928945) 2025.

Summary: Andrew, who cannot play the guitar, is chosen to play guitar for a group that explores the boundaries between jazz and noise.

Perhaps you were (or are) like me–a music fan who dreamed of playing in a rock band. Maybe lead guitar. But the only guitar you can play is an air guitar, and even that not very well. That’s Andrew as he walks to meet band members. He’d seen a poster like this one:

Postcard: “Wanted Guitarist who does not play guitar” from “Jazz Trash” © Michael S. Moore (part of book promo materials)

It turns out he is exactly who Dave and Phil are looking for. They are jazz musicians wanting to create a new kind of music. The fact that Andrew doesn’t even have a guitar and doesn’t know how to play makes him a prime candidate. At his audition in the pictured warehouse, they give him an old guitar and plug him into an amp. And then, on cue, he is to play, which really means making loud noise. Then Dave on bass and Phil on drums improvise behind him.

Andrew has no clue how he is doing. But Dave is ecstatic. This is just what Dave and Phil wanted. So, they make an audition tape to send to the Kit-Kat Club, the premiere jazz club in town. But the owner just doesn’t hear the magic, just the noise. But they get by with a little help from their friends.

Some are friends I’d met before in Moore’s first novel, Crumpled Paper, which I reviewed in 2023, calling it my “sleeper” of the year. Richard is the artist whose breakthrough with a series of “crumpled paper” works. His studio is upstairs in the warehouse from the group, which, after this disastrous mixtape, names themselves “Jazz Trash.” Richard not only sympathizes with the group. He takes them under his wing and arranges a gig at the Kit-Kat under their new name. But the owner pulls the plug as soon as Andrew hits his guitar. A chance to play at a private reception goes slightly longer before the police shut them down on a noise complaint.

Meanwhile, their circle of friends that gather at an artsy cafe, stick with them, Lulu, one of the servers, and Andrew have a budding friendship. Glenn, Richard’s volunteer manager, works his magic. Martha is taken up photographing another artist, Reginald, and his literally haunted house, which reminds her of a series of Nancy Drew mysteries. Yet, she helps with band pictures as Dave creates a music ‘zine to hype the group.

While all this is going on, everyone is working hard getting ready for the annual Art Walk. Reginald will debut new works and try to get free of his ghosts. Meanwhile, Richard will try to follow up on his previous successes, and the band will get what could be their last shot at his reception.

Like Crumpled Paper, Moore explores the world of artists in various media who try to break out of the boundaries of their art. So much is about getting that chance to find an appreciative public. But part of what makes this book so enjoyable is the ensemble of characters living in this artsy community, enjoying tea and good food and conversation in the cafe as they support each others’ efforts. It’s a pleasure to recommend this book by an Ohio author living in my home town! (And I can’t help but wonder if our Short North arts district and its monthly Gallery Hops served as his inspiration.)

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the author.

Review: Not Finished Yet

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Cover image of "Not Finished Yet" by Sharon Garlough Brown, illustrated by Jessica Linn Evans

Not Finished Yet, Sharon Garlough Brown, illustrated by Jessica Linn Evans. IVP Kids (ISBN: 9781514007952) 2024.

Summary: While “painting prayers” with Gran, Wren discovers she can honestly share all her feelings with God.

An old shed behind the farm house was a wonderful place for Gran and Wren. It’s where they painted together. Some of their paintings didn’t look like much. But Gran defended the mess, saying that you finish a painting when you sign your name.

One of the things Gran and Wren like to do was “paint prayers.” For example, a painted squiggle served to say “Dear God.” Wren wanted to paint feeling special. She picked out colors that felt “special.” But when she put paint to canvas, it looked like an ugly dark blob. Instead of special, she felt awful. Gran asked her for a title to express all the feelings in the blob. Finally, she said, “disappointed.”

Gran asks her to think about and paint her disappointments. A lot had to do with how others treated her at school, or when animals died. Then she dares to admit she sometimes God disappoints her. Gran calls her brave to be able to admit that, and if Gran wasn’t disappointed with her, maybe God wasn’t. And so she paints the sad and scary things she wants to say to God.

It ends up that she does feel special. Heard. What she thought and felt mattered to God. And she signed her name. And in Gran’s embrace, Gran talks about how God isn’t finished yet with the scary, broken world and imagines with her the day he signs his name.

Some, who know Brown’s novel Shades of Light will recognize Wren. But even if not, the story stands on its own as a beautiful statement about how we can be honest with God about all our feelings. It even suggests how we might use the arts in giving expression to what is within us. Complementing the text, the illustrations of Jessica Linn Evans take us into the feelings of Wren. Most of all, Sharon Garlough Brown reminds us of what it means to face the sad and scary and lean into the hope that God, too, will someday be done.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Crumpled Paper

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Crumpled Paper: A Novel About Art and Tea, Michael S. Moore. Sanford, NC: Word-Brokers, LLC, 2022.

Summary: The tale of the unfolding of an artistic vision, and a friend who, acting as agent, just wants his artist friend to stay solvent.

Crumpled paper. Have you ever thought what happens when you crumple a two dimensional sheet of paper into a ball? Suddenly a uniform sheet of paper becomes an unbelievably complex three dimensional object with ridges, folds, and much greater compressive strength. Flatten out a crumpled paper and one sees an incredible network of fold lines.

The central character in this work, Richard, as part of his artistic journey, creates a show consisting of crumpled paper drawings. One of these, Crumpled Paper #3 is sold to a photographer friend at the show for $1000. If he would have saved the crumpled ball of paper from which it was drawn, he could have sold that to her as well, probably for the same price. So he laments to his friend Glenn in Le Petite Café where he goes to drink tea from a special cup linked to his muse, Renoir and his favorite painting of Renoir’s, Luncheon of the Boating Party. Richard even has a favorite table with the perfect view, which he eventually “buys” with one of his drawings.

In the course of this book we meet a number of Richard’s friends, many also artists in various media–photographers, writers, musicians, and dancers. Conversations move between galleries and cafés, as they talk about their work, sometimes collaborating. Meanwhile Glenn, acting as Richard’s agent, tries to keep him financially solvent as he pursues his artistic vision which moves successively to a huge ball of collaboratively crumpled paper as the centerpiece of an show, to a culminating show featuring dresses made from paper, displayed as they would be in a fashion show on live models. How all this unfolds, how Richard’s mind works, and his efforts to live an aesthetic vision in art, in drinking tea, and the rest of life make this fun.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Richard, Crumpled Paper #3 has an interesting life of its own, doubling and re-doubling in price. There is a bit of tongue-in-cheek commentary on all this. What was pure accident, doing the drawing on the wrong side of the paper, as evident in a reversed watermark, becomes part of the mythos of the work. We also see one of the sad ironies of works that increase in value. The artist only realizes the price he or she sold it for.

I love the way Michael S. Moore unfolds this story. The conversations among artists and connoisseurs and the feeding off of one another’s inspiration rings true to time I’ve spent with artists secure enough to appreciate each other’s work. I liked the characters in this story, the development leading up the final show, and the denouement, which I will leave you to discover. And I found myself drooling over the different dishes they enjoy at Le Petite Café.

The most delightful thing about this is that the book is by a local (to me) author and it may well be my “sleeper” of the year. I like to review local authors if I think they might have an interesting work that I’ll be able to recommend. This one did not disappoint and I hope this is only the first I see from this author.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the author.

Review: Art + Faith

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Art + Faith, Makoto Fujimura, foreword by N. T. Wright. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.

Summary: A series of reflections connecting art and faith in the act of making.

Makoto Fujimura is a world-class painter and committed Christian. Many would not make this association in contemporary art but in this work, Fujimura offers a series of reflections on the seamless connection of these in his life, beginning with the act of making. Fujimura declares, “I have come to believe that unless we are making something, we cannot know the depth of God’s being and God’s grace permeating our lives and God’s creation.” The creator we come to understand through making is one who creates out of love and not necessity. God doesn’t need us but in love invites us to collaborate in God’s creation. We enter into this when we make.

We labor in a fallen world, but our work is not to “fix” broken plumbing but to be restored and participate in creation’s renewal empowered by the spirit restored through the sacrifice of Christ, and refreshed by God’s new wine. Fujimura illustrates this in his own creative process of Nihonga. It is not so much a technique but a kind of imitatio Christi of attending to the materials one works with, as part of a community of those who make the brushes, the paper, and powders with which he lays down wash after wash in creating, slowing down to work at the painstaking pace required of the materials.

It is a process that takes him into sacrifice and an understanding of brokenness, evoking another Japanese art practice, that of kintsugi. This practice works with broken cups and pottery, using lacquer covered with gold to mend the broken pieces, creating new beauty out of brokenness. This art points toward the New Creation of Resurrection that doesn’t obliterate brokenness but shines light and beauty through it.

Art helps renew our understanding of work. Fujimura observes that work wasn’t cursed but rather the ground and the serpent. Art points us toward work as gift, and toward the greatest Gift of the gospel. In the Eucharist, we make the very elements that reveal God’s gift of resurrection through sacrifice. We make not for it all to be burned up but toward New Creation.

Fujimura proposes that imagination and faith are closely linked. We often think of Christian theology and leadership in rational, propositional terms. Fujimura notes how much of scripture is in metaphor, in symbol, and description requiring imagination for understanding. As he has argued elsewhere, this imagination invites us into culture care, contra the culture war, battle of ideas that has framed much of our cultural engagement.

In another reflection, he likens the words “Jesus wept” to the “pinhole lens” that captures the whole story of God from loving creation to weeping over the broken creation to be restored through Christ’s suffering and resurrection. He offers a beautiful reflection on John 11 and 12, and the art form of wabi-sabi, the use of well-worn but well-loved objects like a well-worn wallet. He goes deeper into the tears of Christ in the art of Mark Rothko, the poetry of T. S. Eliot, and his own traumatic experience of 9/11, which displaced him from a studio in the shadow of the Twin Towers. He weds tears and fire in a discussion of artistic renewal out of the devastation. He concludes with a chapter on “Lazarus culture” reflecting on what it means to practice resurrection. To make in a fallen, broken world is to enter into Christ’s suffering and be enabled by the resurrection to point toward the New Creation.

The power of this book is in the contention that as we enter into the making of art as people of faith, we open ourselves to a way of knowing the story in which we live. His most trenchant words are those where he asserts the vital importance of imagination and making in the life of faith. His reflections remind me of what a vital role artists play in the life of the church, and perhaps the value of all of us finding ways to be makers and not just consumers, of culture.

Review: The Sense of Beauty

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Santayana.jpg

The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory, George Santayana. New York: Dover Publications, 1955 (originally published 1896).

Summary: A philosophical discussion of the nature of beauty, grounding it in the pleasure of the perceiver with an object and its associations.

Classically, philosophy has spoken of three transcendentals: Truth (logic), Goodness (ethics), and Beauty (aesthetics). To satisfy the requirements of tenure at Harvard, George Santayana wrote this book, based on lectures, to offer his own outline of an aesthetic theory in what was his first book. Perhaps the most striking move of Santayana was to move beauty from the realm of the transcendental to that of human perception of value in the object perceived. He contrasts physical pleasure, focused on the organ of sensation, with aesthetic sensation, focused on the object from which pleasure arises. He defines beauty as “pleasure objectified.”

He then explores this sense of beauty under three headings: the materials of beauty, form, and expression. The materials of beauty focus on the  various human senses, chiefly sight, hearing, memory and imagination, through which perception and appreciation of objects occur. Form has to do with both external realities that give rise to sensation and their mental representation. He explores aspects of these that produce pleasure including symmetry, uniformity, and multiplicity, and also the idea of “indeterminate” forms such as landscapes that derive their beauty from the perceptive interpretation of the observe. Finally, Santayana explores the nature of expression which means the qualities one associates with an object. This suggests that one’s sense of beauty develops from immediate perception to a deeper perception where past experience, imagination, and other associations shape the kind of aesthetic pleasure one has in the object.

Santayana elaborates each of these elements in a discussion that is highly abstract, that I won’t attempt to outline or summarize here. What troubles me in his treatment, which seems to me a sophisticated way of saying, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” is the elimination of the transcendent aspects of beauty. For those who sense beyond perceived beauty an author of beauty, Santayana would say this is simply one’s sense experience, and one’s sense of the sublime is simply ecstatic pleasure. There is nothing “beyond” to which beauty points. The sehnsucht or longing that C.S. Lewis writes of in Surprised by Joy when listening to Wagner, or glimpsing a scene in nature, to Santayana signifies nothing more than the interplay between object and sense eventuating in aesthetic pleasure. When Bono says, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for,” Santayana might reply, “and you never will. All you may find is what you are looking at.”

I find myself wondering how much Santayana’s aesthetic has shaped both the making of and the appreciation of art. How might artists pursue their work differently when they do not compose and paint, write and dance, with the object of “Soli Deo Gloria” and instead see their work as evoking aesthetic pleasure in those who partake of them. How are we changed as we are discouraged, when experiencing what we might call the “transcendent” in a work to think of it as nothing more than a confluence of the material of our senses, the form of a work, and its expressive associations. What happens when wonder is turned inward, rather than upward?

These were some of the questions I was left with on reading Santayana.

Review: Placemaking and the Arts

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placemaking

Placemaking and the Arts, Jennifer Allen Craft. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2018.

Summary: Considers the “place” of the arts in placemaking, particularly in the settings of the home, the church, and the wider society.

Urbanists like Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte have pioneered a movement known as “placemaking,” the gist of which is the planning and design of urban spaces that promote the health and well-being of those who live in them. This movement has also included writers of “place” like Wendell Berry who urge loving attention to local places, their people, and their ecology.

In this work, Jennifer Allen Craft explores the role of the arts, particularly the visual arts, in placemaking, and how for the Christian in the arts, artists may both seek the flourishing of their places, and anticipate the coming of the new creation, the kingdom of God.

Her first chapter explores the “placed” character of art. Every artist works in a place. Art is an embodied practice that can only occur in a place and in various ways interacts with that place. Through all this runs a theology of creation, incarnation, and resurrection hope for the new creation. One’s art is integrally connected to one’s relationship with God, other people and creatures, and the place in which we work.

The next four chapters explore how this works out in different settings: the natural world, the home, the church, and in society. In the natural world, art enables us to understand, love and, in the words of Wendell Berry, “practice resurrection” in the creation. Art in the home is a “homemaking” practice that creates beautiful spaces that also may become hospitable places for those experiencing dis-placement. Art in the church creates a welcome “place” for community, for encountering God, and for “embodying” the spiritual in a local place, as does liturgy and the Eucharist. The arts also have an important role in the pursuit of human flourishing in society, in creating “place” for the displaced, and bringing artistic considerations to the design of places.

Her final chapter is an attempt to articulate a placed theology of the arts. This commences with six key dialectic features of art: physicality/spirituality; particularity/universality; individuality/community; given/made; beauty/usefulness; contemplation/action. It seems that part of the theological ground of this dialectic approach is the sense of already/not yet of the kingdom and the dialectic of reflection and action in spiritual practices of faith.

The author seems to primarily be writing for an academic audience at the intersection of theological studies, sociology, and art theory, an important group to engage. I found myself wondering how accessible this would be to most of the practicing artists I know, many who might be appreciative. Many are believing people but unaccustomed to reading academic prose and would struggle to read a book like this, or they would just put it down and paint.

At the same time, as an individual who participates in a local arts group and a local choral organization, this resonated deeply with me. Joining a group of plein air painters in various locations in our “place” helps me see and cherish that place more deeply–the particular light of our summer skies, the gently rolling landscape, the river valleys, the species of trees and the shades of green of each. Whether it is a local park or town square, these become intimately a part of the place where we live as we seek to render them on canvas. To study and rehearse great works of music, and then to perform them in an assembled community in our place brings these works to a particular life that enhances life. The works we and others have painted that adorn our home make it a distinctive and welcome place. Singing four-part acapella harmonies with a few friends in my church embodies community and invites worship in our local place.

What this work offers is a theological framework for thinking about both the embodied practice of making art in local places, and how faithful engagement in the arts may be a part of our kingdom callings. I hope she will think about how to articulate these ideas to a wider art and craftwork community, many whose work is indeed grounded in place, and could use the encouragement and affirmation of their work present in this book.