As religious affiliation declines, can art provide fresh ways of exploring the questions posed by theology? Might art – its creation as well as reception – lead to the discovery of new spiritual information? What do faith traditions lose when they overemphasize the written word and neglect the role of images?
Historically, faith traditions have focused on both the written word and images as sources of knowledge and meaning. Some would claim that words have taken undue precedence as theologies have developed, while images seem to have been left behind. Has this shift in focus left us wanting?
Art and theology have more in common than is seen at first glance. As George Pattison, a philosopher of religion, has argued: ‘Theology can learn from the particularity, the integrity, the will to wholeness and the pluralism of art’. Both theology and art can help us find new ways to engage with faith and discover reality, seen and unseen. Sometimes, our words fail us, and we need another option to reveal what we revere.
Two years ago, I received a Templeton Foundation Grant focused on ‘Art Seeking Understanding’. This video is a precursor to a larger related book project. In it, I do my best to tell my story, shedding some light on our cultural/religious stagnation.
Where: St John’s Anglican Cathedral, 373 Ann St, Brisbane City, Queensland
Opening: Thursday 11 July, 6.30–8.30pm. The opening night will feature classical music performances by Amalia Safonov (vocalist and flautist) and Artemii Safonov (pianist and composer).
RSVP: 0410 197 946
Sailing to Byzantium is an exhibition that blends the sacred art of the Early Renaissance and Byzantine periods with themes from William Butler Yeats’ poem. Hosted at historic St John’s Anglican Cathedral in Brisbane, this collection of recent paintings and sketches invites you on a journey through faith, history, and artistic expression.
The exhibition’s title comes from W. B. Yeats’ poem, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, which speaks of the quest for eternal beauty and spiritual transcendence. In the poem, Byzantium symbolizes an ideal world of artistic and intellectual perfection, a place where the soul finds peace beyond the physical. This idea connects deeply with the spiritual essence of early Christian art, where every detail holds profound religious meaning.
As someone who has been studying the history of art extensively, I am captivated by the intricate, aspiring abstract designs and joyful colours of this historical period. The luminous golds, vibrant blues, and rich reds are not just decorative but symbolize divine light and the heavenly realm. Each piece in this exhibition is a modern tribute to the craftsmanship and spiritual depth of ancient iconographers and Renaissance masters, aiming to inspire faith and devotion.
Through this collection, I hope to bridge the past and present and invite you to reflect on the enduring power of sacred art. By reimagining these traditional motifs, I aim to create a dialogue between the ancient and the modern, much like Yeats’ poetic journey to Byzantium.
The exhibition invites you to embark on your own voyage of discovery and contemplation. I hope you will enjoy it!
If you’d like to know more about my Christianity-inspired paintings, check out this article.
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OLGA BAKHTINA IS AN ARTIST WHO LIVES AND PAINTS ON JAGERA AND TURBAL COUNTRY.
Join us for the Opening Launch of Premonition, by Rod Pattenden on Saturday 17 February, from 2 pm.
This is Rod Pattenden’s second solo exhibition at ASW and promises to be another celebration of sensuous colour and form. Pattenden describes this new body of work as:
New paintings and drawings with a vivid presence and an uncertain future breaking in. Works in vibrant colour, small to large scale with a range of stark large scale charcoal drawings.
Olga Bakhtina is a Queensland-based artist working in oil and charcoal. She studied painting 15 years ago in the Sultanate of Oman while living there with her family for 4 years. Currently, she studies the history of art at the University of Queensland. Olga has a passion for Early Renaissance art, in which she finds serenity and inspiration.
Since her first solo exhibition in 2012 in Oman, Olga has been exhibiting regularly across Australia. Her recent solo exhibition, ‘Good Samaritan and other Biblical Stories’, showed in St John’s Anglican Cathedral, Brisbane, in July 2023. Olga has been the finalist and winner of a number of Australian Art awards, including the COSSAG (Cathedral of Saint Stephen Art Group) Award in 2016 and 2018.
Olga’s artworks are in the collections of the Archdiocese of Brisbane, the Australian Catholic University, Rosebank College, and St Anselm Abbey, New Hampshire, USA. Her work also hangs in various private international collections.
In 2022, the Archdiocese of Brisbane created a video series titled Art Aficionados, in which Olga’s Good Samaritan painting featured:
Olga writes:
I’m often asked why I paint Bible scenes. There are several reasons, but the most important one is that my paintings are not just about the Bible. They are about humanity and what comes with it – the beautiful things in life, like love, unexpected kindness, devotion, and sacrifice. But humanity also brings pain and tragedy – betrayal, greed, cruelty, and war. Has anything really changed since the Bible was written?
Nowadays it seems that the world is collapsing back to biblical times, as if there is a crack in civilisation. On one hand, there is humanism and advanced technologies, which Joshua, who stopped the sun in the Old Testament, did not dream of. On the other hand, there remains a lot of hate and barbarism, which sadly we continue to see around the world way too frequently. Sometimes, it feels like we’re flipping through the Bible and checking it with our reality.
I think we can all relate to the biblical stories and lessons, in one way or another. The Bible has lots of answers. My biblical paintings are my attempts to find them, to process what is happening in the world, and in my own life. They are my prayers, too. Someone said that art is the highest form of hope.
Olga is having an exhibition as a part of the 150th Anniversary celebration programme of the Cathedral of St Stephen, in Brisbane. The exhibition opens this Friday evening. RSVP to cathedral@bne.catholic.net.au or (07) 3324 3030.
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Olga Bakhtina is an artist who lives and paints on Jagera and Turbal country.
The Severed Head of St. John the Forerunner, c. 1870s. Egg tempera on silvered and gessoed wood, 31 x 26 cm. Private collection.
There’s a timely reflection by Seung Heon Sheen over at Transpositions on the relationship between AI-generated art and iconography, with implications for how we might consider the relationship between an artist and their work more generally. It draws on relevant texts from the iconoclast controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries. Here’s a snippet of the argument in nuce:
… any ‘icon’ generated by a ML algorithm would be inherently idolatrous since the relationship between the image and the archetype would be severed. That is, although the works produced by a human iconographer and an AI ‘iconographer’ may be outwardly similar, inwardly they would be radically different due to the disparity in the process of their creation. A human iconographer faithfully contemplates and depicts the archetype; an AI abandons the archetype and merely replicates its images. And if this is so in the case of iconography, it implies a danger of idolatry in involving AI in religious art or employing it for religious purposes.
When words fail me, being in the studio helps me make sense of the world.
This new body of work emerges from several years of attending more deeply to the life of the trees that surround and companion me every day. For many years, I have walked routinely along a path that follows a local creek, appreciating how the trees continue to hold space for me. Even as the weather changes and shapes them, we both endure. But in late 2021, I watched my neighbour excavating the land nearby and, by doing so, undermining the existence of a healthy gum tree. As the roots of this tree were laid bare, I went into the studio to paint the grief that I felt and understand the depth of my response to the inevitable loss of this tree.
It seems that in choosing to live among trees, we live within a nexus of risk and power. In being among the trees surrounding my studio as I make this work, I am becoming more deeply aware of the interdependence that shapes our life with trees. Trees welcome the CO2 that I cannot bear and, in turn, offer me life in the form of oxygen. As I learn to see how trees live interdependently with one another, I see a healthy exchange between risk and power, shaping how I can choose to live with others. I am learning to see trees in the way I see people, and I am wondering what it is like to be a being among trees.
Over the past year or so, I have been working towards developing a new exhibition set to be hung in April 2023.
Being Among Trees will hang in the Queen Victoria Women’s Centre between 3–27 April. Rather than an opening night, I have scheduled an afternoon for a conversation with the artwork and me. Further details are below:
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LIBBY BYRNE LIVES WORKS AND PLAYS OF WURUNDJERI LAND. SHE WORKS AS AN ARTIST, ART THERAPIST, AND THEOLOGIAN FOLLOWING THE INVITATION AND DISCOVERY OF ART INTO NEW WAYS OF BEING WITH PEOPLE IN LIMINAL SPACES. WITHIN HER STUDIO PRACTICE LIBBY WORKS WITH IDEAS, IMAGES, AND EXPERIENCES TO EXTEND THE WAY WE THINK, PERCEIVE, AND RESPOND TO QUESTIONS OF MEANING AND EXISTENCE.
In 2014, the ‘broken Christ’ crucifix that Michael Galovic had brought with him from Yugoslavia in 1990 was used as the core in his creation of an image of the desolation and humanity of Christ as evoked in his anguished cry from the cross and translated as, ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’ These are also the opening words of Psalm 22. The juxtapositioning of the broken Christ with the lances of Diego Velázquez’s The Surrender of Breda (1634–35) highlights the sense of defeat and desolation as well as the continuing threat of violence. As Galovic notes:
These lances, for me, feature as an ominous foreboding symbol of ‘empire’, or system, ready and capable of destroying any human.
The image is one of almost utter desolation; light from no discernible outside source illuminating Christ’s face.
Shortly after the work’s installation in Our Lady Help of Christians Church, Rosemeadow, in February 2023, the parish priest, Father Christopher Sarkis, suggested that it might form part of a triptych. Having seen a medieval manuscript’s illustration of the resurrection, he felt that this depiction would be suitable as the final image. Galovic suggested that the first item could portray Christ’s crucifixion and death through the imagery of the Arma Christi, and the head of Christ is based on the Shroud of Turin in the lower part of the image.
Left panel: Michael Galovic, Arma Christi with the Shroud of Turin, 2023. Egg tempera on linen on board, 120 x 90 cm. Our Lady Help Of Christians Church, Rosemeadow, Australia. Central panel: Michael Galovic, Lord, O Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?!, 2014. Mixed media on board, 120 x 90 cm. Our Lady Help Of Christians Church, Rosemeadow, Australia. Right panel: Michael Galovic, The Resurrection, 2023. Egg tempera and gold on linen on board, 120 x 90 cm. Our Lady Help Of Christians Church, Rosemeadow, Australia.
The completed work would thus contain a central contemporary work in muted tones, a first panel drawing on images of objects coming from a collection that has been a part of Christian iconography with its central image, the crucifix, having been used since the fourth century CE and a third panel based on a medieval manuscript. This seemingly disparate grouping also needed to be created in a way that would form a coherent whole. While having a linear structure in time that covered the period of Christ’s betrayal through to his resurrection and empty tomb, it also needed to have links established through the use of colour and form.
In the Arma Christi, the upper register highlights the betrayal of Christ and the mockery and savagery that attended his crucifixion. As with the central image, it references Psalm 22.16b–18:
[T]hey bound my hands and feet. I can count all my bones. They stare and gloat over me; they divide my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots.
Christ’s final words from the cross – ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit’ (Lk 23.46) – with their tranquillity and faith, are embodied in the lower image, based on the Shroud of Turin, which, irrespective of its authenticity, forms a depiction of the final aspect of Christ’s human role in salvation.
In contrast to the violent instruments of betrayal, humiliation, and torture against their fiery background, it is a wonderfully expressive portrayal of calmness and completion. There is a great gentleness in the muted tones and careful delineation of the features, overlaid by the delicate treatment of the weaving of the cloth.
However, there is also a linking through colour, with the blue tones shown especially in the rooster, whip, and lance head in the top register being subsumed into the blue depiction of Christ’s face below. These two colour tones of blue and vermilion flow through to the central panel. In ‘Eloi, Eloi’, they appear in muted tones in the rocks foregrounding the spears, with the blue used on the image of the broken Christ.
They are then developed vibrantly in the final panel, which depicts two images associated with the resurrection. The vivid vermilion and oranges both frame the upper and lower panels depicting Christ’s resurrection and the myrrh-bearing women who came to anoint Christ’s body and form a significant part of each of the images.
The figure of the resurrected Christ in the top panel, surrounded by a golden-rayed mandorla, connects this image with the sacred, while the deeper tones used on the garments of the sleeping soldiers evoke Roman costumes.
In the lower image, the treatment of the angel at the tomb, with its flame-like wings and fiery countenance, creates a sense of otherness that is accentuated by the luminous white and gold of the robe. It also resonates with the garments of the two holy women closest to the tomb. Throughout both images, orange and vermilion tones highlight the fruitfulness of the trees while also forming contrasting highlights to the use of blue beneath them on the varying rock formations.
The interplay of colours creates a harmony that works beautifully throughout to unite the three images. But that is only one of its aspects. The top register of the first image, with its strong orange and vermilion tones highlighting instruments of torture and mockery, also evokes the fiery infernos of medieval hell-mouths and Renaissance depictions of hell. The contemporary image of the broken Christ, with its background imagery of war and defeat, highlights the bleakness of destruction. Yet, in the final image, all of these aspects are subsumed into the vibrancy and vividness of Christ’s resurrection, in which even the sleeping Roman soldiers had a place.
The Triptych is a tribute to both creativity and flexibility of form. In bringing together aspects of Christianity from different eras, cultures, and perspectives, it focuses on Christ’s sacrifice to redeem humanity. Each of the individual works evokes a different perspective, and through these images, the viewer is given a sense of the beauty and complexity of responses to the crucifixion and resurrection throughout the history of Christian art.
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Kerrie Magee has an MA in Medieval Studies and lives in the area of the Wallumedegal People. Michale Galovic is a renowned iconographer living in the area of the Darkinjung People.
Last month, Jason Goroncy spoke at the opening of an exhibition of Wes Campbell’s artwork. Wes is a theologian, artist, and (retired) Minister of the Word in the Uniting Church in Australia. An edited version of his talk is now available on the ABC’s Religion and Ethics portal.
Art/s and Theology Australia 