Latest / CASTLcast / 5 | Made in the Image of a Creator & The Struggle to Create - with Bernadette Lamb

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5 | Made in the Image of a Creator & The Struggle to Create - with Bernadette Lamb · CASTLcast

• Jake: Hello and welcome to another episode of Castle Cast. I'm here today with Miss Bernadette Lamb. Yeah, I'm really excited to have her onto the show. Thanks for having me. Absolutely, absolutely. So I know we're gonna talk about art a lot, but this falls within the humanities here at Castle. So for somebody that doesn't know what that means, you know. How would you describe that? That is a great question. I'm coming kind of more strictly from an art background, so visual arts in particular. when I think of the humanities, I just think of the word itself. Human is in the word. and so we're studying works of art, of literature, that pertain to the human person and that give us a grander vision and hopefully a deeper understanding of who we are and who we're made to be in a Catholic lens, who we're created to be by God. So yeah. Great. I like that a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So maybe talk about your art background here for a second. before we dive into the curriculum here. Sure. Yeah. I am a working artist. I have studied illustration, gotten a couple different degrees at Secular schools, University of Arizona, Washington University here in St. Louis. and illustration is kind of a unique subset of art that historically has not really been considered worthy of academic study until the last few decades. and so my practice is mostly in the realm of studio art, so I'm making work, but I'm also writing alongside that. So fiction writing and then some kind of critical academic writing too. So I came into teaching at Castle with a very heavy visual arts background, but not exactly a classics background. background. So as I'm also teaching literature classes here, I read many of the texts that I now teach for the first time when I first came on as a faculty member. So that has been great in expanding my yeah, just understanding of where we come from, the various historic cultures that inform the periods of art that I have been studying for years and art history as well. Beautiful, beautiful. So I I know you've got to do, you know, semi recently a number of sort of very immersive experiences, as pertains to your being a working artist. the residency the summer then I guess something in England as well. Yeah. Recently or Yeah, I was very blessed this year. I presented a small talk at a symposium in England in May. this is through a group called Visual Theology. and it was a a great just kind of passion project for me. I got to talk about a very obscure twentieth century illustrator and how His work kind of pertains to GK Chesterton, so that was neat and taking some of my formation here as a faculty member at a Chesterton Academy and having that be in conversation with my other loves. And then I also had the blessing of going to a children's literature residency with some colleagues of mine called Milkwood, which is put on by Sophie Blackall. She's a Caldecott Award-winning author illustrator. And she and her husband host these amazing residencies and workshops in upstate New York. to spend a week just working on my own projects and praying through them too like it's amazing what a beautiful place can do with your own creative practice so sure yeah no I got to see some of the photos and yeah it it really is magnificent. Yeah and then sound like you got a lap done too I it was very productive. Very much so yeah. Yeah yeah so while you know while the students were Off Gallivante all over the summer, you got to really dive into things that maybe a little bit harder to do so during the school year, but what you still engage in. So let's talk a little bit about what the students get to engage in you know, here during the school year. I think Chesterton is, you know, maybe this is true of all classical schools, I'm not sure, but arts is very much a part of the curriculum. This is Romine, the drama teacher, another episode was mentioning that the arts are y are usually the first thing to get cut in public schools, et cetera. So the fact that it's such a priority here, is Yeah, it's it's huge. So I don't know if you can speak a little bit towards that. Yeah, it's an enormous blessing. we do have art all four years. So freshman year they get both semesters with visual art, and then the consecutive years it's one semester. and I kind of think of the Chesterton curriculum that we're we're given by the network and we get to shape a little bit individually as being three parts. So we're really tackling the foundations of art in a lot of ways. At the very beginning, in the studio we're doing obviously Observational drawing. So the students are learning how to handle a pencil, not only in a way that's conducive to the work itself, but is healthy for their body and just learning how to handle materials well and then looking very deeply at a subject in front of them and drawing that and replicating that on paper. Observational drawing for generations, millennia, right, has been like a staple of arts education. And so and it and it is considered maybe a more classical approach as opposed to to jumping straight into imaginative drawing or imaginative art making. It's it's important to have that foundation, being able to draw what you see before learning how to to deviate with confidence from that and to explore and be a little more experimental. So we do drawing foundations. Secondarily they delve into pen and ink work. So we actually do a quite a bit of calligraphy and they learn a kind of Celtic alphabet and Gothic or black letter alphabet and make some illuminated manuscript pages which is also tied to our historic tradition as a church too. and I love having monk days with them where we kind of pretend that we're monks in a monastery. I'll put on some Gregorian chant and we'll I'll work on our projects. and then finally junior and senior year is more focused in oil painting, which again historically in the kind of art academy that arose in the eighteenth, nineteenth centuries, was a real staple and is a staple for some artists who are working but kind of more in the fine arts realm. And so since my background is an illustration, That's not a medium that I am personally as familiar with. I've I've worked in it a bit, but I tend to work with quicker or quick drying things because illustration's a faster industry, I suppose. so oil painting is is great because slowing down and taking time and working thin layer by thin layer and really contemplating things like value and color is is an inherently contemplative act. So that's great to yeah, slow the juniors and seniors down a little bit and have them by senior year create create an image over the course of one semester that they're really proud of. Yeah, yeah. Well the ones that we have on display in the hallways, if parents ever come for tours or what have you, they'll they'll see, you know, these just magnificent paintings. Yeah. Like, I I know that kid. How did he paint that? So, and that's so w you attribute that to sort of this this s contemplative process, right? And e even the the the calligraphy the illuminated manuscripts, that does sound very c contemplative. and then and then even more so on the oil paintings, like, okay, we're gonna take our time here. We're gonna really try to see what the artist did with lights and shadows and how do we replicate that? Yeah. And close looking again is like an integral part of that and that's why I feel like any good arts education should be scaffolded, right? It should build upon itself. And so even as students are painting by senior year and they're not really using pencil, they're still thinking about their representational drawing skills or they they know I sound like a broken record in class, squinting in order to perceive changes in value and hue more clearly. Sometimes we need to look with with new eyes. so but art making is also I mean it's it can be wild and fun and joyful, as well as contemplative. And it is a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Like it it does require work and we do talk about a lot at the beginning having a shared vocabulary so that we can talk about these elements of art in a considered and academic way when we're viewing art and looking at art history, but then also in making our own work. we're make actively making decisions. It doesn't just happen. it's a lot of hard work. Okay, so you have a shared vocabulary both in sort of analyzing art. then also in making art, is that right? Exactly. Yeah. So talk talk to me a little about both those aspects. like s some of that shared vocabulary. How do you I I don't know, how do you how do you teach them to to look at and ta and and also discuss and talk about art? Yeah. And then maybe we can touch on next sort of process. Sure. It it sounds very elementary, but at the very beginning, freshman year, we start by just identifying what are the elements of any one single artwork, right? What are the things we see? We see line, we see shape, we see hue or color, value, so that light and shade or light and darkness, we see texture. And so and this is something that I quiz them on, and these are these are all things we should know and have the in the back of our mind. But then once we actually sit in front of a work, whether it be a fellow classmates or something we're seeing in art history, we are analyzing just what we see in front of us. And we're we're not even going to the point of meaning yet or interpreting what this scene might be depicting. We're just looking at how those elements, that line, that color is being employed. And then we start talking about principles of art. So how those then are used to draw our eye to specific parts of the image. Because again, a a a well-construed artwork has intention behind it. and so whatever, whether it is representational or abstract, an artist is intentional in their choices. And so we're we're thinking a lot about that once we're looking. Yeah, absolutely. And then you mentioned the process of of of creation, right? So there's a shared vocabulary there too. And and process is both sort of the the actual creation of the artwork. as well as what's happening inside the artist. Am I understanding that correctly? Totally. Okay, so to walk us through like what are these students going through when they you know, at these different like levels of art making here at Chesterton. Yeah. I actually there's a a quote that that reminds me of. I have a lot of materials here because I love studying and preparing things ahead of time. there's a a great Christian writer and singer-songwriter. So he doesn't so much work in visual art, he does as more of like a hobby. and he writes in in a book as he's talking about creative process. It's kind of a a series of of essays, personal essays. He talks about the kind of Christian's approach to artwork, and this is often a a a problem that I see or just an attitude that I see with students coming in who think that they can't make art, right? Or they they're kind of down on themselves or it's a maybe misconstrued sense of humility, like, I I'm I'm just incapable of making something that's great or that's beautiful. And he says, Andrew Peterson says in this book, Adorning the Dark, God, you pray, I'm so small and the universe is so big. What can I possibly say? What can I add to this explosion of glory? My mind is slow and unsteady, my heart is twisted and tired, my hands are smudged with sin. I have nothing, nothing to offer. And then an italics, write about that. What do you mean? Write about your smallness, write about your sin, your heart, your inability to say anything worth saying, and watch what happens. And so there's this spirit of of humility that I tried to instill in the kids of like, look, we're we're here, I even say at the very beginning, we're here make bad art, right? Like here to to make messes and to learn. And if we stop before we've even started, how are we going to grow in virtue? How are we going to discover the beauty that we can make with the help of God? so that question of identity and this is a challenge that I saw also through my college experiences and even now in the professional world I have a lot of colleagues who are making amazing work and still struggle with imposter syndrome, feeling like they they don't belong, their work isn't enough. And there's always a danger, I think especially with creatives or those who tend toward creative pursuits or careers, to put our identity in what we make or what we do, what we do more broadly, I mean all of us, I think, especially in in the West, right? Are we live in a fast-paced world, a a very work and career focused world. and so the first thing that I want to kind of question in students' minds is, okay, is is that actually true? Like are we speaking truth to ourselves ourselves when we are thinking, I'm incapable of doing this thing or I'm too little or it's gonna take too much effort. It's gonna be too hard. Well, anything, you know, worth doing is gonna be difficult and gonna be hard and God challenges us. So, yeah, I I try to kind of break down, cut that off at the knees, right? That assumption that we have to be perfect because that perfectionist mindset proliferates, I think, in artistic communities. Which I mean we didn't really kind of address this at the very beginning. we talked about humanities and then we dove into to kind of you know, art and not necessarily connected all the dots there. You know, you know, right now in in your classroom you have set up, you know, there's a there's a table with a with a cooking pot on it. And it's got a l you know, a light so that it's always kinda creating the shadows in the right direction. And so sort of question that could arise is like, okay, clearly we're doing observational drawing here. Yes. but what is it about observing a cooking pot? Like tells us something about what it means to be human. I mean on many levels, yes, on the surface it is a a practical skill. Like we we're looking at an object that has a shiny surface, and that poses a particular challenge after they've done drawings of things that don't shine under light, right? we did some drawings at the beginning of the semester of leaves and started to talk about shadows and cast shadows when the light is strong or in one particular direction. And and so in many ways this is just kind of a practical next step. What happens when in our minds we conceive of a pot and we think about it being one color. But when all of a sudden it's in a dark room, it's on a table of a certain size with white paper underneath and it's lit by light, what happens to the surface of that pot? It becomes infinitely more interesting. so I think what it's it's doing is I mean the the pot doesn't allegorically stand for anything, you know what I mean? Like it's I'm it's it's not like a theological lesson in disguise. But I do think like looking at even the most mundane objects For a long period of time, leads us to consider looking at the world and aspects of our lives with a greater sense of wonder. And that's something that G.K. Chesterton speaks a lot about. Wonder and paradox are kind of two pillars of his personal spirituality. And it helps us to be a little bit more childlike, attentive, but in that attentiveness, seeing the beauty in the unexpected and in the ordinary. and then also practicing patience. I mean these these freshmen, these 14-year-olds, right? have sat for a good 60 minutes in the dark in front of this pot and they were asking great questions. And I was circling the room and talking to them individually, like, okay, how how do I get this foreshortened handle? What am I actually looking for? So we started breaking down what we saw into its constituent parts, thinking about shape, thinking about comparing value, measuring with our pencil. And those little tools. and practices of close looking. I think also, I was just thinking about this the other day, help train us to not live in such a hurried world. I mean we all have supercomputers in our pockets and you know the temptation to to scroll infinitely and to look at a an image for a fraction of a second at a time is that's just the world we live in. Yeah. But what happens when you sit in a room without those distractions, you know, albeit you f your friends are next to you, right? So conversation might be a distraction. But when you sit in a room and you actually look very deeply at something mundane. Yeah. You start to see what's interesting and beautiful about it. I mean St. Augustine gradually throughout his conversion started to see the beauty of the created world and the fact that it was made by God. Right. This was a gift from God. And so for the students like it's also training them out of that short attention span, just on like a practical human level. And I I almost wonder, you know, how that training for my myself of sitting in front of, you know, a model for a couple of hours in an art class and undergrad, right? trained me to sit still and to contemplate Jesus in the Eucharist, right? Like otherwise I if I had not trained that muscle of being silent and attentive and looking deeply, I might find it a lot more difficult to to pray. so that's where I I feel like art making in whatever capacity, and I don't expect all my students to be career artists, ultimately is human formation and it's also spiritual formation when done right. Yeah, that's beautiful. Yeah, you did remind me of a Chesterton quote there. I think it's like the world will not fail. I'm I'm kind of paraphrasing here. The world will not fail for lack of wonderful things, but for lack of wonder. you know, and and so that definitely speaks to that that that's experiences the students are having in the classroom here. learning learning again how to wonder, with some of the ill training of our you know, modern world that we live in. And so that's really cool. And then and it does have yeah, there's a lot of human formation there. as they kinda go through that. you know, basic, I guess, basic skills of of learning art for sure. So how does that continue, I guess? What's that process of interior growth like as they continue through some of the yeah, you know, next levels of art, you know calligraphy, illuminated manuscripts and some of the the painting. Yeah. I there are d many different challenges, whatever medium you're dealing with. I remember thinking very powerfully when I took a a watercolor class, which is not a medium that we study here, but As my professor was telling me, one of the principles of watercolor is to let the water do the work. This is David Christiana, he's an amazing fine artist and illustrator. And I had to kind of come to terms with my own desire for control in that moment. Like, wow, this particular medium is asking me to surrender, to let go. Once I put paint on paper, as soon as you start messing around with it, it's gonna look bad. And you have to embrace the limitations or the the strengths of any given medium. So pencil is a little bit more straightforward. You have the flexibility of being able to erase so at the very beginning it doesn't pose maybe as many challenges in that way. but but it does in terms of its kind of graphite and its dustiness, right? You're dealing with smudges and having to kind of rework your paper. with ink that becomes much more difficult for freshmen and sophomores because they realize once they put that ink to paper they can't erase it. So there also is a bit of surrender there. But also discipline when you know, if you've got an ink splatter on your sheet of paper, there's no easy way to cover it up. We have to be really strategic and work that into our composition or start over. And there's a lot of discipline in that as well. and then by senior year knowing that it's that that this is, you know, sort of if it happens, it's hard to fix this. So I'm a little bit more careful going into this. Exactly. The approach at the beginning of the project changes. and then by senior year, well really junior and senior year when they're spending more time, more weeks on a single project, I I do frequently have to, as I'm walking around the room, tell them now is a good time to slow down. Practice looking at your subject more than you are actually putting brush to canvas, right? Or pencil to paper or pen to paper. and that's really helpful because I I remember I had a a student last year. We were working on master studies of portraits by John Singer Sargent, who's just a very prolific, was a very prolific gilded age portraitist, absolutely amazing. And the students got to kind of out of a suite of images pick the portrait that interested them the most. So we have a lot of really great examples upstairs. And One student was he spent a lot of a lot of time trying to mix one particular skin tone. Like I I don't know if it was in light or in shadow and it was a very unexpected color. And he's like, There are so many colors in this one color. And but but really just kind of delighted at that. Like not not be getting frustrated. Like, yeah, maybe it is taking you longer than I expected, but it's it's amazing how much work and care goes into replicating even one small part of an image. Yeah. And it helps you wonder at the beauty of God's creation, right? And God as the greatest artist. so yeah. Yeah. Well maybe you can speak about that too. let's go a little deeper there. We are imitating the greatest artist. And so there's there's you know, what what gives us the I don't know, I wanna the right to do that and why does it help us to do that? Can you speak about like what it means to be an artist and and what are these students learning by by putting that on? Yeah. No, that's a beautiful question. I think number one one of the first thoughts that I often share with people, especially who aren't in the arts world or do it only as a a hobby, is that every single human being, by virtue of the fact that we're created by a creative God, is creative. and this also kind of flies in the face, right, of any preconceived notions of I can only draw stick figures or whatever that that idea might be coming into an art class is no, in a lot of ways art is a learned skill. you know, some might have a particular charism for it more than others and that that's you know, a spiritual gift and that's a reality, but in many, many ways it's something that can be learned with a lot of discipline. and so spiritually, I mean the the the question of that audacity, I think it comes back to the recognition that we don't so much create as we do make if we distinguish between the two words, right? To create is to make something out of nothing. Ex Nilo, right? And then to to make is to make something or form something out of something that's already been made. And so because we are created by God, we are using materials in the world, forming materials and mediums into something that is beautiful. And yeah, there is a kind of like childlikeness to it. Like even as a working artist, as an adult who's trained or whatever, like I feel like a a a child, you know. in that that same book by Andrew Peterson, there's a beautiful metaphor he uses at the end where he describes artists as being like toddlers, slobbering on the Floor of a cathedral. And we're here basking in the beauty of God. And there's there's really not much we can do. Like our attempts are always going to fall short of the glory of God, but also of our own vision for the work. so John Paul II actually in his letter to artists talks about this. and I have the freshmen read this whole document at the beginning of their time, which is really beautiful because there are so many gems here. Yeah. And He says in paragraph six, all artists experience the unbridgeable gap which lies between the work of their hands, however successful it may be, and the dazzling perfection of the beauty glimpsed in the ardor of a creative moment. What they manage to express in their painting, their sculpting, their creating is no more than a glimmer of the splendor which flared for a moment before the eyes of their spirit. Yeah. So it's it's convicting, right? Because as my professor John Hendricks would say, he uses this this awesome image of the creative process. And at the very end, we're all trying to catch with a net this magical butterfly of what we imagine our work is going to be. But that little gap where our net ends up and where the butterfly is is never bridged. Yeah. Right? Like we're all of our work is going to be imperfect, this side of heaven. Just the nature of things. And so there's a lot of humility and recognizing that God has given us this gift. We are inherently creative. Yeah. So so that we can grow in virtue. Right. So that we can, yeah, experience in some small way, JP Two talks about this in his letter to artists, the the joy with which God created the world and created us. Like he wants us to share in that. and that I find very humbling, challenging, right? 'Cause we we all struggle against that. That temptation to constantly strive for greater perfection to the point of discouragement, right? Like we should always be be striving for greater holiness. But the secret to that is in just receiving God's grace, right? Receiving his love and his mercy. So that's been really cool to see too in the students where they come in very anxious and maybe are still battling these anxieties of I I really want to make something I'm proud of, right? And I I tell them like this this is not the last work of art you're going to make, right? Yeah. the the process itself is inherently valuable because God's with us in it and working with us in the process. I love all that. Yeah, you reminded me of a short story that I wanted to write some years ago. 'cause I was kinda I I was driving driving, you know, down the road actually in Kirkwood and and there's a church there and it's the church of Scientology. I'm like, they just got it totally wrong. Like why would they be like it says it says right there on the church, you know, whatever, the first church of Christ scientist. Like if you're gonna go start a church, you know, that's not the one that Jesus Christ founded, why wouldn't you call it the first church of Christ creator? like that is a much more compelling, you know, thing to me, right? You know, and and I guess going back to the real point that you're making here of sort of the you know infinite gap between the ideals that we see of truth, goodness and beauty, and then our our desire to, you know, reach that. And and there's so much growth in that process and put a lot of that is I think what it means to be human. and and and and to see too the just the really the the kind of the the heights of god's dream for humanity of what he wants humanity to be and all its moral goodness and and so there's like like you said that our our path towards holiness is not about perfectionism but very much in in the desire there of attaining that we can really open ourselves up to so much grace. Which is really I think at the end of the day what we're you know trying to accomplish here at Chesterton Academy of St. Louis. Right. And so what a gift you're giving the students by letting them kind of experience that journey right through the yeah right through the you know studio art. It's a joy. Yeah. And and to the point of perfection too. I mean Christ calls us to be perfect and to perfect love. But we can only attain that through him. So I think that's that's the the beauty of that ultimate lesson is what whatever the students are struggling with or learning, whether it be that that patience of learning to sit in front of their subject or or even the the charity in looking at another's work or looking at the works of of art history. I think studying art history is a a great lesson in charity, frankly. and in in learning more about not just an individual human person, but peoples throughout history who have pursued truth in so many different ways. and yeah, I mean I could get into that too. We can save art history for another time. But but yeah, it really is beautiful as a teacher to see these students growing and learning, whatever the careers may be and however they may create in the future, whether it's yeah, through a fine art or they're creative in the way that they're hospitable and welcoming people into their home. Sure. whatever their vocations may be, right? we're all called to love creatively. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well we definitely will have to have you back on for a whole episode on art history. of course also bringing you back on for literature. but thank you for coming on today and and sharing all this stuff with us. Yeah, thanks so much. It's a joy. Absolutely. well see you all next time right here on Castle Cast. And don't forget, rhinos do exist. They do indeed.