RED DANCER

Red Dancer

created 5/4/2008
Bridge Orlando Fellowship
during worship

CLEANSING FIRE

created 4/27/2008
Bridge Orlando Fellowship
during worship.
watercolor 6 x 7 inches

An observation from fellow blogger Seth Ward on October 9, "Life Outside the Bubble". See his link on the right. Five Cent Stand

quote:
Any Christian art that stays, will always be good art. It will never stay just because it’s Christian. end quote.

Prophetic Instruction from the Bible concerning art:

Article by Rick Joyner on Art

So many christian "name" ministries are now telling us that the arts have a tremendous prophetic call that is going to take the world by storm. Art that will have a huge lifechanging impact on culture. I want that to be true. I passionately want that to be true. So where are they - these culture changing artists? I'm not being facetious or sarcastic. I think there must be some somewhere but where?

The world considers Andy Warhol a christian (prophetic) artist. See my post below. So will Andy Warhol be representing the prophetic, lifechanging, culture impacting christian arts model? He is already a cultural icon credited by art historians with impacting culture all over the world.

There are ministries addressing the artist gap to a small degree. I've been to Morningstar Ministries on many many occasions and I've seen their artists paint during worship - they work on canvases and have been given a legitimate space to work in during the service. I've seen other ministries that also have "christian prophetic art" during services which amounts to a small gaggle of children and teens scribbling away on the floor or off in a corner. Morningstar has a gallery now too and an art instructor. Everybody else has enthusiastic children using markers and colored pencils. Is this the best we can do to impact a culture?

I think Morningstar's vision is too small though a valiant attempt to address the cultural/church gap. They will not open the doors to real proven artists. It seems they restrict their support to those young people who will go through their school of ministry or their Comenius School. The chances of them raising up an artist whose talent is so prodigious that the art world tales notice is very small. Maybe their belief is that they will impact the world without the art systems being involved. They better start praying for some christian museums and galleries if so.

In case they haven't noticed, artists who go the distance are noted even as students for their work. They win awards in prestigious competitions as students. If that's not happening then the artist has almost no chance of recognition. How is the anemic, sluggish church going to raise up legitimate, viable, passionate, charismatic artists?

Trying to invade culture with christian art is like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon.

Art historians are calling Andy Warhol a signifcant christian religious artist for the 20th century. He has a body of work that incorporates religious imagery that is the largest known in America. If christian artists are going to take cultural ground then they have to widen their scope from scribbling in the sanctuary. They are going to have to take ground in their local museums, art centers and in art schools. They are going to have to produce work that is impressive. Work that changes men's ideas of life.

I have an acquaintance, Carole Elder Napoli, who has shown her christian art in outdoor shows for many years. She is a fantastic painter and she wins top awards for her skills as a painter. I once asked her if her church supported her as an artist. She thought about it and then said that the pastor has never seen her work but that they have prayed for their business, selling art at outdoor shows, to be successful. I asked her if anyone had ever told her she was part of the worship team. She said no. She goes on winning awards with her work. She goes on worshipping the Lord without any support or recognition from her church family. All her recognition comes from nonchristian secular people who believe in her gifts and abilities.
Unless the church begins to embrace those artists who are winning awards and being recognized for their amazing work by the world they will not see the prophetic unfolding of the visions. If they really want to impact the world with christian art then join the local museums and art centers. Meet the artists. Invite them to your church to create during worship. Who knows, maybe Andy would have spent more of his life as an influence for christianity if someone had tried to love him from the born again churches instead of judging him for his lifestyle.

Cause the last laugh is on the church if Andy is the most significant christian voice...............

Andy Warhol - son of God?

About a week ago I got a shock. I woke up to the Lord speaking to me about Andy Warhol. He said," Have you looked at
Andy Warhol, my son?"

Well no, I hadn't. I personally don't care for his artwork. It always seemed so plastic and sarcastic to me. And his lifestyle was like textbook sin. Or so I thought. But there are always layers in anyone's life. Things not brought to public view.

So I went online and typed in: Andy Warhol christian. And there were references to his christianity. What!!!!!????? Yes there were more than a few references to his christianity. He was devoted to it. all of his life. Even while he was a famous celebrity living in the factory and hobnobbing with people steeped in drugs, sex, booze and rock and roll. While he was making those weird Velvet Underground films.

Warhol died in 1987 of complications from a routine gallbladder surgery. In 1986 he had a huge show at the Guggenheim museum of images of "The Last Supper." He exhibited about 60 variations of the last supper by Leonardo DaVinci. The images were typical of Warhol's serigraphed and silkscreened factory generated style. His last suppers incorporated logos from Wise potato chips and Dove soap. In an interview he was asked about the imagery. He deflected all questions about his faith. He would only discuss the museum show as commercial art. He did say he thought the images would be considered "transgressive."

Read this article from 2003 though. It sheds light on the hidden heart of Andy Warhola, son of a hungarian coal miner father and devout catholic mother.

TRANSUBSTANTIATING THE CULTURE: ANDY WARHOL'S SECRET

More than one seemingly religious person's secret sins have been exposed at their death; Warhol's secrets were that he went to church and served at a soup kitchen.

By James Romaine

The works of our century are the mirrors of our predicament produced by some of the most sensitive minds of our time. In the light of our predicament we must look at the works of contemporary art, and conversely, in the light of contemporary art we must look at our predicament.
- Paul Tillich in "Each Period Has Its Peculiar Image of Man"

In his final self-portrait, Andy Warhol's gaze is both perplexed and perplexing. Like the artist, everything about this work is suspended in a haze of mystery. Warhol probably had no expectation that this would be his final self-reflection, yet it's hard to imagine him treating himself differently even if he had known.

Warhol treated everything the same. Cool detachment was as much a trademark for Warhol as Campbell's was for soup. Warhol's coolness has often been read as cynicism, and it did involve a degree of distance, but only out of a perceived need for self-protection. The seeming contradiction of Warhol's Self-portrait, and indeed all of his work, is that he expresses himself without revealing anything about himself; he is at once alienated and self-alienating.

There is scarcely a person in America whose life has not been affected—whether or not they know it—by the way Warhol transformed our understanding of our culture. Certainly there is no serious artist working today who has not been influenced by Warhol's conversion of the banal world of consumer culture into the sacred realm of art. We see ourselves and our world reflected in the mirror of Warhol's art, but the image has still not come into full focus. By the time he painted this last Self-portrait, Warhol had become the most famous artist in the world; but more than a decade later his art remains enigmatic.

Warhol began his career in New York as an illustrator of women's footwear, under his real name, Andrew Warhola. The darling of magazine editors, Warhol acquired the nickname "Candy Andy." Perceptions of Warhol today have not changed much since then.

We may think of sex and drugs (two things Warhol mostly abstained from) or fame and fortune (two things Warhol abounded in) as Andy's candies. Yet Warhol's persona, with his fast parties and white wigs, differed greatly from the private identity he both concealed and revealed in his art. Sly as a fox, Warhol played dumb with comments meant to set us off track, such as, "If you want to know about Andy Warhol, just look at the surfaces of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it."

There is, in fact, a great deal concealed beneath the surface of Warhol's art. The surfaces of his works appear to be mechanical -- an appearance Warhol emphasized by calling his studio "the Factory" and claiming to make art that could be done by anyone. The smooth veneer of silk-screening not only created a mechanical appearance, but his practice of reproducing already-reproduced images published in magazines and newspapers allowed Warhol to increase the degrees of separation between himself and his subjects.

Nevertheless, Warhol continued to use imagery that had personal significance to him. Many of these images were spiritual ones, influenced by the Catholicism that permeates Warhol's art. Despite reports that he went to church almost daily, some doubt the credibility of Warhol's faith and even consider his work anti-Christian. Warhol's life was, admittedly, filled with contradictions. He was always trying to protect his true intentions, especially regarding his Catholicism. Many of Warhol's friends did not know of his religious life until after his death.

More than one seemingly religious person's secret sins have been exposed at their death; Warhol's secrets were that he went to church and served at a soup kitchen. In his eulogy for Warhol, John Richardson outed him from the confessional when he said:

I'd like to recall a side of his character that he hid from all but his closest friends; his spiritual side. Those of you who knew him in circumstances that were the antithesis of spiritual may be surprised that such a side existed. But exist it did, and it's key to the artist's psyche. Although Andy was perceived—with some justice—as a passive observer who never imposed his beliefs on other people, he could on occasion be an effective proselytizer. To my certain knowledge, he was responsible for at least one conversion. He took considerable pride in financing his nephew's studies for the priesthood. And he regularly helped out at a shelter serving meals to the homeless and hungry. Trust Andy to have kept these activities in the dark. The knowledge of this secret piety inevitably changes our perception of an artist who fooled the world into believing that his only obsessions were money, fame, glamour, and that he could be cool to the point of callousness. Never take Andy at face value....

With family roots in Byzantine-Slavic Catholicism, Warhol kept a homemade altar with a crucifix and well-worn prayer book beside his bed. He frequently visited Saint Vincent Ferrer's Church on Lexington Avenue. The pastor of Saint Vincent's confirmed that Warhol visited the church almost daily. He would come in mid-afternoon, light a candle, and pray for fifteen minutes, sometimes making use of the intimacy of the private chapels. The pastor described Warhol as intensely shy and private, especially regarding his religion. Warhol's brother has characterized him as "really religious, but he didn't want people to know about that because [it was] private." For someone so bent on self-protection, Warhol's efforts to keep his religious life a secret may indicate just how important his faith was to him.

Do these religious revelations offer insight into Warhol's art? They do; perhaps more than has yet been appreciated by either the art or Christian worlds. Warhol's consumer imagery at first seems obsessed with the external world of contemporary culture to the exclusion of the internal life of faith. But there is also a persistent longing for something more, a hunger that is evident in the last Self-portrait and, most famously, in those cans of Campbell's soup.

In order to see this religious dimension, we must regain our sense of the sacramental—the use of material things as vehicles for encountering the divine and enabling eternity to break into time and space. Warhol's pop art, often criticized as mere regurgitation of advertising, actually displaces images from their original context in the commercial world, transporting them to the realm of art, collapsing the distance between the two, and creating new associations and meanings.

The Campbell's soup can, one of Warhol's most famous motifs, thus becomes another self-portrait of the artist. The can, like Warhol's public persona, is cool, metallic, machine-made, impenetrable, a mirror of its surroundings. These qualities, superficial though they are, nevertheless seduce the eye.

But what completes this self-portrait are the can's contents; they should be the most significant part, but actually have very little in common with the can's exterior. Soup, a warm source of nourishment, is a sensitive element that will not survive long outside of a protective container. Hidden beneath supermarket imagery, Warhol's faith is sealed for protection.

While carefully keeping himself secure inside, Warhol succeeded in making everyone believe that the soup can should be the focus of attention. Some have become enraptured by their own reflection on its metallic surface. Others have complained that Warhol and his art are hollow. Very few have attempted to open the can and find out what's inside.

Warhol's creative gift was an ability to bring subjects into spiritual equilibrium. He treated ultra-glamorous movie stars and anonymous police arrest photos with the same combination of contempt and envy. Warhol used consumer items more than just as mirrors of his time.

What seems to have attracted him to Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell's soup cans, as in 200 Campbell's Soup Cans, was a sense of comfort, belonging, and equality.

Warhol admitted that one reason he was attracted to the imagery of Campbell's soup was that he had eaten Campbell's soup nearly every day as a boy. Soup, of course, is a nearly global icon of home, but Campbell's is a distinctly American icon.

For Warhol, growing up in a poor immigrant family struggling to find its place in a new homeland, Campbell's soup probably offered a reassuring sense of belonging.

Warhol loved mass consumer imagery because of its equilibrating powers. "Coke is Coke," he once said, "and no matter how rich you are you can't get a better one than the one the homeless woman on the corner is drinking."

Living in New York City, Warhol undoubtedly experienced the way cities have of exaggerating the distance between wealth and poverty even while juxtaposing them. Perhaps reinforced by the piety and poverty of his childhood, Warhol may have looked forward to the equality of heaven, with the mechanical nature of his work forecasting an eternal destiny.

Warhol's strategy of representing heaven by repeated images has been linked to Byzantine icons, which limit individual creativity in favor of a standardized form. Warhol's work has a certain hypnotic rhythm, not unlike the rosary. This repetition also suggests that the image could extend infinitely, giving us a glimpse into eternity through everyday reality.

200 Campbell's Soup Cans celebrates more than social egalitarianism. But in a critique of America's emergent consumer religion, 200 Campbell's Soup Cans also joins a long artistic tradition of vanitas images, in which lavish displays of wealth are offset by reminders of life's fleeting nature and the inevitable final judgment.

Warhol's references to religious themes increased throughout his career, culminating in his most overtly religious and plainly sacramental works, patterned after Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper. Warhol made more than one hundred works based on Leonardo's image, but until recently these works received very little attention.

Many things may have drawn Warhol to the Last Supper, including the fact that Warhol's own art often dealt with food as a symbol of heaven.

Warhol's Catholicism asserted the miracle of transubstantiation, in which food—bread and wine—becomes a heavenly substance. Warhol may have accessed Leonardo's imagery to set himself within a certain tradition of religious art.

Leonardo brought out the classical and realist artist in Warhol, even though the meaning of "classical" and "real" had radically changed in the five hundred years separating them. Leonardo's breakthroughs in artistic perspective had radically brought the Christ figure into the viewer's world; Warhol brought Leonardo down off the wall, and in so doing brought Christ and the sacrament of the Eucharist into his world.

Indeed, Warhol's interest in Campbell's soup and the Last Supper are linked. Remember, Warhol said that his attraction to Campbell's soup was that he had eaten it every day as a child. Warhol's brother recalled that a reproduction of the Last Supper hung on their family's kitchen wall. As Warhol sat eating his soup, he ate under the watchful presence of Christ.

Another reason Warhol turned to the Last Supper was that it reminded him of his mother, Julia Warhola. Mrs. Warhola had a prayer card with an image of the Last Supper that she kept in her Bible. After her death, Warhol kept this card as a reminder of his mother's faith. He was very close to his mother, who came to live with him in New York. Warhol's brother noted that Andy and their mother had a small altar in their New York apartment and that "Andy wouldn't leave unless [she] would come into the kitchen and kneel down with him and pray."

Mrs. Warhola's prayer card bears a remarkable resemblance to Warhol's art, for it has reworked its subject significantly: the figure of Matthew is shifted, and Christ is given a golden halo -- changes probably made to invigorate the viewer's devotion. Is it too unlikely to suppose that Warhol's art had the same intent?

Works like Last Supper (Dove) bring together brand name products from the supermarket and the sacramental imagery of the church, asserting that modern life and faith are neither separate nor contradictory. Each makes the other more real and meaningful. The dove, descending from above Christ like a halo, represents the Holy Spirit; the General Electric sign (with its own halo) is a symbol of the Son. It doesn't take much imagination to connect GE with the light of the world, but there is an even subtler meaning to this sign: GE's slogan, "We bring good things to life," points to the resurrection and eternal life.

Warhol died of unexpected complications from routine surgery on February 22, 1987, making the Last Supper images a fitting, if unintentional, conclusion for Warhol's art. They show Christ in a creative and transformative action. Artistic transubstantiation allowed Warhol to identify with Christ, to see Christ as an artist and to see art as a sanctifying activity.

Indeed, Warhol's approach to art and Christianity exemplify what H. Richard Niebuhr, in Christ and Culture, famously called "Christ the Transformer of Culture." Just as Christ transformed common bread and wine into the holy sacraments, Warhol transformed everyday imagery into art.

The popularity of Warhol's work is a reflection of our own hunger for such transformation. Like all art, it raises questions: Are we hungry enough to accept anything offered to us? How are we to be discerning? Was Warhol discerning? If we are to "test each spirit," should we filter out Warhol? Was Warhol so hungry for something divine that he too easily accepted substitutes for the one thing that would satisfy him?

If we consider the disreputable company Warhol kept, our answer to the last question might be yes. Maybe Campbell's soup was no more than a commercial substitute for a spiritual hunger. But the spiritual sincerity and artistic complexities of his last works suggest that Andy Warhol's faith, and art, cannot be so easily dismissed.


November 12, 2003


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

James Romaine is an art historian who lives in New York, and the author of "Objects of Grace: Conversations on Creativity and Faith."
This article originally appeared in Regeneration Quarterly. Copyright 2003, James Romaine. All rights reserved.

www.godspy.com

So the huge celebrity of Andy Warhol begins to take on a new perspective. Andy Warhol who had a praying mother. Andy Warhol who prayed from his prayerbook perhaps 5 times a day and went to mass daily. Presumably he also took communion and confessed his sins. he ministered to the poor weekly. He served them. Andy Warhol who created work based on the memories of love and comfort derived from Campbell's soup as a child and a picture of the Last Supper venerated by his mother. A God conscious Andy Warhol..... not perfect, not sinless, but very aware of his creator.

Apparently he kept himself clean from booze and drug taking. I don't know what he was engaged in sexually but there are hints even in the secular books which deal with the outrageous lifestyle going on at the Factory, that Andy was not sexually active. He seemed to be a leader and father figure to a great many artists and strange people but not a participator. As incredible as it seems (and it seems very incredible) Andy Warhols religious nature was who he really was and the public version was not. It was largely an act. Part of his role as "ARTIST" played out for the public.

I found this article by a religious art curator, researcher and professor

Dillenberger, who is 85 years old, admits that she is an old-fashioned, traditional art history professor. In fact, she specializes in Christian art with an emphasis on the Renaissance period and Rembrandt. But since Dillenberger first spotted a large, unfinished painting of Jesus and two apostles in an old Warhol studio photograph, she says she has become "a missionary in regard to Warhol."

Dillenberger immediately realized the wall-sized, unfinished painting of Jesus, John and James was based on Leonardo da Vinci's famous Last Supper painting. "I knew at once that Warhol must have done other such paintings. What were they like, and where were they? Warhol, the pop artist, the creator of religious art? How extraordinary!" says Dillenberger. Over a number of years, Dillenberger combed through collections in galleries and private homes in the US and Europe, looked up records at the Warhol Foundation and consulted with the late artist's family. Eventually, she found over 100 of the Last Supper paintings. In the process, Dillenberger also discovered that Warhol regularly helped to feed the homeless at his church and even had a private audience with Pope John Paul II in 1980.

The Last Supper paintings are of various sizes and media. All are based on Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper and feature the images of Christ and the two apostles on saturated backgrounds of pink, red, yellow and other colors. Some measure nearly 30 feet wide and are silk-screened while others are hand-painted. During the last decade of his life, Warhol created hundreds of paintings with very clear religious themes, including works depicting crosses, brightly colored Easter eggs and others with large praying hands. But according to Dr. Dillenberger, the Last Supper series was Andy Warhol's last will and testament. She adds, "Warhol's contribution was so important. He was incredibly prolific. The number of works he created is beyond imagination. He created the biggest series of religious works of any American artist."

Ten Years Later - What Would Andy Say?

Illustration: John Warhola with Andy's portrait
of their mother, Julia, at the museum.


By R. Jay Gangewere


John Warhola, Andy's older brother, suspects that Andy would say, if granted heavenly reprieve to return to earth and see The Andy Warhol Museum: "Gee... that's great. Wow." It's hard to argue with that. Andy always protected himself in public with cleverly evasive expressions when he was asked to say something memorable. But critics of American art and culture have learned in the past decade to search beneath the surface of his art to see a whole lot more going on than Andy ever confessed to. Looking after the meaning of Warhol's artistic legacy is becoming a minor industry in cultural interpretation.

Andy Warhol (1928-1987) died 10 years ago, and many people still have a hard time thinking of him as absent. I spoke to Vincent Fremont, one of Warhol's closest New York friends, and to Andy's older brothers, Paul and John, about what Andy would say about the last 10 years in which his art has remained in the public eye. They were full of insight.

Fremont worked with Warhol from the late 60s on, helped found the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., and is now the exclusive sales agent for that foundation. Fremont says that a few art historians "tried to bury Warhol" 30 years ago. "But he was first and foremost an artist, and the import of what he did only comes to light more" as time passes. "His 60s work stays fresh, and he would have been pleased at the sale of his collection." Even though Andy announced, "' I can't draw,' his sketchbook drawings are fantastic," says Fremont. "Artists in their 30s and 40s today are amazed by them."

Fremont still thinks of him "as one of the most intuitive people I ever met. He could put his finger on things-could get to you, and to the press-with ideas, like the idea of celebrity. He was at the right place, at the right time."

But a decade is usually time enough for any reputation in contemporary art to collapse-and Warhol, so preoccupied with the images of a transient popular culture-seemed a prime candidate for disappearance. But it has not happened. In Pittsburgh The Andy Warhol Museum has become a stabilizing influence on his reputation, and a long-term guarantee of his artistic survival. Fremont notes that Europeans often visit the Pittsburgh museum first on an American tour, which they find easy to do because in Europe going from city to city to see art is the normal practice. The museum is also the source of new perspectives on Warhol's art, such as the exhibition now being organized by Assistant Curator Marjory King, demonstrating Warhol's influence on fashion from the 60s through the 80s. The exhibition opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York this fall, and will subsequently be shown at the Andy Warhol Museum.

Andy would also have said "Wow" to the first issue of a new journal of art history entitled Religion and the Arts published by Boston College. The Fall 1996 issue (Volume 1, Number 1) has a special feature on Andy Warhol containing four views of the religious content of his art. The last essay, by Jane Daggett Dillenberger of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, is entitled "Warhol and Leonardo in Milan," and makes the point that Leonardo da Vinci's famous Last Supper, made banal by generations of copyists in printed replicas until it had become a visual cliché, was given new life and meaning by Warhol in his last exhibition. Having made over 100 works of art based on this renaissance masterpiece, including many pieces of immense size ranging between 25 and 37 feet in length, Warhol exhibited 20 of them in Milan one month before his death. Concludes Dillenberger:

"The Last Supper paintings formed one of Warhol's largest and most profound series. It is also one of the largest groups of paintings with religious subject matter by an American artist of our century, indeed, of our 300-year history. Only John Singer Sargent's murals for the Boston Public Library on the grandiose theme, The Development of Religious Thought from Paganism to Christianity, approach Warhol's series in size. Warhol's recreations infuse Leonardo's familiar image, which had become a cliché, with new spiritual resonance. In these last works Warhol's technical freedom and mastery and his deepened spiritual awareness resulted in paintings which evoke what the Romantics and the Abstract Expressionists called the Sublime. His final series on the Last Supper is arguably the greatest cycle of paintings by this prolific, enigmatic and complex artist."

This late apotheosis of Warhol as a painter of profound religious murals is inevitably a surprise to casual viewers of Pop Art. They might be equally surprised to see arguments by other scholars that for 25 years Warhol had been working, theologically speaking, in the same Catholic vein. In the midst of his Pop images of food, fashion and sexually liberated "Super Stars," Warhol's intimations of sin and judgment day were never far away. His Electric Chair images and Disaster paintings are direct reminders of the closeness of heaven and hell. His Tunafish Disaster (1963) depicts several food cans with the caption "Seized Shipment. Did a leak kill." Underneath the cans are repeated photos of two women who died suddenly of food poisoning after a neighborly luncheon of tuna salad. "Warhol reminds us of the capriciousness of death; the ordinariness of the women's photographs makes the painting all the more alarming," says Zan Schuweiler Daab of Converse College, in "For Heaven's Sake: Warhol's Art as Religious Allegory."

The debate about the Catholicism in Warhol's art has actually been going on for some time. For example, biographer David Bourdon noted that the images of Jackie after John Kennedy's assassination "often make viewers feel as if they were walking along a modern-day Via Dolorosa as they relive the First Lady's agony in a new, secular version of the Stations of the Cross." (Warhol, published by Harry N. Abrams, 1989.)
Some Family Memories

Whatever the art historians now see as the moral lessons in Warhol's art, it is no surprise to his older brothers, Paul and John, that Andy was deeply religious. Growing up Byzantine Catholic in Pittsburgh, the boys were strictly raised by parents who spoke Rusyn-Slavonic, observed all the saints' days and constantly sent care packages to poor relatives in Czechoslovakia. They were taught to pray every day. For 20 years Andy made the weekly pilgrimage down the hill of South Oakland to Saline Street, in the Rusyn Valley, where St. John Chrysostom Church was located. Andy visited church regularly, but unobtrusively, in New York. Church attendance was not something, says John, that Andy would talk much about. It hardly fit his role as a high-style leader of Pop Art. He didn't even tell John that for the last four years of his life he went to a mission for the poor on Easter and Christmas to give food to the homeless.

There is a caring, accessible quality to Paul and John Warhola that has to reflect their family tradition. Soft-spoken, easy to talk to-these are traits the shy young brother obviously shared. John and Paul likewise continue their mother's tradition of sending care packages to their relatives in Czechoslavakia, seven decades after Julia first immigrated to the United States following the ravaging of Europe by World War I. On the day I interviewed Paul for a few hours at his farm near Uniontown, his wife, Ann, was taping up a large box on the truck to send to Czechoslavakia. She had gotten a good buy on quilts at Kaufmann's department store, and one by one the large boxes were going to Europe. Six decades earlier, when Paul was a boy, he used to give the pennies he made selling newspapers, or peanuts at Forbes Field, to his mother, Julia, who sent every available cent to her sisters in the Carpathian Mountains. Their father, Andrej, struggling for money, sometimes complained, but always gave in. During the 20 years Julia lived with Andy in New York, she continued to collect inexpensive clothing to send to her relatives.

Paul recalls how, when he once visited his mother's small mountain village in Mikova, the daily hardness of life in the mountains struck him. Old women, he said, gnarled and muscular from a lifetime of work, walked the solitary roads. In the fields were crude wooden crucifixes, erected by the shepherds tending sheep and cattle, so they could pray. Religion was fundamental to everyone's daily life and work.

John says that Andy had good intuitions, and once advised him to buy real estate. But as a graduate of Connelley Trade School, and for years a Sears employee, he never had the extra money to invest. Still he and his wife dressed their three sons well, and raised them to care about others. He recalls that a lady for whom his son delivered papers once came to him, when she learned who he was, to compliment him on his son's behavior. The boy had run across the street to help her home with heavy packages-it was not something that you expect from young people today. Looking after people is a kind of Warhola instinct. In his own way, Andy Warhol practiced a version of that. Homeless people would beg him for a meal, but no fool, he did not give them money, but rather told them to get a meal at a restaurant where he kept an account.

Where did Andy Warhol get his sense of intuition? How did he anticipate what would happen next in the trendy fashion scene? Both Paul and John attribute this intuitiveness to their mother. They credit her with an instinct about what would happen next-a type of "good advice" that even their neighbors respected.

Paul recalls that when Andy was shot in 1968, and was close to death-the doctors said he had a 50 percent chance of living, or dying-Julia knelt and prayed by his hospital bed. Then she told Paul not to worry-Andy would be "all right." When she herself went into the hospital a few years after her husband's death, for an operation for colon cancer, she knew she might not survive. But she assured her worried sons that she would be all right. The doctors told the boys after the operation that Julia could probably live no more than five years, but she lived nearly 30 years more.

John remembers with pride how during World War II all the young boys on the block leaving for the service stopped at the house to say goodbye to Mrs. Warhola, and that she gave them advice. She told them to "take care of themselves," and not to be reckless, not to volunteer for dangerous duty. Her realism came from the bitterness of surviving World War I in a mountain village, when the Germans burned all the houses and shot the men, and she and her sisters hid in the woods. Those memories of the war years were with her in America, and part of the lore she impressed upon her children. She told them about her own mother, who died when she heard her son, Julia's brother, was reported killed by the Germans. Then, it turned out, he was alive. He had taken off his own shredded uniform after a battle, and put on the nearly new uniform of a dead soldier, but he left his identification on the dead man. When he returned to the village later, the people were amazed-they knew he had died. Such were the family stories the Warhola boys learned from their mother.

John has a tape recording of his mother singing sad songs in her native Slavonic tongue. She seems to be accompanied by other voices-but when he asked her about that, she explained that she had taped herself, and then sang again to her own accompaniment. She did this, she said, in the expectation that someday her sons would want to hear her voice. John also remembers how Julia's way of speaking English was made to appear ridiculous in a national magazine. During an interview the reporter asked Julia questions, and quoted her imperfect grammar to make her seem foolish. Andy had asked beforehand that Julia's conversation be edited for publication-but the magazine decided to emphasize her broken English. Andy was embarrassed and upset by this manipulation of his mother. Perhaps it was one of those seminal incidents in which Andy Warhol himself learned never to be an easy mark. Instead, he became the manipulator. His mastery of calculated, innocent-sounding phrases became the quotable sign of his sophistication.

What would Andy Warhol now "say" about the decade between 1987 and 1997? The evidence of the 30 years before that suggests that whatever Andy would now say, it would be characteristically simple and understated.

Both Paul and John say Andy was always shy as a child-someone they had to look after. They agree that Andy's sophisticated reluctance to talk in public was probably still a genuine fear, however playfully disguised. When he "interviewed" the actress Farrah Fawcett for Interview magazine, John recalls that she said beforehand she was afraid of the interview-but in fact, John was convinced that Andy was more afraid than she was. They also believed, with their father, who had saved money to send Andy to college for two years before his own death in 1942, that their father's advice was correct. He predicted that somehow Andy was going to be, in the Slavonic phrase, an educated man, important, a scholar who had gone to college.

Religion, intuition, memories of war and life and death-all were part of Andy Warhol's childhood-but he never discussed them publicly. Still, theologians are now uncovering them in his art.
What would Andy Warhol be doing now?

Had he not died so unexpectedly after an essentially routine gall bladder operation in 1987, Andy Warhol would now be 69 years old. People agree that he was very intuitive, always ahead of things, ready to perceive the next creative step as an artist. Neither Paul nor John Warhola think that he would necessarily have remained a painter. He talked about television, video, film. He had a scheme to replace himself, in interviews, with a look-alike robot, which could say things better, more satisfactorily, than he himself could say them in person. Would he have remained essentially a printmaker, a painter? That is not clear.

I asked John Warhola what, with the wisdom of old age, Andy Warhol might have been thinking about with respect to leaving some part of his wealth to benefit others. John thinks, given his own family sense of Andy's upbringing and values, that Andy would have wanted to help poor young artists, as he himself once was growing up in Pittsburgh. Clearly today the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., and the Andy Warhol Museum, have an educational mission that would have been important to Andy.

He died too unexpectedly to be fully prepared, yet his art seems to remain forever current. Vincent Fremont believes that death remained "abstract" to Andy. The art historians now see a Catholic imagination informing Warhol's sense of life and death. Andy himself, always ready to be enigmatic, once suggested that a word to carve on his own tombstone could be "Figment."

I added this image onto my other blog as well but for the prophetic blog I wanted to tell it's story.

I have an eBay store and I look at the work of other eBay painters a lot. Especially the ones who are selling for serious money. Some are. Visit my other blog - it's there under links - and I have links to lots of artists.

I am struggling financially. I look at how easily other artists are selling and - I admit - I was jealous. I'm not selling. Well not yet anyway.

So what you ask. Well I painted an orange and made it cleverly small and tried 3 times to sell it. I had some watchers but no bids. Nada. Zilch. I got burned at God. I prayed for favor. Still not selling. Heck nobody even looked.

Then on Thursday, February 2, We went to some Intercession Workshops at Kissimmee with Mike Bickle and Misty Edwards. The worship was great. We went to the afternoon session and left to eat. On the way back into the evening session I hear the Lord prompting me to paint a picture of an orange during worship. So I did. and it was this picture and it was better than the first orange I did. I instantly loved it and wanted it for myself. Badly. Badly. Only I clearly felt the Lord saying it was His. I wanted what was His. I did not want to give it to a stranger. yet that is exactly what He wanted me to do. Uh oh, not good. I thought maybe I was supposed to give it to Misty only she left before the end of the session.

I went home and began to scheme. I would scan it and make a photo copy and give that to somebody. Yeah okay. I stayed up until 3 in the morning trying to get either scanner to work. Finally I gave up after making a bad photo copy. The next morning I used my camera and photographed it several times. then I put it in a clear bag and sealed it in an envelope. I put Misty's name on the envelope and we left for The Call Orlando meeting. I figured I would have to find a way to give it to her. Somehow. Well there was no way. The stadium security would never have let me through. Did I care? No way. I was happy. Hey I got to keep what I wanted. I could honestly say I tried but it was a no go. So I had done what the Lord wanted right. At least I tried. secure in the knowledge that I was free to keep my little painting I went home that night, left it in my purse and we went to church on Sunday. Afterwards we go out to lunch. We hooked up with some friends. They told us another friend, Conrad, was coming to meet us at the restaurant. Then the wife tells me that Conrad was probably at the Mount Dora Art Festival. He loves art. My heart sank. Suddenly I knew who I was really supposed to give the painting to. Conrad.

I did give it to him. I had to explain why it had somebody else's name on it of course. I'd written a little note to Misty on the back - but Conrad was really happy. He had always wanted to buy a painting but the artist's charge so much he couldn't afford to buy one. He sometimes bought prints but he didn't have any original paintings. He was really blessed by my painting. The funny thing is I was able to let it go. I knew Conrad would take care of it well. He plans on taking it to a framer. I have been giving away paintings that I didn't care about but this was the first time I gave away one I wanted. It cost me something to give it up. I got broken. In my breaking there was peace.

I know some people give up on their creativity because they feel it interferes with their devotion to the Lord. I wonder though if it isn't better to lay it down as an offering. Meaning that the gift of creativity is His to control and not yours or mine. I'm hoping that during this time I will be able to stay open to brokenness. Painting from the throne room perspective.

Sacra Biblia, Dali and Madonnas

John 8:3 Sacra Biblia Illustration . I happened to see some of Dali's lithographs at the Daytona Museum of Arts and Science a couple of days ago. That's how I found out about his illustations. There was a madonna and child lithograph there that he created by shooting an ancient pistol loaded with ink pellets at the lithograph stone and then looking until the images formed as he looked. I was inspired by the images. I don't own any ancient pistols but the automatic mark making was interesting. Dali called this method "bulletism." Pretty funny guy.








Luke 1:31 Illustration From the Sacra Biblia by Dali.

















This is a Madonna With a Mystical Rose by Dali 1963

Maybe it's more a Catholic symbol but it does demonstrate that Dali considered christianity.

He was commissioned by a friend in the early 1960's to illustrate a bible.

The friend, a catholic, was concerned that Dali wasn't relating to God as he should and the friend figured Dali would come back to faith if he looked into the bible.

Anyway I've been thinking that Dali's illustrations just don't look like the rest of his images and I looked at lots of them online. This Madonna is typical of the style Dali usually employed but for the bible illustrations he was really loose, automatic mark making and not terribly intellectual. I think he really tried to feel the scriptures inside. The bible was printed in 5 editions with 105 plates in Italy. It's viewed mostly as a limited edition artwork and is being sold piece by piece to the highest bidders. I think there were about 1500 produced in 1967 and by now most of the plates have been removed and have sold and resold. Even on eBay. But as raw and unstructured as they are they remind me that trying to see the unseen isn't easy even if you are an artist as accomplished as Dali was. He still had to wait, look and listen for the inspiration to put paint down.

You can view about 53 of the illustrations with the scripture references that Dali did for his Sacra Biblia here Sacra Biblia

I don't know if this is actually prophetic but I have to say that the quality of the so-called prophetic artwork that I see on so many sites is of disturbingly poor quality and extremely weak creatively. Being a worship painter is becoming a sought after position and like the dance movement before it everybody wants to participate and be taken seriously.

And

I have been told countless times that the image someone was showing me was a,"third heaven vision," "given by God" and wondered if that somehow made the image legitimate in their eyes since it was often an image seriously flawed by it's execution.

I realize that many are feeling a "call" to express themselves creatively in response to things the Holy Spirit has put on their hearts but unfortunately too many of you "emerging" artists are sadly lacking in any kind of technical abilities.

There seems to be an emphasis on naive combinations of christianized symbols with primary colors, outlining and other bold use of simplified iconic forms in an attempt to convey the very real moving experiences and visions many of you are having.

As a former teacher of adults who wished to learn to paint I would offer this advice to you all:

Your skills are not as great as your intellects. Most adults (and young adults too) are as ignorant as grade schoolers about how to go about using tools to create an inner vision. yet time and time again they attempt to overrule their lack of skills by willfully and intellectually imposing an image that never quite matches their visionary concepts.

I mostly had to teach them to begin where they left off learning as a child. Learning the color wheel, learning how to really see and associate without thinking and striving. Learning to let an image grow and not try to force it to grow.

Learning how to mix only two color mixtures and avoiding mud. Learning how to map out what you see, really see, and not what you imagine with your mind.

Sounds simple to do but it is not. Growing as an artist is an exquisite journey involving heart, hand and tools that need to respond to the inner visions in a sensitive compelling way. Many of you are trying to produce images in the frenzy of passion while listening to worship music or in response to worship music and the end results look frenzied. Maybe you had a good time dashing it off during your performance but what did it say afterwards? Did it say anything at all?

The goal of an artist is to communicate the internal in an external fashion. Visually.

But vision is a kind of distillation. Focussed in and often intensely quiet.

Try going to a library and getting a book of drawings. Not a how to book but a book of an exhibit of drawings. Looking at just one artist you usually see changes from youth to adulthood in how they perceived things because the way they drew changed. Simplified. Distilled. Many artists spent their whole lives peeling back many lines to get to the essential ones. Look at Piet Mondrian for example. As a young man he drew realistic trees and flowers because that is what he knew but as he got older he put away extra lines and concentrated on simplified line forms. Grids with colored squares. He had an internal awakening that took him in a certain direction. As a matter of fact all artists respond to internal visions. There is a goal and a prize set before them. Most "famous" artists invested themselves totally in running their race as excellently as they knew how.

So where will your journey of discovery start and where will it take you? Are you even on a journey as an artist or just along for the ride listening to the music and feeling fine?

As a christian and a potential artist you have an advantage because your inner visions are heavenly. I strongly urge you to not take that kind of calling lightly but to start where you are at right now to learn how to really see and to unite your heart with craft and to do so excellently. Maybe you should read artbooks at the library or take classes. learn to learn and you will do much that is excellent too.