Last week ArtWay posted a portrait series by Catherine Prescott, an oil painter who concentrates primarily on realistic renderings of human faces. Prescott, who had drawn portraits all her life, intended to pursue realism but found herself born in the wrong time period:
By the mid twentieth century in America likeness was largely held in low regard, as leading artists sought a mythic presence through abstraction. When Catherine Prescott was studying art in the 1960’s, the category “art” had no real place for the kind of realism she was drawn too. Her skills as a draughtsman were readily acknowledged, but she was stymied by a lack of artistic options. A summer in graduate school, where realism was acceptable as long as it dispassionately transcribed photographs, convinced her she had no future in the American art world.
Resistance to realism isn’t new; even though the modern era lays claim to abstraction as expression, the fear of imagistic realism is as old as religion itself. As is widely known, the worship of and/or through Christian images sparked controversies (wars) throughout the history of the Church; but even in those circles in which images were generally considered good there existed political tensions, if, for example, the image in question wasn’t up to snuff stylistically: Gregory Melissenos, of the fifteenth century, said: “Although I do recognize Christ, I cannot even pray to him because I do not recognize the manner in which he is being depicted” (Belting 1).
ArtWay’s write-up references Hans Belting’s book, Likeness and Presence, in which Belting argues that before the “era of art” there existed an “era of images,” that portraiture was painted for reasons other than artistry, namely the power of the human image itself.
Images have always existed for veneration, or at least to convey some sort of spiritual depth: “In our case [historically] they represent persons who cannot be seen because they are absent (the emperor) or invisible (God). If they were visible, veneration of their image would not be necessary.” Belting explains that the emperor, though absent, could always be present through pictures—as the regime in North Korea understands all too well. Images somehow have the power to make the absent present. “But for Christianity the depiction of the invisible God (though he may have become visible in Jesus) posed a problem that escalated in the conflict over iconoclasm and taxed the minds of theologians for a century” (Belting 41). Longer than a century, I’d say, as there is still debate about the value of images in the Church today.
ArtWay continues:
I don’t believe that Hans Belting meant to oppose likeness and presence, as though they could never co-inhabit an image. Nor would I ever argue that Catherine Prescott stands alone in her ability to illuminate character. Yet in an era when the belief that humans are unique is contested, these paintings — direct yet complex, immediate but also fixed, and humble while speaking with quiet eloquence — have a palpable sense of human worth. The British philosopher Roger Scruton has described our age as marked by “defacement,” as various forces and ideologies eradicate our natural sense of the human soul. Prescott’s faces suggest that hidden presence and make human transcendence sensible.
This suggestion of a “hidden presence” in Prescott’s portraiture feels to be an indirect gesture towards the innate image of God in the human body. Second-century church father, Irenaeus suggested that even though we often think that the Son of God was made in the image of man, the truth is that man was made in the image and likeness of the begotten, not made Son of God. The Son of God (alias: the Word) shows us who we were modeled after and restores us to our intended likeness.
For in times long past, it was said that man was created after the image of God, but it was not [actually] shown; for the Word was as yet invisible, after whose image man was created. Wherefore also he did easily lose the similitude. When, however, the Word of God became flesh, He confirmed both these: for He both showed forth the image truly, since He became Himself what was His image; and He re-established the similitude after a sure manner, by assimilating man to the invisible Father through means of the visible Word.
Not for any religious reasons, Prescott felt the pressure to refrain from the “image,” and rather to explore more contemporary means of expression through abstraction, which in some ways reflects the battle that Irenaeus fought, combatting the gnostic tendency to deny the intrinsically imagistic human body. But after spending some time at L’Abri, an International Christian Fellowship center in Switzerland, Prescott discovered “that God was not a respecter of such categorical snobbery. She began to paint what she saw and loved.”
For Prescott, painting is a way of “knowing.” She paints the surface in order to reflect what lies beneath it; painting is an act of truth-telling and communion. What was once considered lowbrow became Prescott’s greatest expression of truth.
Featured imaged: Catherine Prescott: Without Guile, 2014, oil on panel, 22,5 x 15 cm.
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Thanks for the introduction to ArtWay and to Catherine Prescott’s work. I’m not surprised Prescott went back to realism after studying at L’Abri, given that Schaeffer and his friend Hans Rookmaaker, who lectured there, were so troubled by modernism. (Modernism is the period I love best, although I understand their concerns.) She would have found encouragement there. I notice that Artway’s Editor-in-Chief is Rookmaaker’s daughter.
When studied at Massachusetts L’Abri, there was a beautiful book for sale there on the work of a 20th century Dutch still life painter. I wish I could remember the guy’s name, and I wish I’d bought the book.