One day, I was pushing my then-toddler on a swing while we waited for her big sister to get out of school. One of the dads was doing the same thing, idly pushing a swing and waiting for the bell to ring. As he pushed, he looked up at the sky.
“Look at the clouds,” he said. “They’re so cool! I never really looked at clouds before.”
I didn’t know such a thing was possible, to never look at clouds.
Clouds are some of my favorite things in the whole world to look at and think about. I sometimes tell my kids that God could have come up with so many ways of making the world function, but he seems to have chosen the beautiful and interesting and dramatic way, over and over and over again. He could have designed some other mechanism to move water up and down and around the water cycle — something dull or unchanging or even invisible — but he chose to design this system that’s so elegant, beguiling, ever-changing and recklessly beautiful. Clouds! And all we have to do is look up.
The same is true for so much of the natural world: the way seeds turn from tightly closed secret chambers into brave, tender little beings standing on their own; the way rocks and soil are ceaselessly churned up through the relentless jaws of continental plates. Heck, God could have made the world colorless. Soundless. Scentless. He could have organized the food chain so that birds are not necessary, but he chose to fill the world with strange, beautiful, sometimes nutty and hilarious creatures who not only hop and fly and swoop around, they make music as they go. Are you kidding me? And all we have to do is look up!
And that’s just the stuff we know about! That’s just the stuff we can see with a quick glance around us as we hustle from the car to wherever our next appointment is. There is also an immense natural world that is hidden from us, unfathomably busy with its own designs, that we don’t even know about: things working under the surface of the ground, things too small for us to see, things hidden within our own cells; secret signals between trees, arcane signs passed from species to species and generation to generation. Fungal kingdoms, pheromones, neural memories. Things under the sea; things under the ice; things beyond our atmosphere. The sheer liveliness of the world is too much to comprehend.
I’m lucky that both my parents taught me it was normal and rational to look at the natural world with fascination and delight, because it is fascinating and delightful. To have been raised this way is a gift, and for a moment, on the playground that day, I was crushed by the thought this man had been denied that gift for decades. In maybe 40 years, no one had taught him to look up.
One of my favorite living artists is James Janknegt. In 2017, he kindly gave me an interview for Aleteia about his life and work. Janknegt, 66, who lives in Texas, is currently working on a commission for five paintings for a book on the meaning of baptism. You can find more of James Janknegt’s art and purchase his book on Lenten Meditations at bcartfarm.com.
Here’s our interview:
You converted to Catholicism in 2005. What led up to that?
James Janknegt: When I was a teenager back in the 70s, there was a nationwide charismatic movement. I was Presbyterian at the time. There was a transdenominational coffee house at University of Texas, with the typical youth band playing Jesus songs. There was a frat house we had taken over. We had 20 people sleeping on the floor; it was crazy. A super intense time.
What kind of art education did you have?
I went to public high school, and they didn’t teach much about art history. I would look at books at book stores, and that was my exposure to art. We had a rinky-dink art museum at University of Texas, not much to speak of. After I had this deepening of my faith as a teenager, and really wanted to follow Jesus 100 percent, I was really questioning whether it was legit to become an artist. I didn’t know any artist who were Christians, or Christians who were artists.
Thumbing through the bookstore, I found Salvador Dali. The book was cracked open at “Christ of St. John of the Cross.”
Wikipedia/fair use
That still, small voice that’s not audible, but you know it’s authentically God speaking to you — it felt affirmed. Yes, go forward to be an artist and be a Christian. Those are not incompatible.
Crucifixion at Barton Creek Mall – James Janknegt
Your pieces move from dark and lonely to radiant after your remarriage and conversion to Catholicism — that shift that you define as going from “diagnostic to celebratory.” But even in the “celebratory” stage, there is drama, even agony, along with ecstasy in your pieces.
Foxes Have Holes/James Janknegt
When I was involved in that youth group, they were very super-spiritual, filled with the Holy Spirit, thinking, “Now we can do everything!”
Summer Still Life/James Janknegt
But we never looked internally to see if there are psychological problems alongside your spiritual life. My dad was bipolar and manic depressive, in and out of mental institutions and jail. I met a woman at that Jesus freak outfit, and we got married. I carried a lot of baggage into my first marriage, that I hadn’t dealt with at all. I went to grad school and my marriage fell apart.
Breakdown/James Janknegt
Getting divorced ripped the lid off. All this stuff I had repressed was all bubbling up and coming to the fore. Questioning not my faith, but my ability to be faithful. Can I hear Him and be obedient to Him and do His will? It was a very dark time.
Jet Station/James Janknegt
When we look at your paintings chronologically, it very obviously mirrors different stages in your life. Is it strange to have your whole life on display?
You take that on when you become an artist. It’s very self-revelatory. It’s part of the deal, if you’re gonna be an artist, to be as honest as you can. I think that’s the downfall of a lot of bad religious art: It’s not technically bad, but it’s just not honest. We live in a fallen world. Bad things happen.
Sudden and Tragic Death/James Janknegt
That’s part of life, and that has to be in your painting. You can’t paint sanitized, Sunday school art.
But you do seem to create art that has very specific meanings in mind. Do you worry about limiting what the viewer can get out of a piece?
There’s a painting I did of Easter morning zinnias. They look like firecrackers; Jonah’s on the vase; in the corner, there’s an airplane.
Easter Morning/James Janknegt
I just needed something in the corner to make your eye move into that corner! People were trying to figure out what it meant, but sometimes an airplane is just an airplane.
To me, the role of art is to make something beautiful. Very simple, that’s the prime directive: Make something beautiful.
Bug Tools and Beyond/James Janknegt
It doesn’t have to be figurative or narrative or decorative. But my feeling is: The history of our salvation, starting with Genesis to Revelation, is indeed the greatest story ever told. What’s better? As an artist, why wouldn’t I want to tell that?
Nativity Christmas Card/James Janknegt
How does the secular world respond to your works? They are full of parables and Bible stories, but also unfamiliar imagery.
A painting is different from a sentence or a paragraph. Paintings deal with visual symbols. I’m trying to take something that was conceptualized 2,000 years ago in a different culture, keeping the content, in a different context.
Two Sons/James Janknegt
It’s almost like translating a language, but with visual symbols.
I have a definite idea of what I’m trying to get across. But you [the viewer] bring with yourself a completely different set of assumptions and experiences, and I have no control over that. I don’t want to.
Holy Family/James Janknegt
When I look at a painting, it’s a conversation. I’m talking into the painting, and the painting is talking to you.
Grain and Weeds/James Janknegt
Part of the problem today is that we do not have the same visual symbolic language. In the Renaissance or the Middle Ages, the culture was homogeneous, and symbols were used for hundreds and hundreds of years. If I put a pelican pecking its breast, no one [today] knows what that means. We’ve lost the language. So it’s challenging.
Are you inventing your own modern symbolic language? I see birds, dogs…
You kind of have to. It’s a balancing act. In art school, they say, “Just express yourself! You’re painting for yourself; it doesn’t matter what everyone else gets out of it.” I’m not doing that. I’m trying to communicate with people.
The Wise Bridesmaids/James Janknegt
Tell me about the state of religious art right now.
People complain about how there’s no good religious art. But there’s a lot of good art out there; you just have to search for it. I feel like I’m hidden away, in this weird place between two cultures, but they are out there.
Saint John the Evangelist/James Janknegt
In our time, people who collect art aren’t religious, and people who are religious don’t collect art. And for an artist, in the Venn diagram, you’re in the place where it says “no money.”
If you could just find an artist you really like and ask them if you could buy a piece for your home shrine.
The Visitation/James Janknegt
If every Catholic could buy a piece of art from a living artist, think how that would impact your life, and the life of the artist. You could give them a living.
Divine Mercy/James Janknegt
Your farm is called “Brilliant Corners Art Farm.” Is that name a reference to Thelonious Monk?
It is! But it also has a hidden spiritual meaning. Honesty is the light. If you’ve got brilliant corners, then the whole room is lit up.
I Will Make All Things New/James Janknegt
You can find more of James Janknegt’s art and purchase his Lenten Meditations book of 40 paintings based on the parables of Jesus Lenten Meditations at bcartfarm.com.
I can learn to decipher what their calls might mean, but it would be a great loss, a bizarre and ungrateful act, to deliberately train myself to stop hearing their music as music.
We could have done without a multitude of categories of clouds, without birds that migrate, bugs that pollinate, mint and milkweed that battle, and little girls who know something about flying. We could have been moved by fear and panic and compulsion, rather than by beauty and longing. Why is there beauty? Why is there life that delights in life?
