Shore Scene with Waves and Breakwater, oil on board, circa 1835, by J.M.W. (William) Turner.
Water Album - The Yellow River Breaches Its Course, ink on paper, 12th century, Song Dynasty, by Ma Yuan.
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In his 2006 book Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, Lawrence Weschler writes in the introduction that "I myself have increasingly found myself being visited by similarly uncanny moments of convergence, bizarre associations, eerie rhymes, whispered recollections—sometimes in the weirdest places." He is writing about art critic John Berger and Berger's "way of seeing." Almost every time I notice some strange echo in pieces of art or writing, I find myself thinking about Wechsler's book or Berger's Ways of Seeing.
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Or I may find myself thinking about "Pillow of Air: A Monthly Amble Through the Visual World," which is a new monthly column by Lawrence Wechsler for The Believer, where he explores convergences outside of the confines of his single (although fascinating) book.
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Anway, it was a tear, a seam, in the clouds over Puyallup that started this whole series of echoes and reflections and rabbit holes.
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Those clouds were haunting me.
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Then, while searching for images of "water" to use in a piece for work, I stumbled across Shore Scene with Waves and Breakwater by William Turner (pictured above) on the WikiPaintings Visual Art Encyclopedia. This painting echoed the seam in the sky I had seen, even though depicting waves crashing upon the shore.
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A bit further along, I find another picture of waves and whitewater—one of the twelve paintings of the Water Album by Ma Yuan. And there was the roiling and turbulence. And there was the seam.
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After work, I headed to the Puyallup Public Library to check out a book on Turner—The Art of J.M.W. Turner by David Blayney Brown. The small painting I'm enamored with isn't pictured, mostly because it turns out that Turner was a very prolific painter. But the same sense of turbulence in cloud and wave and light is present in many of the other paintings reproduced therein.
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It was back online to see if I could find anything out about Ma Yuan and Water Table. Contemporary artist Zhang Hongtu took Ma Yuan's twelve paintings as a jumping off point to remake Water Table, but to do so 780 years later and to depict the water as it would be seen today—polluted, filled with chemicals and oil and runoff from our modern lives and industrial lives.
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Another article has a quote by Zhang Hongtu, explaining the beauty that can be found in his "re-makes" of these classic paintings:
"Think about [J.M.W.] Turner's paintings of the Thames, he made them during England's Industrial Revolution; that fog is probably smog, but it's still beautiful. Only it's a sort of poisonous beauty, the pollution isn't obvious like tin cans in a river, it is in the air and water much more deeply."---
I just sat in my chair, staring at my computer screen, dumbfounded and silenced.
Cloud. Water. William Turner. Ma Yuan. Zhang Hongtu.
Centuries. China. England. The modern world with its art galleries and museums. The internet.
All collapsed into one small moment for me, seated in my living room, unable to move.
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Another day and I'm sitting in a class by a Pacific Lutheran University professor on "The Virtues of Christian Environmental Ethics" during an adult education class at my church, and we have already covered six of the seven classical and theological virtues—prudence, temperance, justice, courage, faith, hope—and are heading into love and a discussion of climate change, when all of a sudden we are talking water again.
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And then there was talk of baptism. Martin Luther. The Small Catechism.
"How can water do such great things?"
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And then there was the article in the Word & World "Water" issue about diatoms. ("Think Like a Diatom" by Evelyn E. Gaiser.) They provide 30% of the oxygen on earth. If we pollute water, which kills off diatoms, then we raise the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
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And then there was the reference in Like a Hammer Shattering Rock: Hearing the Gospels Today by Megan McKenna. The Gospel of the Earth and the stewardship of creation we need to engage.
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And more waves. Psalm 104. The creation narrative. The roiling waters. The Spirit that speaks over them. The tehom (Hebrew) or the abyss (Greek) of the Great Deep. Tiamat. Jörmungandr. Sea monsters. Olaus Magnus and his map.
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And then I walk off into the white margins of the map. Into the seam that I see there amongst the waves, in the clouds.
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