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Art for the Great Books

In 2016, Head of School Ty Fischer edited Teaching Beauty: A Vision for Art and Music in Christian Education. In response to this book, and in an effort to invest in the visual education of the school's students, an annual art invitational was established with the aid, expertise, and oversight of Veritas parent, graphic designer, artist and Square Halo Gallery curator Ned Bustard. In this event several contemporary artists are invited to create works based on themes from the Great Books studied in our Omnibus classes. The works are first shown in the Square Halo Gallery in Lancaster, and then hang in our school throughout the year for the students to enjoy. A purchase award is given to one of the artists in the exhibit, and that work becomes part of the school's permanent art collection. The remainder of the works are auctioned off, with the proceeds shared between the artists and our school.

2018-2019 Invitational Theme: The Modern World

 
 
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Daniel

Presence: When 3=4

by Jonathan Millet
Digitally manipulated scanned painting, archival ink on 100% rag paper, mounted on panel, acrylic and enamel paint embellishments.

“Is it true, O Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego,” the king demanded, “that you are refusing to serve my gods or to worship the gold statue I set up? I’ll give you one more chance. When the music plays, if you fall down and worship the statue, all will be well. But if you refuse, you will be thrown into a flaming furnace within the hour. And what god can deliver you out of my hands then?”
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego replied, “O Nebuchadnezzar, we are not worried about what will happen to us. If we are thrown into the flaming furnace, our God is able to deliver us; and he will deliver us out of your hand, Your Majesty.  But if he doesn’t, please understand, sir, that even then we will never under any circumstance serve your gods or worship the gold statue you have erected.”
 
This artwork represents that great and overriding promise that God in the book of Daniel to be with his faithful remnants.  Those who are faithful in their devotion to the Lord, uncompromising in the face of political mandates, cultural conformity or a disingenuous attraction to a man made deity.  The Presence of the Almighty is always with us, so therefore the addition of one (when 3 equals 4) from the story of the fiery furnace from Daniel chapter three, is a logical and most comforting conclusion. I find the story of the three young jewish men who stood for their convictions against the erroneous mandate of a delusional king, to be quite reassuring that we—as his faithful followers—are always in the safety of the Almighty God.  It is quite a poignant reminder set in the beginning of the book of Daniel that in the worst of circumstances, when the desires of man forsake the Lord in order to create edifices to themselves, that even as we look towards the prophetic end of an all consuming fire as a final judgment of this world, that God is in control and will lovingly shepherd his faithful children to greener paster and streets of gold. 
 
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Pilgrim's Progress: WINNER!

Christian and Hopeful Captured by Giant Despair

Katie Joy Nellis
Oil on canvas

Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is a story of the redemption of the pilgrim, Christian. He is a man that leaves the City of Destruction and sets off for the Celestial City.  During this allegory, we see the burden of Christian’s sins roll of his back and we see him interact with both friends and foes (like Faithful and Worldy-Wise Man) as he journeys through places like the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair makes his way toward Heaven. 
 
This painting shows Christian and Hopeful at one of the lowest points of their journey. Imprisoned by Despair in his “nasty and stinking” dungeon, battered by his cudgel and verbally abused, they are barely alive. I have emphasized the mental and spiritual torment Despair inflicted on Christian and Hopeful. Rather than painting Despair as muscular and menacing, I focused on his demoralizing influence. His face, suspended in darkness above the men, is ghoulish and horror-stricken. The garish colors and dripping paint suggest steadily creeping doubt and confusion. And just as Despair’s head is haloed in a dark cloud, so little mounds of darkness cover Christian and Hopeful.  Yet these mounds are so small that a man standing upright might breathe freely above them. And Christian and Hopeful, though oblivious in their misery, are bookended by signs of hope. Christian, often depicted in the armor of God (Eph 6), has set his shield (symbolizing faith) beside him, but the cross emblazoned on it casts a red glow on his body. And a small green vine, somehow flourishing even in the dungeon, is curling around Hopeful’s right hand.
 
About the Artist
Katie Joy Nellis paints from her home in Coatesville, PA. She studied painting at Gordon College in Massachusetts and in Orvieto, Italy. Since graduating in 2013 she has worked as a self-employed artist, illustrator, and art tutor. She specializes in oil portraits on wood. 
 
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Uncle Tom's Cabin

Resistance: Uncle Tom’s Cabin Revisited

Silver based black and white film
Ruth Naomi Floyd

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century and the 
second best-selling book of that century, following the Bible. To this day, the book is highly controversial in the African-American community. The deeply scarring portrayals in that book of those prisoners forced into the labor system of American slavery not only twisted and suppressed the Imago Dei for that generation, but also for generations to come.    
 
The thread of justice has always weaved throughout black art. The union of justice and art is profound, as African American art was birthed in resistance, and has a rich history of brotherhood, sisterhood and community. 
I believe that each generation has a duty to take what is best from those that preceded them and build on it to create something new. It is my goal for my art to connect to history and rub against tradition, while at the same time skillfully and artistically produce new art images. In the creative process I am challenged, confronted, and learn the most about myself and my creative spirit. I lose myself in the process, but in the process I am also found.
I chose the medium of black and white photography because it allows me to express the brightest white to the deepest black and the vivid gray shades that fall in between. The photographic images were captured using silver based films with 35 mm and 4×5-inch view cameras and printed with the use of traditional wet darkroom techniques as well as digital printing technology on archival papers.
The motivation driving me to create and share my work is an intense hunger to reflect on themes of life, to ask (and attempt to answer) the necessary questions that life’s journey provides. My goal is for my images to evoke a response—positive or negative. I humbly accept the process of creating art as a gift from God. Art is essential to human life and its spirit; art can speak to the human condition and strengthen and revolutionize thoughts and lives. 
 
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The Great Gatsby

So We Beat On

Oil on canvas with block print
Kimberly Stemler

 
Gatsby is a self-made success who builds an extravagant life during the Jazz Age. His life, and the lives of those around him, is one of materialism, hedonism, and consumption. At his core, Gatsby wants to earn the life of his long-lost love Daisy. At night, he looks across the bay to see the green light at the end of Daisy’s house’s dock. The last lines capture this saying: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . And one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
 
To Gatsby, the green light on the dock represents Daisy and the possibility, their future, the hope for love as he gazes across the lake from his balcony.  It is a future never fulfilled, unrequited love; represented by the breadth of her light fizzling out before it reaches the boat.
 
About the Artist
Kimberly Stemler was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pa, and received a BFA in painting from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Living with her husband Jon and their three boys in a rural area of Montgomery County she is inspired by the land.  Her work primarily revolves around landscapes that are focused on color, densely patterned, and layered.  These landscapes, while abstracted, have the ability to give the viewer a sense of connection to place, time, moment.  They can feel nostalgic and almost recognizable, like a fuzzy memory.  Another focus of her work tends to revolve around objects that are evocative, wistful, and full of remembrance.
 
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The Communist Manifesto

Weniger Wert

Najwan Zoubi Sack
Oil on Canvas

 
The Communist Manifesto is an 1848 political pamphlet considered one of the world’s most influential political documents. It claims that the “history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Near the end of the Manifesto, there is a call for forcibly overthrowing all existing social conditions, which would serve as the justification for all communist revolutions around the world. Karl Marx called on the workers of the world to unite against the owners of industry, promising a glorious future. Sadly, history has shown the failure of communism to deliver on those promises. 
 
 
Karl Marx, patriarch of socialism, is shown pondering economics, while wearing Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s gulag prisoner uniform.
 
Sack is an extraordinary Israeli artist living in the United States who has a B.A. in Fine Arts from Oranim College in Israel. She was featured in the Square Halo Gallery last year, and will have an exhibit here in December.
 
 
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Three Speeches by Abraham Lincoln

The Cooper Union Speech (A House Divided), The Gettysburg Address,
and The Second Inaugural

Tying Persuasion to the Founding Fathers

Matthew Stemler
Acrylic

 
In the Cooper Union Speech Lincoln claims that the nation cannot continue permanently half slave and half free. It will either become all one or all the other. In the Gettysburg Address Lincoln makes a plea that “government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.” And in his Second Inaugural Lincoln gives the speech as the war (and his life) nears an end. He finishes the speech saying, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
 
With his three speeches, Lincoln connects his argument against slavery to principles established by the Founding Fathers, the writers of the Declaration of Independence. In a sense, the Founding Fathers are an anchor to ideas that flow up through history. In the painting, these ideas take the form of vessels being corralled in divergent directions by a steam boat and slave ship. Some vessels are rotated so one can see their openness or the potential to carry a load. Others reveal nothing. Interestingly, a vessel rotated to show only the bottom takes a form similar to that of a Klansman’s hood. The image is immersed a patriotic color pallet and if seen abstractly, takes the form of an American flag.
 
About the Artist
Stemler is currently the co-chair of the Department of Visual Arts, studio art instructor and gallery curator at Cairn University. 
 

Past Veritas Arts Invitational Winners
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2017 Winner: The Medieval World

Wittenburg Reformation Altarpiece

 

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2016 Winner: The Ancient World
Trojan Horse

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