Orthodox Writers, Readers, and Artists: Emma Cazabonne, “Beauty will save the world.”

“Beauty will save the world,” wrote Dostoevsky in The Idiot, first published serially in 1868-1869.

Many Orthodox writers and thinkers have since used the phrase. I encountered it about 25 years ago in a book by Paul Evdokimov, and it never left me. At the time, I was just discovering Orthodoxy; but I had been exposed to art for many years and was doing a bit of drawing and painting myself.

After two world wars, numerous ecological disasters, and ugly terrorist acts all over our planet, we may be tempted to despair. But I believe “beauty will save the world.”

To attract your attention, whether on paper, on the little screen or on your monitor, the media focus almost exclusively on ugliness and catastrophes. But beauty will save the world.

Now an official member of the Orthodox Church, I believe in the saving beauty of Christ’s redeeming death and Resurrection.

I also believe that following Christ means participating in His redeeming work, at many levels. I will only speak here about one level. As an Orthodox believer, I feel particularly called to spread beauty in our world. And I strive to do it through my artwork and my writing.

Born from French parents gifted with talents for drawing and painting, I started painting in grade school; I even remember nailing old sheets on a piece of wood to make my own “canvas.” I was not 10 at the time.

A few years later, an art teacher introduced me to the fascinating world of colors, and I attended weekly art classes until university. After some low years in art production, I discovered rock painting. I have now been painting almost exclusively on rocks for 10 years. I paint things I find beautiful and believe will introduce beauty in the life of others. Seeing the joy of my customers when they discover my rocks brings me a lot of hope, as they have a glimpse that everything may not be rotten and in our world.

Beauty will save the world.

 

I paint birds, flowers, landscapes, etc, memorial rocks for deceased pets, from pictures taken by the pet owner, and icons and Orthodox stain-glass style designs.

Beauty will save the world.

God’s saving Beauty was made visible in the flesh: “The Word was made flesh.” John 1:14. We have access to this multi-faceted beauty in our daily contact with the Word in the Scriptures.

I believe we can find and propagate beauty not only through visual arts, but also through The Word and words. I have loved words since I was about 4, when I started reading by myself. Since then, I have grown into a passionate lover of words and books.

It is not only fascinating to read, but also to share with others the beauty I find in books, whether they are fiction or non-fiction works. I started a book blog a year ago, and it has been a deep experience to interact with others on the beauty and depth of words. I entitled my blog Words And Peace, to convey the idea that you can reach some peaceful depth in yourself through reading and sharing, and of course I could not miss the opportunity of introducing a pun, on War And Peace, as you would all have guessed. My blog’s address is: http://wordsandpeace.wordpress.com. The last Orthodox book I reviewed was:

You can read my review here.

I write a lot every month through my translation work of articles and books, mostly from English to French, and occasionally from French to English. The world of translation is absolutely fascinating. I deeply believe we still need bridges in our global world. The image of the world as a village is still a myth, not exactly yet part of our daily reality: we still need help communicating with each other on our planet, and that is the beautiful role of translators, among others. The more we understand each other, the easier we will be at peace. I believe part of my mission as an Orthodox believer is to be a “beauty and peace maker,” by helping people understand each other.

I believe I contribute to this bridge building also through my online French classes, geared to students of all levels, from total beginners to Ph. D. students and proficient learners who just want to keep up with their French conversation skills.

Beauty will save the world.

More creatively, I have given lots of conferences focused mainly on monastic spirituality, both for Western and Eastern Christians. Some of these conferences I have published as articles. The most relevant to our topic here is my article on Gregory Palamas. Discovering that few Western Christians knew about him, I tried to write an accessible presentation of his life and works. I initially wrote and published it in French, then in English and Spanish. The English version is available in the Cistercian Studies Quarterly 37:3 (2002): 303-333 .

Who better than Gregory Palamas wrote about the beauty and depth of our faith? I discovered Gregory through the mystery of the Transfiguration back in the late 80s, and since then I have striven to propagate this beauty.

And last but not least, I published a book a few years ago focused on light. Early on, I discovered that as much as Eastern Fathers and Mothers, writers pertaining to the Western Christian tradition focused a lot on the topic of light. I decided then to publish an anthology of short spiritual texts related to the theme of light in Cistercian Fathers and Mothers:

A Light to Enlighten the
Darkness: Daily Readings for Meditation during the Winter Season Selected by Emma Cazabonne (Cistercian
Publications, 2008) ISBN: 978-0-87907-227-8

Beauty will save the world.

Some of our contemporaries may think beauty, whether in art or in words, is something totally irrelevant to our busy and efficient modern world, where the main goal seems sometimes to make money and buy things. Just as we need our daily bread, I believe that more than ever, we need our daily portion of beauty to survive and thrive.

To paraphrase a passage by Nina Sankovitch in her latest book Tolstoy and The Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading (Harper: 2011), I wish for all of us that beauty may become “an escape, not from, but into living.”

_______________________

Note: I am referring to this passage:

“Cyril  Connolly, twentieth-century writer and critic, wrote that ‘words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.’ That was how I wanted to use books: as an escape back to life. I wanted to engulf myself in books and come up whole again.” p.20

 

Emma Cazabonne is a French tutor, an English-French translator, and a rockpainter. She was born in France and has been living in the US for 10 years. After 20 years as a Trappistine nun, she converted to Orthodoxy. With her husband, a clinical counselor combining Orthodox spiritual elements and psychological principles in his practice, she attends a small ROCOR parish in the Chicagoland.

Orthodox Writers, Readers, and Artists: Claire Brandenburg, “What is in the Kitchen?”

Creating interesting characters is very important to a story. The character has to be someone that you, as a writer, understand on an interior level. You know what he will do and what he won’t do. That character has to be someone that the reader also wants to follow and to spend some time with, and is in many ways the key to keeping people turning the page.

So how do we go about that?

I open my double door pantry and start going through the shelves… hmmm, a can of this, a can of that…how about some of these spices on the door?

What on earth am I talking about?  Well, let me tell you a little more.

I spend a lot of time observing people, even speaking in their accent if they speak unusually to my ears, (of course not to their face).  I guess in a way I act out who I perceive that they are.  Of course this representation is I myself living in a different circumstance, in perhaps a different culture, and taking on mannerisms of that life.

I ask God to show this to me as well.  I ask how would he (the character) do this or do that?  What would he chose? What is next thing that might happen?  Does that feel right, does this feel right?  And then I wait until I have the answer.

I also research and ask questions of people; how do they do the things that they do, the jobs that they have, or things that they enjoy.  A person spends a lot of time each day at their work, they love it, they hate it; but they grow in it, and it changes them because they are interacting with other people; and often not people who would necessarily be friend choices.  Watching people at work tells you a lot about them.  You see personality manifested through their actions. As an illustrator, my job is showing the reader what is happening.  That is a writer’s job is as well.  You want to show a lot about your characters through the way they move through their day or through a problem.

I am working on a young adult novel.  It has been a long term project; in fact, I have been working on it now for over five years.  I have tried to create a character of a mixed cultural background deriving the personality of Isaac, the principle character, from the Hispanic people of Northern New Mexico, with whom I have lived as neighbors and friends for many years.  I also wanted to combine his personality with things I have read in Orthodox writings, wanting him to come from a background that has partly Orthodox roots.  I went so far as to create a history for Isaac’s grandfather as well, who, though not actively met within the book, has a major impact on the central character’s consciousness and responses, and whose influence has greatly formed his character.

This is a road trip story, so I took the road trip.  I know where my character is going, what these places look like, and how he will feel about those places before he gets there.

That kind of “story” gathering is an important part of the pantry that provides food for a book and the representation of its characters who are not only good to write about but also good to read about.  With this method the adage, “Write what you know,” is played out to the hilt.

A fine artist and children’s book writer and illustrator, Claire received a BFA in art and education from the University of New Mexico. Working in a variety of different art forms for over thirty years, she has shown her work in galleries and museums and has received numerous awards. You can learn more about her published work at www.clairebrandenburg.com.  Claire is married. She and her husband have two grown children. Beside her work for Children’s Books and illustration, Claire is involved in the recording of Orthodox books and teachings on CD. Claire blogs at http://clairebrandenburg.blogspot.com and can also be found on Twitter and Facebook. If you visit her Facebook page, you’ll notice a link to Heavenly Ladder, a bookstore that was founded as part of an effort to establish an Orthodox Church in Taos, New Mexico. Check out the Heavenly Ladder “Travel” link to learn about tours and pilgrimages to Orthodox holy places.

Orthodox Writers, Readers, and Artists: Sheena Hisiro

Admittedly, when Melinda first contacted me about writing a piece for her blog, I was a little hesitant.  After all, I didn’t major in writing.  Rather, I went to school for illustration, to learn to bring stories to life via pictures, not words.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I can do this.  While a writing degree may not be in my background, the subject matter of this piece is something I am very familiar with–my artwork.

This summer I was fortunate enough to work with Conciliar Press illustrating a new children’s book, written by Kelly Lardin, being released early next year.  The book, entitled Josiah and Julia Go to Church: A Young Child’s Guide to Church Etiquette, is a playful story for children teaching them what they should (and shouldn’t) do in church.

Obviously, with the book being set in a church, I needed to draw a church.  Rather than create a fictitious one, a concept that came immediately to mind was to depict the church I grew up in, Christ the Saviour Orthodox Church, where I spent many a childhood day.  For a number of the images, I drew from memory, having spent many hours over the course of my life studying every visual detail of the church–the pattern of the floor, the pews, the intricate wood carvings decorating the iconostasis, the decorative and very colorful garments worn by the priest and altar boys, the parishioners, the beautiful icons, the different candles burning, and once they were finished, the very large icons adorning almost every wall in the church.  These in particular fascinated me as
a child and continue to do so as an adult, with all the detail and care with which they were painted, as well as how each tells a different story.  For someone with a passion for anything visual, the church is a feast for the eyes.

The priest in the story is again my priest from childhood, Fr. Daniel Ressetar.  Up until the last couple of years when he retired, Fr. Dan was the priest at Christ the Saviour. That is to say, he “officially” retired; if you go on Sunday, you’re very likely to see him helping out with the current priest, Fr. Stephen.  Fr. Dan was then, and continues to be, an influential part of my life.  Many times when I go home to visit family, I have some news clipping or other compliments of Fr. Dan, be it an article he thought of interest to me, news about Orthodoxy, Church Bulletins, and occasionally, a book that he thought I might like.  He was there for many big events in my life, church-related and non-church related alike–my baptism, first communion (and many communions after that), first confession, high school graduation, the release of my first children’s book and subsequent one, and would have attended the most recent if not for a previous engagement.  Including him in the story was my way of paying tribute, of saying thank you, to Fr. Dan for everything he has done and continues to do for me.

Over the course of my life, many people have said, “You have a gift from God,” or “You have been truly blessed with artistic talent.”  I am very grateful to have this gift and pray that I am able to continue to utilize my talent for a very long time.

Sheena Hisiro has been drawing since she could hold a pencil. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY where she is still drawing and loving every minute of it. Sheena is currently illustrating children’s books, designing greeting cards, and drawing cupcakes.