Chapter 2 - Blank Canvas

I have a blank white canvas hanging on my wall. It started out as a high school art project that hung on the wall of my parent’s house for these fourteen years. Last month I decided it was in fact time to let go and find the beauty in the breakdown. I brought the canvas, which was a cheap knock off of a Mondrian, who is one of my favourite artists, home, and I painted over it with white. A fresh start.

Mondrian, in case you don’t know, was one of those artists you can look at and say I could have done that. Piet Cornellis Mondrian was known for his style, even if you don’t recgnize the name, you will certainly reconize the style because it has been usurped and re-employed by corporate branding campaigns, movie introductions, product packaging and pressboard wall decor the world over. His style could be adequetly described as simple, and more often than not a painting was comprised of nothing more than a series of intersecting horizontal and vertical black lines, the negative space filled with primary colours. The names of his compostions where congruously wrought with titles like Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue. He was also a genious. A bit mad maybe, but who judges these things, anyways?

Mondrian was obsessed with the infinite. Not a universal or cosmological infinite, but an abstract ideological infinite. He hated green. Perhaps it reminded him of finite organic material, but he was known to switch places with someone if his restaurant seat afforded him a view of the trees. His paintings reached for this idea of infinity. Two lines running parallel don’t touch. A bar of colour reaching off the edge of the canvas could stretch to infinity. (footnote - From David Sylvester, “About Modern Art: Critical Essays, 1948-1997”) It was his way of making the canvas appear to be more than what it is. He was trying to show a window into a heaven of ideas that are only understandable in terms of colour, balance, and composition. He understood redemption. Maybe not as you and I do, but in terms of Macros: Small mechanisms illuminating the larger ones.

I too am trying to understand redemption. When I hung the blank canvas on the wall, it was because I didn’t have anywhere else to store it. We have a small house that we bought to avoid the piling up of too much junk, but the house defies us and piles it up none the less. Over the next few weeks, however, the canvas would slowly become a metaphor to me. There is something expectant about a blank canvas. It is new, full of anticipation. I am full of anticipation, trying to re-create my faith. I am trying to open myself to the guidance of God and to allow him into the important things in my life again. I am trying to become a blank canvas. I have allowed the old part to be painted over, and I wait and see what paint God will apply. What style? What colours? Perhaps he will paint a Mondrian; reflecting eternity, simple strokes full of colour. Perhaps it will be a Michelanglo; more classic but readily identifiable. Or most likely of all, he will apply to the blank canvas of my renewed faith a few bold lines, some scribbles, and a house, like a child’s drawing. Very much like a child’s drawing, I suspect. A home.

I am trying to stay out of it. When I get a sense of where God is going with this, perhaps I may pull the big white square off the living room wall and try to follow his brush with mine. But for now I stay white
and expectant.