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1 | Things as they appear

It is a simple living room, filled with pale, cool, winter morning light. The sunlight coming through the big picture window, striking a framed print hanging on the wall, is not truly bright. The room is calmly illumined (there are no dark shadows) but fully illumined. The somewhat icy blues of the curtains and the carpet join with the heavier, but still pale, grey-blue of the two chairs to give the room a cool harmony. Even the matte of the framed picture is blue.

The sky out the window, which is more turquoise by comparison, is a little brighter than the living room. It penetrates the curtain and paints its turquoise very subtly on the wall with the hanging picture. You see it also on the ceiling, reflected there by the snow in the front yard of the house.

Out the window you can see a corner of the snow-covered yard, with its wall of shovelled snow beside the driveway with the family car, a VW Beetle. Out the window the suburban homes of the neighbourhood, across the way and lining another street up to the right, sit in place.

(It is actually difficult to ‘narrate’ a painting that – and it is hard even to know how to put this – is not a narrative. There is no rational sequence to the things that the ‘describer’ of a picture could mention, and you do not have to go far, writing a description, before feeling that your sequence is getting the picture wrong. Precisely not wrong in the sense that first come to mind [putting the wrong things first] but wrong in the sense that in your description there is a first, and a sequence, and an endpoint, and in looking at a painting like this there is no such thing. There is nothing you are meant to look at first. And is it not correct also to say that there is nothing you are especially meant to notice. What you are given to notice, most emphatically, is the whole thing.)

A tall bare tree across the street, which two people out for a morning walk are passing. Two tall dark firs, a single power line running diagonally long a space, between the homes. It must be around Christmas, because of the three silver stars hanging in the centre of the window, a store-bought decoration. A teddy bear on top of maybe another teddy bear is on the floor, off centre in the foreground.

Half the picture is the big window and the empty carpet at right, a big open space diagonally matched by the open space of the corner of the room at left. In both halves of the picture a boy sits on a blue chair whose polished wood frames reflect the light. Each boy looks at the television turned on in the corner, its curved glass screen also reflecting the daylight. The ‘black-and-white’ or more accurately blue-and-grey image falls in with the harmonies of the light. Equally appealing set against those hues are the beige and gold tones of the lampshade, TV frame, tabletop, a thoroughly sat-in leather cushion seat, the wall and floor, the topmost teddy. Everything fits. Even the other gold accent, way up at the ceiling on the right: and odd-looking decoration that doesn’t seen to represent anything. Maybe if we saw the thing itself we would see what it was, but it doesn’t deliver that information just hanging there, with its cascade of golden tinsel. It looks to be stapled to the ceiling, probably at the centre, so it suggests the extension of the room, the fuller space.

The brown-haired heads of the boys turned in opposite ways to the same target, their bodies in postures of children: the boy in the yellow robe frozen still by attention, his feet poked out just past the chair seat in poufy sleep socks, his brother in the striped robe playing with something in his hands, perched on the very edge of his chair, one foot propped on the in-turned other in the way only a kid will sit.

The inside and the outside, the outside coming in to give the room its morning light. The time of day is echoed by the pyjamas and the kids’ show on tv (morning broadcasting). The beyond of the neighbourhood, running back along the power line. Time and space and light. Ordinariness. Things carefully rendered just as they appear.

To say ‘an event shown just as it was’ would not describe this: what event would we be talking about? Nor is it a moment. What, here, marks a particular moment? Technically, maybe, that second of the tv show, but that second gave way to another, and the character of the entire image seems far more attuned to that kind of continuance. The ordinariness of this image bears the implication not of the momentary but of the common. The light would come again in much the same way. The room would stay the same. Another day would come, like this day, with the neighbourhood just as it was. We are looking not at a moment but at something else.

2 | The concept of realism

The artist who painted this picture, over a period of two years between 1968 and 1970, is Jack Chambers, a Canadian painter and film-maker who worked in London, Ontario, where in 1931 he had been born. It is not difficult to see why Chambers was one of the thirteen artists included in the book High Realism in Canada by Paul Duval, published in 1974. Duval opened it with a statement on his central concept.

‘High realism’ is used throughout this book to describe a special kind of pictorial art which is characterized by an intense concern and involvement with subject matter as such.”

Paul Duval, High Realism in Canada (Toronto: Clarke,
Irwin & Co., 1974), 7

I have no special desire to be critical of this author but I have by now become sensitized to the threat of language; talk too easily fools us into sauntering along on the writer’s track, when the writer’s track is far too often no track of experience at all: we are just being made consumers of writing. (I am quite aware that I am writing this, but it hardly follows that writing, just because it is writing, has to shortchange its reader. Where writing is truly subservient to something – in the present case, art or what art is doing – it might steer well away from exploiting you just by being oriented to something real. Mind you, becoming oriented to what is real, as the very discussion of ‘realism’ serves to show, might be more of a challenge than it sounds.)

If realism in art demonstrates a “concern … with subject matter as such,” then the contrast here is: ‘with subject matter as such by contrast with subject matter as a mere vehicle of, or so I would suppose, other concerns of art’. I would think, then, that if a work of art used, say, flowers as a kind of decorative element then it would not be concerned with flowers as such. Take a work that Chambers himself painted in 1968 before he began our picture, a painting he titled Madrid Window No. 2 (a work included by Duval in High Realism in Canada), and we seem to have exactly that: the main thing appears to be a composition that overshadows the flowers, takes centre stage by means of the flowers.

Duval’s distinction isn’t working. You might find this author’s claim about ‘high realism’ plausible, but actually try to understand what he says, and apply it, and it instantly breaks under this very slight pressure.

Realism, what is it? I would suggest that the most striking quality of the concept of realism is the injection, into this concept, of the notion of ‘reality’. How does that come about? But Duval offers a second qualification in his next paragraph.

The essential qualities of high realism are objectivity of vision, sharpness of definition, precision of technique, accuracy of detail, and excellence of craftsmanship.”

I take “objectivity of vision” to mean that nothing ‘subjective’ is added: the feeling of the artist makes no alteration to what is seen – which now introduces seeing and the way we see. For instance we see, ordinarily, with “sharpness of definition” – we can see details – and in order to render details an artist will need “precision of technique”. Edvard Munch’s The Shriek has none of these three qualities: it is certainly concerned with its subject matter (the feeling behind the shriek Munch references in the title) but it renders that subject with an elaborate visual evocation of ‘subjective’ feeling, making an image without any definition and accuracy of detail – that is, none relative to seeing.

The question I am asking is what makes attention to the way we see things call up the idea of reality? Munch was not indifferent to reality; his painting was actually prompted by a real experience. Were you to ask an artist of the past (one who did not render meticulous details or give things optical “sharpness”) why his art was not ‘realistic’, surely he would not have understood your question. The word would baffle him. And if you tried to be clearer, by saying,

‘Why aren’t you more clearly concerned with reality’

he would undoubtedly think that you were stupid. Art concerned with the world, as all art was, is concerned with reality.

In short, the idea of ‘realism’ is an historical idea that does not always make sense. I don’t mean that it could not have been explained to an artist of the past but that it would indeed require explaining in order to be intelligible. The association of the representation of things with the particulars noted by Duval (“objectivity of vision”, details, clarity) – and this treated as a kind of involvement with reality, signalled via the word ‘realism’ – comes out of history.

THE MODERN MINDSET OF ‘REALISM’?

I do not know the prehistory that truly gives birth to talk of ‘realism’ but I suspect that this is partly the work of modern philosophy, through the way it has shaped people’s basic outlook on things.

In modernity a new kind of emphasis is given to the senses; this explains the rise of the term ‘empiricism’. All the ancients, all medieval thinkers, knew that knowledge comes via the senses, but that the senses receive input from the world (through which knowledge about the world is obtained) does not entail that knowledge comes in through the doorway of the senses, does not imply

Sensationalism, the doctrine that all knowledge is derived from sensations,”

as various modern thinkers come to imagine this. It is easy to think that,

because sense experience is caused by the external world, it can be regarded as infallible. … The empiricists sought a hard core of indubitable truths involved in sense experience upon which all knowledge could be based,”

Peter Alexander, s.v. “sensationalism,” Encyclopedia
of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 415, 416

etc. But think simply of the view that it is the eye, receiving light, that captures the picture of the world, and now consider the following ancient view, from Aristotle.

Were thinking [or, say, understanding] to take place in a bodily organ the intrinsic character of that organ would limit the range of natures that could be thought [or grasped or understood].”

Richard N. Bosley and Martin M. Tweedale commenting
on Aristotle in On the Soul, book 3, in Basic Issues in
Medieval Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Broadview, 2006), 619

My point is that – for the reason just given – ‘reality’ cannot be taken as what the eye gives us. Sensory reality (a clear and perceiving grasp of what is in front of us physically), perhaps: the eye, functioning as it should, might well deliver that (to the mind, or even using the mind) – and thus there would be sensory realism (the faithful attempt to capture in a representation what the sense of vision obtained).

But that this would be reality would not follow: it would be part of reality, a mere preliminary slice of reality that a mind-attached bodily organ could take in.

When people talk, simply, about ‘realism in art’ it will ordinarily be quite unclear what it is they are talking about. Do they mean this kind of sensory realism or are they referring to a realism in which, possibly, there is more involved.

3 | From sensation to perception

‘PERCEPTUAL REALISM’

Chambers spoke about a more involved phenomenon. In the several texts he wrote on his work he did not talk simply about realism; his concept, in one text, was “perceptual realism” (treated in an article of that title). I do not know whether Chambers was aware of this but in philosophy there is a

distinction between sensation and perception [according to which] perception involves interpretation and … sensation does not.”

Alexander, s.v. “sensationalism,” 415

With interpretation comes a “possibility of error” , writes Alexander, but sensation is essentially just caused, not formed, and this greater reliability made the shift of focus to the senses very attractive.

To perceive is not just to receive the data, so to speak, but to see what is in the data, not just to receive the light channelled through the eyes but to experience the image that the light transmits, to see what the image holds. In a manuscript Chambers indeed refers to

things as they appear externally to our senses,”

Jack Chambers, manuscript, c. 1969

but this is only the starting point of experience. It is not perception.

In an article on his work Chambers wrote that “perception” involves a kind of interruption of things appearing to us in which a kind of contact is made with “creation”.

Perception in process is like a sound movie. Suddenly the picture freezes and loses focus. The sound goes. The defocusing brightens and becomes white light. Then the focus returns, the sound comes back and the film starts moving again. That’s a slow-motion version of what happens. The moment of ‘white light’ is the moment of perception. The frame returning to focus and the first returning sounds are the registration of … objects on the nerves as the senses recover.”

Jack Chambers “Perception, Painting and Cinema,”
Art and Artists (1972), cited by R. Bruce Elder,
“Jack Chambers: Perceptualism, Painting, and Cinema” (2012)

When they recover, however, there is now more in front of us than ‘things as they appear externally to our senses’, though the image is not different. The image is the same image; the screen image continues just where the film had stopped, but the image now delivered is charged with … – I hesitate to choose a word, here, since my choice might shut out what Chambers was trying to say, in writing about this non-sensory thing. In this same text he speaks of an “energy”; clearly, he is not talking about physics, but this energy, as in physics, comes from something, and it also charges us in some way through this ‘white light experience’. There is a transaction.

Creation is the energy which informs sensory reality in the object world as it transcends the object’s world in perception. … On recovering the senses after the perceptual impact, one feels the stark wonder of the world and the uniqueness of all its forms. We feel a deep and abiding affection for the physical. What stays with us from day to day more or less consciously is this sense of gentle astonishment at the world is as it is.”

Chambers “Perception, Painting, and Cinema,” emphasis added

In a second text Chambers writes,

The intention to imitate experience by art-craft, I call perceptual realism.”

Jack Chambers, “Perceptual Realism,” Artscanada
issue 136–137 (October 1969), cited in Jack
Chambers: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue,
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (1970), n.p.

TALK OF ENERGY IS TALK OF ‘ACTION ON SOMETHING’ – IS TALK OF RELATION

I said just a moment ago that in mentioning “energy” Chambers is not shifting back to the plane of physics and causation – and that is true. He is referring to something that “transcends” or is above “the object’s world”; he has left the plane where an object is an object, a thing unto itself. But in physics, strangely enough, the very phenomenon of energy itself rules out or transcends such a characterization of things. And this makes Chambers’s own language even clearer.

The moment, in physics, that you begin to speak of energy (“among the most important of physical concepts”) you are not talking about objects but about effects (about a relation in which one thing affects another).

Energy is not a way of characterizing particles, but a way of characterizing processes in the field.”

D.W. Theobald, The Concept of Energy (London:
Spon, 1966), 39, 50, 98; cited by Stoyan Tanev,
Energy in Orthodox Theology and Physics:
From Controversy to Encounter (Eugene, Or.:
Pickwick Publications, 2017), 94–95

To speak in particular of electrical energy,

The concept of electrical charge is fundamental and cannot be described in simpler, more basic concepts. In the words of Eugene Hecht, ‘We know it by what it does and not by what it is – if you like, it is what it does, and that’s that!’”

Tanev, 95; citing Eugene Hecht, Physics: Calculus
(Pacific Grove, Ca.: Brooks/Cole, 2000), vol. 2, 610

Energy “is therefore a relational concept, a concept which is inherently associated with the description of … change, and … interaction….”

In his study on this subject Tanev notes that what science reveals about energy aligns with what certain fathers of the Church had said about the created world and, through it, about God.

The energy [of God simply] means that God does something…. This activity … includes God’s works such as creating, sustaining, providing, … etc.”

Tanev, 117

As explained by St. Gregory Palamas (14th-century bishop of Thessalonica),

the energy of God … is bestowed proportionately upon those who participate and, according to the capacity of those who receive it, it instils the divinizing radiance to a greater or lesser degree.”

St. Gregory Palamas, One Hundred and Fifty
Chapters, ch. 69; cited by Tanev, 118

What we are talking about is a revelation of the glorious character of created things (the word ‘glory’ in the Scriptures is a word that essentially we leave unread, assigning no more meaning to it than the worn out and formulaic ‘great’). But before we speak of the character of that revelation we must amplify, fill out and complete, the suggestion in Chambers’s talk of energy.

St. Gregory Palamas was

a theologian of ‘the glory of God’, [which was spoken of in Gospel passages that gave rise] to the patristic formulations ‘divine or uncreated energy’…. This glory God chose to share with the human race. It is God’s deifying grace transfiguring human life. That it is a matter of experience even in this earthly existence is the main feature of Palamas’s understanding of Orthdodoxy.”

Stephen Thomas, s.v. “St. Gregory Palamas,”
in The Concise Encyclopedia of Orthodox
Christianity, ed. John Anthony McGuckin
(Oxford: Wiley Blackwell), 430

Tanev writes the following about the world around us:

Every created reality [or created thing] has its associated logos corresponding to the inner law of its nature…. The many logoi  of the one Logos [God] make the world a meeting place for Divine-human dialogue reflecting and manifesting God’s thoughts and personal activity.”

Tanev, 133

Physical light, then, is that form of energy that makes “things … appear externally to our senses,” but, wrote Chambers, another energy that is not physical light brings about perception – that “moment of ‘white light’” (though this was just his movie-projector analogy, it was such an analogy – intense and unfiltered light – that he chose) that “is the moment of perception”. When he termed this “inspiration” he was not talking in the usual way about ‘where artists get their ideas’ but about that phenomenon of perception that we are discussing. He explained that it came from the things in front of him – from what Gregory Palamas called the many logoi of Creation, reflecting this form of light.

That is, the word ‘spirit’ in the word ‘inspiration’ comes back to life and is no longer the dead letter that history has made of it. It is no surprise that Chambers wrote of both “perceptual realism” and “spiritual realism”.

Spiritual realism – the human celebration of things as they appear externally to our senses.”

Chambers, manuscript, c. 1969

He wrote of “our encounter with reality” through perception (Chambers, “Perception, Painting, and Cinema”), but owing to the way he understands perception you appreciate that this involves reality making the overture.

In my case, I am convinced that the inspiration always belonged to the object, because the experience of my passage was from the visible object to vision to visible object. I had not turned away from the object. Inspiration or vision occurred between my looking at the object and my continued looking at the object again…. The object is invested then with the experience of inspiration and is seen with the heightened awareness of visionary recall. It is by means of this experience influencing the objective of the thing, that painting seeks to ascend to the excellence of being that is both visible and invisible. The invisible property in the wholeness of vision is the source of unity in the painting.”

Jack Chambers, unnamed text cited by Elder,
“Jack Chambers: Perceptualism, Painting, and Cinema”

4 | The other dimension in the ‘wholeness of vision’

People have the idea that Canada has no visionary artists. Or no Christian visionary artists. Lest you wonder whether the background I have been installing is out of place, Chambers was a Roman Catholic. He had been baptized in Spain a decade earlier, in 1957, having gone to Europe in 1953 with no purpose other than to see it. After Rome, Austria, and France he went to Spain, teaching English to keep himself afloat and then enrolling in an art school in Madrid.

He … learned Spanish and began to read the works of the great Spanish mystic Teresa of Avila. He recalled that this was the first time he seriously studied religion, and that it had made a major impact on his life. During our visit, however, Jack simply told me of his satisfaction in having become a Catholic and that this had come about through the writings of the Spanish mystic and the influence of his many Spanish friends.”

Val Ambrose McInnes, To Rise With the Light:
The Spiritual Odyssey of Jack Chambers
(Toronto: Ontario College of Art, 1989), 4–5, 7

In 1959, in Spain, he met Olga Sanchez Bustos, the Argentinian woman whom he would marry and often paint and with whom he would have two sons. (On the left in the painting below, and see the source photo further down.)

Chambers talks about the transition “from the visible object to vision” and then back “to visible object” – instead of talking about a visionary transformation of the original scene in which the original appearances are shed like a false husk – because it is the world just as it comes to us through the senses that is illumined by the spirit, by the energy that brings perception. –

That is, there is a transformation of what we see but not a change in what is seen; it is a transformation of significance, which is a completely unsatisfactory word if all it suggests is an ‘increase of meaning’. It is foolish to talk simply of more meaning. Rather, we are talking about not a new appearance of things but the appearance seen now as something else, something previously invisible or absent. What is happening in this illumination by which the world is perceived, perceived as what it is, is that the world is seen as something that is entirely new. Without being different it is seen as what it never was before.

Chambers’s own talk of energy and spirit re-introduces into the discussion of what certain artists are doing in their work an understanding of things that was lost in modernity, when man becomes a being surrounded by objects. Things that are created – which are invested with an energy that defines them as the things they are – are things with a virtual soul.

Perception is the intelligible brilliance within us, when our soul and the soul of things become present to one another. It is the intuitive unfolding of both the self and the other in one embrace. The rupture, fading, or shadow of this brilliance becomes, at the instant of its fading, the experience of a what that lives.”

Jack Chambers, Red and Green: A Journal
(Toronto: Nancy Poole Gallery, 1978)

The “what that lives” he linked with “common things seen out of the window or inside the house or any place.”

Chambers, “Perceptual Realism,” cited in
Jack Chambers: A Retrospective

On recovering the senses after the perceptual impact, one feels the stark wonder of the world and the uniqueness of all its forms.”

Every particular thing has its own appeal and charm: the space in a room; the pyjama feet; the curtains and their volumes and tones, light-transmitting and opaque; the unintelligible ornament.

We feel a deep and abiding affection for the physical. What stays with us from day to day more or less consciously is this sense of gentle astonishment at the world is as it is.”

Chambers “Perception, Painting, and Cinema”

It is the discovery of a home.

It is the discovery of a home. I have read only one comment on the title Chambers gave to the picture of his sons in the living room: Sunday Morning No. 2. (Chambers had an art dealer who would have a list of works available for purchase, each work listed under a name, as per the general practice. This is to suggest not that titling art at this time has no deeper significance but that it need not always have much significance.) The numeral relates to the Chambers’s habit of doing different treatments of particular subjects. There are, apparently,

five paintings he created between 1963 and 1977, all of which have the words ‘Sunday Morning’ in their titles.”

Sara Angel, “Unfinished Business,” The Walrus (January/February 2012)

What in this image is Sunday-related? The boys are not getting ready for school; adults are strolling and not at work. But Sunday is the “sanctified” day: God blessed the actual day (Gen 2:3), the moment of time when the whole of Creation is ready to do what it was made for.

Hallowed time is exceptional for people perpetually re-absorbed into their finitude. Chambers remarked on

the come-down [following perception] to categories and numbers, to the time of day, [which] returns us and things to the objective world.”

Things in their categories are things that cease to be fully known, are things contained for reference and use. Things that are countable are already reduced. Things in time are things fallen back into the river of illusion flowing  on toward death. We are in an ambivalent condition.

We are a spiritual centre, surely, but also an object among objects.”

Chambers, Red and Green: A Journal

Nevertheless a certain “intercommunion of oneself with things” is possible for us.

The more we become familiar with the experiences that perception brings the more we become aware of an inherent gentleness in the intercommunion of oneself with things. So gentleness of reception is also a communication that influences the outside world. Finally, perception itself becomes a ‘forgotten awareness that just is with all the common naturalness of those common things seen out of the window’ or inside the house or any place….”

Chambers, “Perceptual Realism,” cited in
Jack Chambers: A Retrospective

5 | ‘Existential schizophrenia’

Chambers began to work on Sunday Morning No. 2 in 1968. He had been moved to work in this style by an experience in October of that year.

On a bright October morning in 1968, he checked his rear-view mirror while travelling east on the 401 toward Toronto. He caught a glimpse of the landscape behind him: a majestic vista of russet trees and lush green hillside beneath an endlessly wide-open sky. It was a moment, he later wrote, of heightened amazement, ‘where reality is so imminent that one feels he has stepped off the conveyor belt of time’.”

Angel, “Unfinished Business”

The resulting painting was 401 Towards London No. 1 (1968–69). In an article on what seems to have been Chambers’s last work, left unfinished, Sara Angel writes,

He began each of [these] pieces with a grid of perfectly spaced horizontal and vertical lines drawn over a photo, usually one he took himself. Then, working square by square, he transferred every detail of his source image onto a large plywood or canvas surface on which he had placed corresponding lines. Calling the paintings he made prior to 1968 ego driven, he began to focus on subjects of everyday life. … [Then] in 1969, after months of feeling unwell, Jack Chambers was diagnosed with acute myeloblastic leukemia, a terminal illness that kills its victims in approximately three months if untreated.”

Angel, “Unfinished Business”

Chambers lived and worked for another decade, dying in 1978. The issue of his later pictures, which I have chosen to look at in Sunday Morning No. 2, is, of course, our lives. We only assume or suppose that we know the nature of reality – stunningly obtuse if our basis for this is the ‘message of our senses’. Even when our senses are reliable, the nature of the appearance of things holds its place in a reality that … – the senses do not tell us what that reality is. We might imagine them to be doing so, but why would we pick the voice of the visible to tell us what sort of a world this is. If we believe in light, and optics, then we believe in energy, which is invisible. The picture we ordinarily make of things, assuming what energy is what, is a fantasy.

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.”

 Iris Murdoch, “Profile,” The Times (15 April 1983)

The situation for people who are religious is no better; Chambers himself made this clear. – I don’t know whether the author of the recent article on Chambers’s unfinished painting (which he had been calling “Lunch”, though, this author tells us, it had earlier been referred to as “Sunday Noon”) .. do not know whether she is a religious person. It is not beyond the capacity of a religious person to say, as she did about Chambers’s paintings,

In all of the Sunday Morning works, the artist’s message remains clear: the Holy Spirit dwells among his family.”

Angel, “Unfinished Business”

But just to make such a statement, as if you were talking about insurance coverage, is already to sink back into the world of finitude,… time,… objects,… categories, as you most always will, because we are riddled with the illusion that our language, like our senses, gets everything pretty much as it is. Chambers was concerned with the reality uncontainable in a message.

The problem for every truly religious person is the struggle against the illusion that keeps us out of reality and makes us comfortable with illusion.

In 2014 Pope Francis, at the Christmas meeting he holds annually with the Vatican Curia (the cardinals, bishops, and priests who run the administration) spoke to this group of august men in their spiritual robes (in the film released by Wim Wenders in 2018, Pope Francis: A Man of His Word, you can see them listening to him). He listed fifteen “ailments of the Curia” that he said had to be treated; one of these he called suffering from “existential schizophrenia”.

It’s the sickness of those who live a double life, fruit of hypocrisy that is typical of mediocre and progressive spiritual emptiness that academic degrees cannot fill.”

“A List of Pope Francis’ 15 ‘Ailments of the Curia’,”
AP News.com (22 Dec 2014)

The religious all live this double life, and are at risk of saying that their general emptiness is fulness. The reality of things is accessible via the acts and energies of God, in all His three persons, but we are ordinarily very far, on account of the way we think and live, from reaching out and pulling hard against the hand that is extended to us, to draw us into the world. Chambers extends his own hand, but even here we risk reducing his work to our way of framing things.

We are generally always floating along in the waters of oblivion thinking that we can see what is in our room, in the rear-view mirror, or in the street, when the world is too rich, said Chambers, to be knowable. The ordinarily religious who have all escaped this condition repeatedly nevertheless tend to be pulled back and forth between states that are not integrated  the trouble perhaps being that we are trying to integrate them. The two minds of the ‘schizophrenic’ are probably not meant to be joined. If “the artist’s message” in his last work is that “the Holy Spirit dwells among his family” then Chambers was not attempting to deliver it as a message; his concern was the experience and perception of the reality.

The school friend who had later become a Dominican and who was in touch with him during his illness wrote,

The onslaught of leukemia produced in Jack a traumatic reaction of desolation and isolation. He was forced to contemplate his own death, to realize that he was simply disintegrating by degrees and becoming a part of ‘the economy of matter’. … [He wrote,] ‘It is hard now to believe that I was baptized a Catholic in Spain in 1957, and had no other fruit to reap than this.’ He then went on to confide, ‘My own free will had killed me, body and soul’.”

McInnes, To Rise With the Light, 7, excerpting
Jack Chambers’s letter to Fr. Mclnnes of 15 November 1971

The invisible once seen remains there unseen, in obedience to the will.

Artist
Jack Chambers (1931-1978)

Date
1968–70

Collection
Loch Gallery, Toronto

Titled there
Sunday Morning No. 2

Medium
Oil on wood

Dimensions
121.9 x 121.9  cm

Photo credits
Loch Gallery, Toronto

.