IN THE STUDIO
Learning to See:
From Urban Landscapes to Jesus' Parables
by James B. Janknegt
James B. Janknegt is a painter tending a small piece of land in a small town 25 miles east of Austin, Texas. He received a BFA from the University of Texas, an MA and an MFA from the University of Iowa. He and his wife are active in the local Catholic Church where they play music and lead the program for adult initiation. When he is not painting, he enjoys reading, gardening, and building things. He recently published a book of his parable paintings called “Lenten Meditations” that is available on his web site: www.bcartfarm.com.
James B. Janknegt is a painter tending a small piece of land in a small town 25 miles east of Austin, Texas. He received a BFA from the University of Texas, an MA and an MFA from the University of Iowa. He and his wife are active in the local Catholic Church where they play music and lead the program for adult initiation. When he is not painting, he enjoys reading, gardening, and building things. He recently published a book of his parable paintings called “Lenten Meditations” that is available on his web site: www.bcartfarm.com.
I do not remember a time when I did not want to be an artist. I had a deaf great-aunt who was a terrific landscape painter. Although she had ceased painting by the time I was aware of her being a painter, her studio still existed on her back porch. I could go out there and smell the oil paint and feel the bristle brushes, and the fire to be an artist got into my blood. I liked to draw and received encouragement from my doctor when I went to get my physical to enter first grade. He praised the drawing I did of a man, pointing out the attention to detail.
My junior high school teacher literally changed my life one day in class as she lectured on the difference between merely looking and really seeing. The proverbial light bulb went off in my head, and my way of seeing the world shifted. Everywhere I looked, I would mentally draw, no longer seeing the objects: chairs, apples, etc., but instead seeing shapes, lines, colors, light, and shade. This new insight spurred me—already naturally gifted—to draw and paint more incessantly. My teacher recommended that I be accepted in the Saturday Morning Art Project, a program for public school kids who, for three hours each Saturday morning, were taught by art education graduate students from the University of Texas. These students offered lessons in drawing, painting, photography, jewelry making, and more. I was fortunate to attend the program through my junior high and high school years. Already feeling a part of the University of Texas, I did not even consider going to college anywhere else. Besides, they offered me a scholarship.
But I faced a crisis. In 1971, when I was seventeen, I had a dramatic spiritual experience—a conversion, if you will. I chose to cast my lot in with Jesus and follow him via an interdenominational Christian group that ran a Christian coffee house near the University’s campus. I became what was affectionately called a Jesus Freak. We looked like hippies with long hair, bellbottom jeans, and tie-dye, but eschewed sex and drugs (but not rock and roll), and attempted to live a radical Christian lifestyle. For example, we would take turns spending the night sleeping on the carpet in the coffee house. Anyone needing a place to stay could come crash with us on the floor. We had a clothes pantry, we fed people, and we ran a crisis center where anyone could come for help. We took people into our homes to help them get a fresh start. We did all of this, along with holding prayer meetings, conducting Bible studies, and performing coffee house evangelism. But nowhere in this outfit or anyplace I knew to look did I find any Christians making art. Was being an artist a valid pursuit for a Christian? That was the question I needed to have answered. While being deeply spiritual, this group was not theologically or philosophically sophisticated. They studied the Bible and listened to contemporary spiritual teachers, but did not have much use for anything else. So I did the only thing I knew how to do—and that was pray. I asked God if being an artist was a legitimate pursuit, in line with my desire to follow Christ radically.
One day while waiting to go to work at the movie theater, where I was an usher for $1.05 an hour, I was perusing the art books in the mall bookstore. I pulled a big coffee table book about Salvador Dali off the shelf. I cracked the book and it fell open to his painting of St. John of the Cross. I got weak in the knees; that still, small voice, inaudible but as clear as a bell, confirmed my vocation to be an artist. I spent a month’s pay on that book—the first art book I ever bought. I was launched on the path of becoming a Christian artist.
I began to paint paintings in a Dali-esque style and hung them in the coffeehouse. I also painted several murals for the coffee house and did drawings for an underground newspaper. I was generally encouraged in my artistic endeavors by this Christian group, and was happy to use my talents.
When I finally began to attend art school at the University of Texas, I found myself to be something of a fish out of water, not only for being a Christian, but for wanting to do figurative, narrative work. I had no knowledge of contemporary art, and very little knowledge of art history, but I knew what I wanted to paint. Third generation abstract expressionism was all the rage, but the teaching of traditional craft and technique was not in vogue. I remember hearing about the faculty lobbying to do away with life drawing as unnecessary. (Thankfully, they never did). My first assignment in my first painting class was to paint an abstract painting. That was all the instruction we got. I had no idea what the philosophy or intent behind abstract expressionism or any other ’ism was at the time. I did my best and came up with a painting that looked like a badly designed paisley shirt. At that point, I decided to disregard the assignments, paint what I wanted, and butt heads with the instructor for the rest of the semester. He must have at least respected my hard-headedness, because he gave me an A. To be fair, not every teacher was like this, and I had a couple of great ones—including Bob Levers, a painter, and Lee Chesney, a printmaking instructor.
I graduated with a B.F.A. in studio art and moved to Iowa City to attend grad school in printmaking. I admit I am stubborn, and ended up butting heads with Mauricio Lasansky, the famed head of the printmaking department. Mostly, I just could not accomplish in printmaking what he wanted me to do, which was work from my gut. I did not know how to do that, having primarily worked from my head. He was right about me needing to inject more feeling into my work, but I just could not do it. So halfway through the program, I switched to drawing and painting. Suddenly, in this different media, I could do what Lasansky had wanted me to do all along. It also happened to coincide with going through a separation and divorce, which forced me to delve into some deep, unresolved feelings about my father, who was bi-polar during my childhood and teenage years. I began to draw about my childhood in a looser, more expressive style. I followed those feelings down the rabbit hole and finally accepted the fact that I was a melancholy personality. I gave myself permission to express those feelings in my work.
After I moved back to Austin upon graduating with an M.A. and M.F.A., I continued to paint and express my darker feelings with a long series of urban landscapes. I would take a campstool and sit on a downtown Austin street corner and sketch the city at night. I attempted to capture the urban angst I sensed with buildings, streets, and every kind of urban light: neon signs, billboards, streetlights, and stoplights. My drawing was very naturalistic, but the color and lighting was expressionistic. Towards the end of this period, I introduced a more cubistic rendering of space and turned away from naturalism in order to be even more expressive. I had a growing sense that going beyond traditional western perspective could represent reality more expressively.
I followed a bunch of my Jesus Freak friends into the Episcopal church after returning to Austin from graduate school and became increasingly fond of the liturgical stream of the church. While in the Episcopal Church, I created two suites of artwork for mass booklets used in the weekly liturgy: “The Mass for the Lamb of God” and “The Mass for the High King of Heaven.”
In 1989, I married my wife, Melissa, and moved into her suburban home just blocks away from the neighborhood where I grew up in in Austin. Married life made me happy, and my painting shifted away from the urban landscapes I had been doing, and I began to celebrate the suburban life I had known as a child in the 50s and 60s. I found I had to rely increasingly on a cubist rendering of space to represent adequately the long, spread out visual landscape of suburban Austin. The paintings were filled with color, light, plants, homes, and people.
Throughout my urban and suburban landscape periods, my work was not overtly religious in nature. Occasionally, I would include Christian symbolism worked into a landscape or still life, but unless you knew what to look for, it would not be obvious. One exception was a painting I did in 1985 as a commission for a friend of mine, Mark Smith, who was curating a show called “Contemporary Altarpieces.” He knew I was a Christian and invited me to do a painting for this exhibit. I created a large painting set in the parking lot of a shopping mall just west of downtown Austin; the city is visible in the background. Jesus is being crucified on a light pole while shoppers react in various ways. On the light pole, neon signs proclaim theological insights into the crucifixion, such as “Open 24 Hours,” and “Eat Here,” and “No Vacancy.” Having studied a fair amount of art history at this point, I did not really think I was doing anything out of the ordinary by depicting a biblical scene in a contemporary setting. Is this not what most artists like Rembrandt and Caravaggio had done? Their Bible paintings are clearly set in their time and space, not in some biblically recreated, first-century Jerusalem. I thought I was merely following a time-honored tradition, albeit updated to my own time. The owner of the building the exhibit was in did not see it that way. Convinced that the painting was blasphemous, he insisted Mark remove the painting from the exhibit. Mark, being a man of great integrity, refused, and instead removed the entire show. It was a tempest in a teapot and made the front page of the Austin newspaper.
In the late 1990s, I did a series of suburban paintings with a subtext of the apocalypse as everyone was looking forward to the end of the century. Again, the religious ideas were sublimated in the landscapes. If one was not familiar with the religious ideas as conveyed by the titles, the content remained mysterious.
Shortly after this exhibit, I admitted to myself that my faith had been and continued to be the still, focal point around which the rest of my life revolved. Why not be more intentional about it in my painting? If I had something to say, why not say it? I made a commitment to paint only religious imagery in my work from that point on. The thrust of art historical writing would have us believe that religious painting slowly faded away after the Baroque until it became non-existent in the 19th and 20th centuries. I was always on the look out for the outlier—the eccentric artist who swam upstream and continued to paint in the religious tradition. I found many of them.
One of my favorites turned out to be Stanley Spencer. I ran across several paintings of his in which he depicts Jesus in the desert, meditating on things of nature. His intention was to paint enough of these to create a Lenten meditation series. Unfortunately, he never followed through on his idea, but it planted a seed in my brain. Still being a bit melancholic, penitential seasons like Lent and Advent are right up my alley. So I thought, why not follow up on Spencer’s idea and do a series of paintings for Lent? This fit right into my goal of painting religious inspired paintings. So I proceeded to paint a series of paintings based on Jesus’ parables. Depending on how you count them, there are over forty different parables, and the imagery in each is very vivid. While I wanted to do religious painting, I did not want to do it in a classical religious style. I wanted the imagery to be contemporary and modern. Jesus uses untraditional religious imagery in his parables. His subjects have to do with agriculture, business, cooking, marriage, etc. I began studying the parables as I imagine a priest or pastor would study to prepare for a homily or sermon. Many of the parables turn on Jesus defying the expectations of his audience by challenging their cultural assumptions. These moments are difficult to spot unless one has access to the cultural context in which they were told, and one can only get that by studying sources other than the Bible. Once I felt I grasped the original meaning of the parable, I attempted to translate the concept in two ways. First, I tried to express the parable’s meaning in contemporary terms. Second, I used visual imagery that is familiar to our culture. Sometimes the imagery is very similar to the imagery Jesus used, but other times the imagery, while retaining the original intent, is visually different. As an example, I translated the parable of the mustard seed into a visual image of an oak tree, as most people in the United States do not have a visual idea of what a mustard seed or a mustard plant looks like, but most everyone knows what an acorn and an oak tree look like. The core concept—that something very big started out as something very small—translates visually into a contrast between a small acorn and a huge oak tree.
I also realized that there are many formal, stylistic characteristics shared between cubism, medieval painting, and icon painting. While cubism attempts to see reality from multiple points of view simultaneously or multiple time periods simultaneously, an icon painter’s use of space is also non-naturalistic. The inverted perspective is a vehicle to “see” the part of reality that cannot be seen. I take advantage of a non-naturalistic use of space in my work while still painting in a realistic yet simplified, somewhat primitive style. In a similar way that I used cubism in order to depict suburban neighborhoods effectively, the style I use in the parable paintings is necessary to create a narrative that may have multiple points of view, the same character depicted multiple times, or a sequential time or space narrative. This would not be possible if I limited myself to painting in a naturalistic style. Sometimes I have found it necessary to create multiple panels, either in a diptych or triptych, to convey a single parable. This also allows me to convey a sense of movement through space in the same painting. I also discovered a technique in icon painting where a border is used to depict many scenes from the life of a saint, while a larger, portrait type painting dominates the center. I liked the dialogue created between the border and the center. I began creating borders in my paintings of parables and letting the images around the edge speak to the image in the center. Medieval painters also used scale as a way to emphasize the hierarchy of content in a painting, or to minimize architectural elements in such a way as to create a context, but in a stylized, symbolic way. These elements also found their way into my work.
Besides working on the parable series, I have done various other paintings based on biblical stories or biblical imagery using similar techniques as I used in the parable paintings. I have done ten of the mysteries of the rosary and the fourteen stations of the cross, as well as many other paintings based on the biblical narratives.
While I agree that the primary purpose of a work of art is to be visually interesting (I would even say beautiful), I was never willing to stop there. On looking back at the history of art, we see art doing work—telling a story, taking us to a distant time or place, providing an entry to a state of devotion or worship, even teaching those who are illiterate. The Catholic Church has always embraced and defended the visual arts, and as I have embraced the Catholic Church, I have become increasingly aware of not only her long history of understanding and clarifying theology, but also the Church’s love of and embrace of philosophy and its ramifications for the arts. St. Thomas Aquinas is often revered as the greatest philosophical voice of the Church and his ideas (as little as I have begun to understand them) resonate with me in a powerful way. If we accept the premise that it is the role of the artist to create something beautiful, we have to ask ourselves: what is beauty? St. Thomas responds with the classical definition. Beauty consists of wholeness, harmony, and clarity. I think I understand wholeness. Nothing is missing and nothing is extraneous in a work of art. And I think I comprehend harmony. All of the individual pieces work together to create a whole more pleasing than the individual parts, each part occupying its rightful place. But I was not sure what he meant by clarity until I stumbled across James Joyce’s understanding that equates clarity with quiddity or the “what-ness” of a thing. I believe this resonated with me so strongly because my goal as an artist all along has been to make visible the reality of a spiritual world that exists but can only be experienced via the concrete, material world. Understanding the true quiddity of a thing not only reveals something about the thing, but also something about the creator of the thing.
As an artist, I strive to understand the “what-ness” of a thing by not just looking at it, but really “seeing” it, as my teacher inspired me to do so long ago. I try to arrive at an understanding of its essence through visual representation. Just as Jesus revealed the essence of the Kingdom of God through telling parables about mundane, everyday reality, I have tried to gain an understanding of Jesus’ parables by painting them in the language of everyday American experience: gardening and McDonalds, oak trees and business managers, lamps and money, and bread and wine.
My junior high school teacher literally changed my life one day in class as she lectured on the difference between merely looking and really seeing. The proverbial light bulb went off in my head, and my way of seeing the world shifted. Everywhere I looked, I would mentally draw, no longer seeing the objects: chairs, apples, etc., but instead seeing shapes, lines, colors, light, and shade. This new insight spurred me—already naturally gifted—to draw and paint more incessantly. My teacher recommended that I be accepted in the Saturday Morning Art Project, a program for public school kids who, for three hours each Saturday morning, were taught by art education graduate students from the University of Texas. These students offered lessons in drawing, painting, photography, jewelry making, and more. I was fortunate to attend the program through my junior high and high school years. Already feeling a part of the University of Texas, I did not even consider going to college anywhere else. Besides, they offered me a scholarship.
But I faced a crisis. In 1971, when I was seventeen, I had a dramatic spiritual experience—a conversion, if you will. I chose to cast my lot in with Jesus and follow him via an interdenominational Christian group that ran a Christian coffee house near the University’s campus. I became what was affectionately called a Jesus Freak. We looked like hippies with long hair, bellbottom jeans, and tie-dye, but eschewed sex and drugs (but not rock and roll), and attempted to live a radical Christian lifestyle. For example, we would take turns spending the night sleeping on the carpet in the coffee house. Anyone needing a place to stay could come crash with us on the floor. We had a clothes pantry, we fed people, and we ran a crisis center where anyone could come for help. We took people into our homes to help them get a fresh start. We did all of this, along with holding prayer meetings, conducting Bible studies, and performing coffee house evangelism. But nowhere in this outfit or anyplace I knew to look did I find any Christians making art. Was being an artist a valid pursuit for a Christian? That was the question I needed to have answered. While being deeply spiritual, this group was not theologically or philosophically sophisticated. They studied the Bible and listened to contemporary spiritual teachers, but did not have much use for anything else. So I did the only thing I knew how to do—and that was pray. I asked God if being an artist was a legitimate pursuit, in line with my desire to follow Christ radically.
One day while waiting to go to work at the movie theater, where I was an usher for $1.05 an hour, I was perusing the art books in the mall bookstore. I pulled a big coffee table book about Salvador Dali off the shelf. I cracked the book and it fell open to his painting of St. John of the Cross. I got weak in the knees; that still, small voice, inaudible but as clear as a bell, confirmed my vocation to be an artist. I spent a month’s pay on that book—the first art book I ever bought. I was launched on the path of becoming a Christian artist.
I began to paint paintings in a Dali-esque style and hung them in the coffeehouse. I also painted several murals for the coffee house and did drawings for an underground newspaper. I was generally encouraged in my artistic endeavors by this Christian group, and was happy to use my talents.
When I finally began to attend art school at the University of Texas, I found myself to be something of a fish out of water, not only for being a Christian, but for wanting to do figurative, narrative work. I had no knowledge of contemporary art, and very little knowledge of art history, but I knew what I wanted to paint. Third generation abstract expressionism was all the rage, but the teaching of traditional craft and technique was not in vogue. I remember hearing about the faculty lobbying to do away with life drawing as unnecessary. (Thankfully, they never did). My first assignment in my first painting class was to paint an abstract painting. That was all the instruction we got. I had no idea what the philosophy or intent behind abstract expressionism or any other ’ism was at the time. I did my best and came up with a painting that looked like a badly designed paisley shirt. At that point, I decided to disregard the assignments, paint what I wanted, and butt heads with the instructor for the rest of the semester. He must have at least respected my hard-headedness, because he gave me an A. To be fair, not every teacher was like this, and I had a couple of great ones—including Bob Levers, a painter, and Lee Chesney, a printmaking instructor.
I graduated with a B.F.A. in studio art and moved to Iowa City to attend grad school in printmaking. I admit I am stubborn, and ended up butting heads with Mauricio Lasansky, the famed head of the printmaking department. Mostly, I just could not accomplish in printmaking what he wanted me to do, which was work from my gut. I did not know how to do that, having primarily worked from my head. He was right about me needing to inject more feeling into my work, but I just could not do it. So halfway through the program, I switched to drawing and painting. Suddenly, in this different media, I could do what Lasansky had wanted me to do all along. It also happened to coincide with going through a separation and divorce, which forced me to delve into some deep, unresolved feelings about my father, who was bi-polar during my childhood and teenage years. I began to draw about my childhood in a looser, more expressive style. I followed those feelings down the rabbit hole and finally accepted the fact that I was a melancholy personality. I gave myself permission to express those feelings in my work.
After I moved back to Austin upon graduating with an M.A. and M.F.A., I continued to paint and express my darker feelings with a long series of urban landscapes. I would take a campstool and sit on a downtown Austin street corner and sketch the city at night. I attempted to capture the urban angst I sensed with buildings, streets, and every kind of urban light: neon signs, billboards, streetlights, and stoplights. My drawing was very naturalistic, but the color and lighting was expressionistic. Towards the end of this period, I introduced a more cubistic rendering of space and turned away from naturalism in order to be even more expressive. I had a growing sense that going beyond traditional western perspective could represent reality more expressively.
I followed a bunch of my Jesus Freak friends into the Episcopal church after returning to Austin from graduate school and became increasingly fond of the liturgical stream of the church. While in the Episcopal Church, I created two suites of artwork for mass booklets used in the weekly liturgy: “The Mass for the Lamb of God” and “The Mass for the High King of Heaven.”
In 1989, I married my wife, Melissa, and moved into her suburban home just blocks away from the neighborhood where I grew up in in Austin. Married life made me happy, and my painting shifted away from the urban landscapes I had been doing, and I began to celebrate the suburban life I had known as a child in the 50s and 60s. I found I had to rely increasingly on a cubist rendering of space to represent adequately the long, spread out visual landscape of suburban Austin. The paintings were filled with color, light, plants, homes, and people.
Throughout my urban and suburban landscape periods, my work was not overtly religious in nature. Occasionally, I would include Christian symbolism worked into a landscape or still life, but unless you knew what to look for, it would not be obvious. One exception was a painting I did in 1985 as a commission for a friend of mine, Mark Smith, who was curating a show called “Contemporary Altarpieces.” He knew I was a Christian and invited me to do a painting for this exhibit. I created a large painting set in the parking lot of a shopping mall just west of downtown Austin; the city is visible in the background. Jesus is being crucified on a light pole while shoppers react in various ways. On the light pole, neon signs proclaim theological insights into the crucifixion, such as “Open 24 Hours,” and “Eat Here,” and “No Vacancy.” Having studied a fair amount of art history at this point, I did not really think I was doing anything out of the ordinary by depicting a biblical scene in a contemporary setting. Is this not what most artists like Rembrandt and Caravaggio had done? Their Bible paintings are clearly set in their time and space, not in some biblically recreated, first-century Jerusalem. I thought I was merely following a time-honored tradition, albeit updated to my own time. The owner of the building the exhibit was in did not see it that way. Convinced that the painting was blasphemous, he insisted Mark remove the painting from the exhibit. Mark, being a man of great integrity, refused, and instead removed the entire show. It was a tempest in a teapot and made the front page of the Austin newspaper.
In the late 1990s, I did a series of suburban paintings with a subtext of the apocalypse as everyone was looking forward to the end of the century. Again, the religious ideas were sublimated in the landscapes. If one was not familiar with the religious ideas as conveyed by the titles, the content remained mysterious.
Shortly after this exhibit, I admitted to myself that my faith had been and continued to be the still, focal point around which the rest of my life revolved. Why not be more intentional about it in my painting? If I had something to say, why not say it? I made a commitment to paint only religious imagery in my work from that point on. The thrust of art historical writing would have us believe that religious painting slowly faded away after the Baroque until it became non-existent in the 19th and 20th centuries. I was always on the look out for the outlier—the eccentric artist who swam upstream and continued to paint in the religious tradition. I found many of them.
One of my favorites turned out to be Stanley Spencer. I ran across several paintings of his in which he depicts Jesus in the desert, meditating on things of nature. His intention was to paint enough of these to create a Lenten meditation series. Unfortunately, he never followed through on his idea, but it planted a seed in my brain. Still being a bit melancholic, penitential seasons like Lent and Advent are right up my alley. So I thought, why not follow up on Spencer’s idea and do a series of paintings for Lent? This fit right into my goal of painting religious inspired paintings. So I proceeded to paint a series of paintings based on Jesus’ parables. Depending on how you count them, there are over forty different parables, and the imagery in each is very vivid. While I wanted to do religious painting, I did not want to do it in a classical religious style. I wanted the imagery to be contemporary and modern. Jesus uses untraditional religious imagery in his parables. His subjects have to do with agriculture, business, cooking, marriage, etc. I began studying the parables as I imagine a priest or pastor would study to prepare for a homily or sermon. Many of the parables turn on Jesus defying the expectations of his audience by challenging their cultural assumptions. These moments are difficult to spot unless one has access to the cultural context in which they were told, and one can only get that by studying sources other than the Bible. Once I felt I grasped the original meaning of the parable, I attempted to translate the concept in two ways. First, I tried to express the parable’s meaning in contemporary terms. Second, I used visual imagery that is familiar to our culture. Sometimes the imagery is very similar to the imagery Jesus used, but other times the imagery, while retaining the original intent, is visually different. As an example, I translated the parable of the mustard seed into a visual image of an oak tree, as most people in the United States do not have a visual idea of what a mustard seed or a mustard plant looks like, but most everyone knows what an acorn and an oak tree look like. The core concept—that something very big started out as something very small—translates visually into a contrast between a small acorn and a huge oak tree.
I also realized that there are many formal, stylistic characteristics shared between cubism, medieval painting, and icon painting. While cubism attempts to see reality from multiple points of view simultaneously or multiple time periods simultaneously, an icon painter’s use of space is also non-naturalistic. The inverted perspective is a vehicle to “see” the part of reality that cannot be seen. I take advantage of a non-naturalistic use of space in my work while still painting in a realistic yet simplified, somewhat primitive style. In a similar way that I used cubism in order to depict suburban neighborhoods effectively, the style I use in the parable paintings is necessary to create a narrative that may have multiple points of view, the same character depicted multiple times, or a sequential time or space narrative. This would not be possible if I limited myself to painting in a naturalistic style. Sometimes I have found it necessary to create multiple panels, either in a diptych or triptych, to convey a single parable. This also allows me to convey a sense of movement through space in the same painting. I also discovered a technique in icon painting where a border is used to depict many scenes from the life of a saint, while a larger, portrait type painting dominates the center. I liked the dialogue created between the border and the center. I began creating borders in my paintings of parables and letting the images around the edge speak to the image in the center. Medieval painters also used scale as a way to emphasize the hierarchy of content in a painting, or to minimize architectural elements in such a way as to create a context, but in a stylized, symbolic way. These elements also found their way into my work.
Besides working on the parable series, I have done various other paintings based on biblical stories or biblical imagery using similar techniques as I used in the parable paintings. I have done ten of the mysteries of the rosary and the fourteen stations of the cross, as well as many other paintings based on the biblical narratives.
While I agree that the primary purpose of a work of art is to be visually interesting (I would even say beautiful), I was never willing to stop there. On looking back at the history of art, we see art doing work—telling a story, taking us to a distant time or place, providing an entry to a state of devotion or worship, even teaching those who are illiterate. The Catholic Church has always embraced and defended the visual arts, and as I have embraced the Catholic Church, I have become increasingly aware of not only her long history of understanding and clarifying theology, but also the Church’s love of and embrace of philosophy and its ramifications for the arts. St. Thomas Aquinas is often revered as the greatest philosophical voice of the Church and his ideas (as little as I have begun to understand them) resonate with me in a powerful way. If we accept the premise that it is the role of the artist to create something beautiful, we have to ask ourselves: what is beauty? St. Thomas responds with the classical definition. Beauty consists of wholeness, harmony, and clarity. I think I understand wholeness. Nothing is missing and nothing is extraneous in a work of art. And I think I comprehend harmony. All of the individual pieces work together to create a whole more pleasing than the individual parts, each part occupying its rightful place. But I was not sure what he meant by clarity until I stumbled across James Joyce’s understanding that equates clarity with quiddity or the “what-ness” of a thing. I believe this resonated with me so strongly because my goal as an artist all along has been to make visible the reality of a spiritual world that exists but can only be experienced via the concrete, material world. Understanding the true quiddity of a thing not only reveals something about the thing, but also something about the creator of the thing.
As an artist, I strive to understand the “what-ness” of a thing by not just looking at it, but really “seeing” it, as my teacher inspired me to do so long ago. I try to arrive at an understanding of its essence through visual representation. Just as Jesus revealed the essence of the Kingdom of God through telling parables about mundane, everyday reality, I have tried to gain an understanding of Jesus’ parables by painting them in the language of everyday American experience: gardening and McDonalds, oak trees and business managers, lamps and money, and bread and wine.
James Janknegt, A Little Leaven, Oil on canvas, 30" x 40", 2008
James Janknegt, Casting Our Crowns, Oil on canvas, 24" x 40", 2002
James Janknegt, Crucifixion at Barton Creek Mall, Acrylic on panel, 96" x 48", 1985
James Janknegt, Flood and Fire, Oil on canvas, 32" x 66", 1998
James Janknegt, Saturday Dusk, Oil on canvas, 36" x 96", 1995
James Janknegt, The Unforgiving Servant, Oil on canvas, 40" x 90", 2016
James Janknegt, Wild Turkey, Acrylic on canvas, 36" x 54", 1982
James Janknegt, World's Smallest Seed, Oil on canvas, 40" x 30", 2003