Redeeming Vision (Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt)

Redeeming Vision is exactly what its subtitle states: "a Christian guide to looking at and learning from art." Here, Weichbrodt teaches us "how to look" in part one by providing tools and techniques for approaching art. She then applies it in parts two and three with walking us through example artworks and showing how we can use each to "love the Lord your God" and "love your neighbor as yourself." An outline follows.

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Part One: How to Look

• The toolbox: how we look closely; our tools for visual analysis, "which is a crucial part of engaging with artworks." Here, she covers:
• formal elements (line, shape, form, color, value, space, texture)
• formal principles (unity, balance, movement, rhythm, emphasis, contrast)
• style (representational to abstract, along this spectrum: naturalism-idealism-stylization-abstraction)
• The archive: how we interpret, which includes historical context of an artwork. This is "a way of understanding how we make meaning. Our archive is our mental collection of other things we have seen . . . that help us make sense of new images and well as new experiences and people."
• The frame: an artwork's physical context, "which can play a significant role in our experience of the artwork."

Part Two: Love the Lord Your God

Here, she considers "three different responses to artworks that can cultivate our commitment to God [by comfessing our idols], awe at his transcendence, and gratitude for his presence." She demonstrates that "we can learn from a whole range of visual langauges, from representational to nonobjective art."

• Confessing our idols
• Wondering at God's transcendence (abstract art)
• Delighting in God's presence (representational art)

Part Three: Love Your Neighbor as Yourself

Here, she demonstrates that artwork can help us grow in love for our neighbor by developing the areas listed below.

• Growing in Curiosity: portraiture
• Sharing our space: landscape
• Allowing for complexity: art of the everyday
• Learning to lament: the art of history
• Redeeming vision

Ultimately, the goal is to be "willing to be changed by what we see, acknowledging the power of artworks as cultural liturgies and seeking to purposefully build new liturgies that reiterate the story we are truly a part of: creation, fall, redemption, and restoration."

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This is an excellent resource and wonderful introduction to art that I have been seeking for some time. Not only is her part one outstanding, giving the vocabulary to better describe what we see, but her parts two and three are thought-provoking and helpful, guiding us to be more aware and analytical in our approach. Ultimately, she achieves her goal of equipping us to have 'redeeming vision.' Highly recommended.

I conclude with one comment: her analysis assumes a deep intentionality in each artwork: in other words, she looks at many facets of a piece assuming the artist was quite intentional about each, in both form and message. Is that true? It may be. I hope it is. Sometimes, though, I scratched my head and asked "is that the only interpretation? Could the artist have meant something very different or been unaware of that angle? And if so, is that, in and of itself, meaningful?" I don't always know the answers . . . but I'm thankful this book has given me the tools to both see better and ask better questions.

Rating: A