Beauty Beheld

Beauty beheld

A story of a young artist named Westen as told by CARLY ROSE JACKSON – The Christian Science Journal, Jan. 2009

WESTEN MUNTAIN NEVER ASPIRED to become an artist.

“Smart people,” she jokes, “take one look at a career in the visual arts and run the other way!”

Ever since Westen picked up the French horn in fifth grade, she thought she would become a musician. But once in college, she realized that she no longer wanted to put in the many hours of practice that professional musicians require. She felt drawn to photography, and after enrolling in a class, she found it so satisfying that she declared art as her major. That summer she applied to the Chautauqua Institute in New York and became immersed in the visual arts with students from some of the finest art schools in the US. As Westen tells it, the summer program was extremely challenging. But the experience set her career in motion. “That summer,” Westen explains, “was one of the best things that ever happened to me, because somewhere in there, I discovered that this was me, this was what I wanted.” That same summer she made her first woodblock reduction prints. She says that the form looked and felt exactly like the right medium for her to express the beauty of the world. Today, like many young professional artists, Westen works at a studio she shares with about a dozen other artists. A big, sunny room in a refurbished elementary school, the studio in Arlington, Virginia, is near the home she shares with her husband, Mark. To prepare for her day, Westen says that each morning before going to the studio, she typically studies the weekly Christian Science Bible Lesson, which gives her a spiritual framework to approach her life and her work. She says that when dealing with economic stresses, career decisions, or the need for inspiration in conceptualizing a new piece, she finds solutions by seeking God’s guidance.

Creating woodblock prints

Because creating a woodblock print involves so many steps, it takes Westen about a month to complete a single print. As she recounts the process, when she begins a new piece, she carefully plans in a detailed drawing the colors she wants to use. From light to dark, from large areas to little dots, each step must be mapped out, because in reduction printing, the artist uses only one wooden block for many layers of color. After she prints one color, she cuts away more of the wooden block to print the next color. “It’s a very meticulous process,” Westen says. And what if she makes a mistake? She explains:

“God has always shown me how to fix things that to me seemed irredeemable.”

For example, in a recent print, Westen tried a new technique to depict sea grasses. “It would have worked beautifully,” she says, “except that I didn’t plan the colors right.” When she realized that she’d carved too much of the block away, she thought it would have to be discarded. But after already having worked so long on the print, the thought of giving it up was too upsetting. As she prayed about what to do, she realized that her feelings of personal responsibility for the print had to be discarded—not the print. Westen says she turned to the spiritual interpretation of man in the Glossary of Science and Health: “The compound idea of infinite Spirit; the spiritual image and likeness of God; the full representation of Mind” (p. 591). To understand the significance of being the spiritual image of God, she says she just had to know the truth that “deep in my heart, the only thing I could ever do is reflect God’s creative powers.” Once she stopped thinking of herself as having made a mistake—as having some personal power to be the creator—new ideas flooded into her liberated thought. With a sense of freedom and now much more serene, she found a new way to print the colors she needed—and at the same time she learned a valuable lesson in humility.

Discovering unlimited resources

Later on, Westen learned another lesson in humility when she took the step of working full-time on her artwork. As she watched her husband, a teacher, struggle with different aspects of his job, she began to wonder if it was fair for her to be an artist with no immediate means of support, while her husband went into “the salt mines” every day. Her guilty feelings grew to the point that they were interfering with her relationship with her husband. She knew something had to change. Westen visited a nearby Christian Science Reading Room, where she listened to a Christian Science Sentinel Radio CD about discovering a sense of purpose. By the end of the CD, she realized that she had let fear and feelings of worthlessness take over her thoughts. She was afraid of not having enough to support her husband and herself, and she felt worthless because her husband stayed at a difficult job to support them, while she went to the studio. At this point, she realized she had to see herself as spiritual—as the very expression of God—whose work and sustaining supply were entirely spiritual. She assured herself that her work in the studio was the work of love, and since God is Love itself and therefore the source of all love, God would supply all her needs. Since this profound realization and her ongoing acknowledgment that her work is actually God’s work, she and her husband have not wanted for anything. And not surprisingly, Westen has found her work more fulfilling.

Capturing natural beauty

Clearly, Westen sees every print as an expression of the beauty, color, and order of God’s creation. She strives in her printmaking to give her audience the opportunity to spend a moment in gratitude for the natural beauty of the world. Her first prints were of animals—panda bears, rabbits, turtles, frogs. As she says, “There’s a simplicity, an innocence, about animals.” As her concept of God has grown into sharper focus, her prints have become more complex and detailed, further reflecting the infi nitude of God’s creation. Her later prints show grasses, leaves, trees, and furrows against starry, sunny, and windy skies. Westen got the idea for a recent series of landscape prints that she titled “Lovesong” while on a roadtrip with her husband through Pennsylvania and Ohio on visits with her in-laws and her parents. Too shy to ask her brand-new in-laws to slow down the car so she could sketch the unspoiled landscape, she challenged herself to capture scenes with her digital camera from behind the window of the car going 50 or 60 miles per hour. Aft er about a year of collecting these color photographs, she realized the landscapes would be the perfect subject for her prints. Westen describes the complexities of the landscapes: “The trees are made up of thousands of quivering leaves, each dancing to its own secret song; the infinite number of planes that compose the trees’ bark are alive with bugs and birds; each blade of grass glows in the sunshine.” Because colors are printed on top of other colors, sometimes the bottom layers glint through the darker top layers. Each image comprises dots of color that come together to form a unique picture. To Westen, the beauty in nature and art hint at the beauty and perfection of God’s spiritual creation. As Mary Baker Eddy wrote, “In our immature sense of spiritual things, let us say of the beauties of the sensuous universe: ‘I love your promise; and shall know, some time, the spiritual reality and substance of form, light, and color, of what I now through you discern dimly; and knowing this, I shall be satisfied’ ” (Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 87).

You may also be interested in: