As the world went into lockdown in recent months, the Getty Museum came up with a challenge: recreate a famous artwork with objects you can find around the home.
Of course, some essential healthcare workers weren’t going to miss out. Here’s a group that recreated da Vinci’s Last Supper around a table in a hospital in Paris.
For those rising to the challenge at home it was no surprise that the precious roll of toilet paper frequently featured in these works.
In years to come, art historians may need to create a genre for toilet-paper related art because the internet is rolling it out!
Here’s one of my favourites.
What a fruitful imagination is at work here?
Whoever would have thought that something like a kiwi fruit and a banana could be part of a reconstruction of Vermeer’s timeless portrait of the Girl with a Pearl Earring?
Of course, people of faith are always being invited to see the world differently.
Here’s a picture of rubble from a recent earthquake.
And I ask that you use it to help yourself picture Jerusalem after the Babylonians had been through.
You’re in the post-exilic community and you’re trying to rebuild the temple and whatever your eye takes in seems so uninspiring. Maybe your two eyes aren’t seeing rightly? What if you had a more complete vision, something like seven eyes?
The word of the Lord comes through Zechariah: “Who dares despise the day of small things, since the seven eyes of the LORD that range throughout the earth will rejoice when they see the chosen capstone in the hand of Zerubbabel?”
For people of faith, it’s always a matter of seeing: "‘Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the LORD Almighty."
Here’s an ordinary field with ordinary camels.
You might barely notice it as you walked along or even if it were photographed for a real estate website but what if you knew that someone had buried a treasure there?
Jesus said that when you know there’s a treasure in a field you get taken over with joy and you will sell everything you have just to buy it.
Looking at the cross also requires the right eyes, it beckons for a faithful imagination.
Of course, the crucifixion of Jesus is tragic – physical pain, grief-stricken friends, the defeat of dreams – captured with such vulnerable beauty in this painting by van der Weyden.
And yet…
Take a look at another depiction from the imagination of Salvador Dali.
Influenced by a vision of St John of the Cross, Dali pictures a Christ ruling over space and time from the cross. Perhaps art critics won’t need to invent a genre for toilet roll art, for the art that appropriates Vermeer with a kiwi fruit and banana. All of this is probably a type of surrealism, a way of seeing beyond and above the apparently real, a way of seeing the treasure hidden in a field.
Jesus would say those who do that are not so much surrealists as those who have seen the truth and imagined the real.