Hello! I’m Billie. Thank you if you are reading this. Welcome to this new site: about beautiful, tremblingly grubby-fingered life-giving art.
I love literature, and need music. ‘Art Catholic’ means, simply, that I see God in this art.
For the rest of my writing, this may well only be implicit, but I believe – God animates the very core of everything. He is the justification and the connection of art to real life. God is the earth wire of art, the pungent salt and the demand which makes anything challenging. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote something remarkable: “We want the sense of the saturation of Christ’s blood upon the souls of our poets, that it may cry through them in answer to the ceaseless wail of the Sphinx of our humanity, expounding agony into renovation. Something of this has been perceived in art when its glory was at the fullest”.*
I think this ‘ethic’ is understandable, transposable, and maybe even applicable to more than merely Christians. Here’s something to make you wonder: I’m not even a ‘catholic’.
But really, looking at this salty art will be the focus of this blog. It will be there to move and shift, to ‘disturb us’ and pull us into love and anger, singsong and sad bittersweet passion: just different bits of life from an estranged angle.
I plan to reflect on different pieces at a time.
* Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘Some Account of the Greek Christian Poets’.
the art catholic 