Logo Design: Cornerstone Presbyterian Church

Here’s a “hot off the griddle” logo design for the saints at the newly organized Cornerstone Presbyterian Church in Franklin, TN.

Chestertonian Musings, Part One

Recently, I actually got around to reading G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, which has been on my “to read” list since time out of mind. As I suspected, I found that I’ve had considerable exposure already to direct quotations of various passages (particularly Chapter Four: The Ethics of Elfland) or have absorbed many of his ideas by osmosis, via my reading of others who were thinking his thoughts after him. At any rate, it was very enjoyable and refreshing to get to absorb these notions in their original context of Chesterton’s masterful and brilliant prose.

There were strains of Chesterton’s thought, however, that I, with a mixture of delight and dismay, discovered that I was encountering for the very first time. Most memorably, in Chapter Six: The Paradoxes of Christianity, I was enthralled to find a brilliant articulation of a notion that has crept in upon my own consciousness over the last several years, but which I have never really attempted to explain or put into words. In that chapter’s introductory paragraph, Chesterton writes:

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.

As a visual artists who dabbles in other disciplines, this whole idea resonates with me very deeply. Indulge me here in a brief and somewhat random excursus:

Is it not very odd, for instance, that shapes so fundamental as the square and the circle, which can be drawn with exactitude using a ruler and/or compass, defy precise mathematical definition and analysis (at least when one takes the very first steps in trying to peel them apart)? I’m referring to the fact that &pi (3.142…), the ratio of a circle’s diameter to its circumference, is an irrational number, one that cannot be expressed as a ratio of two whole numbers, no matter how large. The same goes for √2 (1.414…), which is the ratio between one of a square’s sides and a diagonal drawn between opposing corners. Other very important—and naturally prevalent—numbers have the same slippery characteristics: &phi (the “golden section”, or .618…), and √5 (2.236…), to cite two additional examples. The point is this: I encounter and use things like circles and squares all the time. How can something so basic, simple and ubiquitous be, at the same time, so downright elusive and mystifying—so irrational?

This stubborn refusal of the natural order to be brought into perfect conformity with nice and tidy logical definitions drove some of the ancient Greeks to the point of maddened distraction (the Pythagoreans). But the eventual acquiescence on the part of some to this paradox yielded some real aesthetic triumphs, such as the Parthenon, whose subtle and deceptive entasis and unevenly spaced columns testify to the awareness that a bit of carefully employed non-conformity here and there proves more satisfying than strict adherence to mathematical and logical notions of orderliness and “perfection”.

I think I will have to further explore some of the rambling rabbit trails this topic tends to generate in some additional posts, hence the “Part One” label above. Let me just wrap this one up by expressing my delight in discovering that Chesterton, who possessed a mind and a soul (to say nothing of a body!) far broader and deeper than my own, also acknowledged, exulted in, and reveled in this same phenomenon—and also felt within it the same spur towards faith that I feel. While this hardly constitutes some objective proof of the existence of God, I, like Chesterton, detect an audible echo of the Divine in these things—and a decidedly Trinitarian echo, at that.

Signs of the Times

These difficult economic times certainly call for…well, economy. People (yours truly included) make do with less and find creative ways of cutting corners. More power to us all. Be that as it may, I’ve seen some rather striking examples recently of this sort of thing played out in some local establishments’ efforts to re-brand themselves—efforts which push the whole phenomenon almost to the point of a kind of graphical cannibalism. High scores are certainly in order for their creative bids to save a few dollars on signage, though the jury is still out I suppose on their effectiveness from a marketing standpoint.

Yes, brick and mortar video rental chains are fast going the way of the miller, the cooper and the blacksmith, but I think we’re still pretty far away from being able to offer a new hairdo via web streaming. So who knows, this Bride of Frankenstein-esque re-appropriation of the Hollywood Video brand might actually stick around longer than the original incarnation. Lucky us.

This used to be a little t-shirt shop called T-MAX. Now it’s home to—of course! Just a little switcheroo to the sign and, Voila!—a bookkeeping/income tax preparation service that has a decidedly laid-back and casual vibe going. (Not sure that’s exactly the kind of mojo I want working on my own 1040. I personally prefer my accountants to wear shirts with collars—and ties, pocket protectors and thick glasses in addition would’t exactly do anything to sink my confidence level either, but maybe my own personal preference in this regard is a bit off the ol’ bell curve.)

HCSBSB: New Testament Jerusalem

And so we come at last to the mother of them all. This illustration of Jerusalem as it would have appeared in the first century A.D. was the last one which I completed for the HCSB Study Bible, and it was also the most technically challenging. This was due to the sheer amount of detail, exacerbated by the large size required for the final since this illustration would be doing double duty: a close-up, detailed view of the entire temple complex and surrounding areas would be shown on the same spread which features the two views of Herod’s Temple which I have detailed here previously, and another spread would feature the complete illustration of the entire city.

I proposed two possible views during the sketching phase. One view was from the same angle (southeast) that all of the other, Old Testament views of Jerusalem had employed.

This had the advantage of continuity, but I really felt that a view looking over the Mount of Olives from the east would be more dramatic and would better display the more interesting parts of the city, especially the temple complex.

In either case, I wanted to position things carefully so that (for the complete view) nothing of crucial interest would get lost in the gutter, which is always a concern when working across a full spread, especially in a book which has a large number of pages. Ultimately the second view won out, and then began the process, which progressed in fits in starts over several months, of executing a detailed sketch at full size (19" x 24").

Once this was approved, I backed the sketch up to a piece of bristol board and rendered the final using a technical pen, with the aid of a lightbox. (I couldn’t bear the thought of actually transferring the sketch directly to the board, which essentially would have meant having to draw every detail not twice but three times!) At this point point the deadline was drawing near and I spent several days on end at the drawing table. There were oh so many individual buildings and houses! My drawing hand was pretty sore by the time it was finished, and I had a distinctive callous on the last knuckle of my middle finger, where the pen rested—but it was all worth it!

Here is a final, detailed view—and with this my posts on this particularly, big, exciting and rewarding project come to an end. Many thanks to those of you who have eagerly followed these posts over the course of the past few months. Please continue to check back in on a weekly basis or so; I plan to keep posting regularly on other projects and other topics that will merit your interest and attention!

Bessie Gotto's 90th Birthday

A special lady who is very dear to my heart turns 90 years old today: my maternal grandmother, Bessie Lee (Gray) Gotto.

My siblings and I orchestrated a big birthday celebration for her this past weekend as well as a surprise gift, both of which called for some custom design work by yours truly. First the invite to the party:

My Granny has written a handful of verses over the years, until recently recorded only by her own hand in various notebooks which she kept. As a birthday surprise, we decided to have them “published” and presented to her in a book-length format. I created a custom-designed photo book—hard bound with a dust jacket—which features one of her poems on each right-hand page, complemented by photos of her, my late grandfather, and other family members on each of the facing pages.

As expected, the book was a big hit not only with her, but also with many extended family members and friends who attended the party and were able to view some sample copies that were on hand. Orders for several more copies were placed at the gathering, beyond the initial set which was ordered for my Granny and for the immediate family. A pdf of the entire book (minus the back cover and dust jacket flaps) is available for download here.

As a final tribute to my Granny on this day, I will close with the following bio, taken from the inside flap of the book’s dust jacket:

Bessie Lee Gray was born March 8, 1921, in Davidson County, Tennessee, to Alex Turner Gray and Annie Elizabeth Hulan. Her parents, both having survived their previous spouses, brought a total of seven children into the new marriage, thus making Bessie, the only offspring of their union, the eighth child of the household and the baby of their blended family. Her mother died in 1936, just a month after Bessie’s fifteenth birthday. On February 28, 1938—just a few days shy of seventeen—Bessie married Clarence Gotto. Together they had one surviving daughter, Cheryl Janice. The couple spent most of their years together living in Nashville, Tennessee, until Clarence passed away in the summer of 1976. The sadness of her husband’s relatively early death tinges much of the poetry in this collection. But, despite this tragic loss, Bessie is recognized by all who know her decades later as a lively personality and an uncommonly quick wit—one who enjoys nothing more than a good time, spent with loved ones, and filled with smiles, laughter and fun. She continues to live out her remaining years in the company of her daughter and her family, which includes five grandchildren and (as of this writing) ten great-grandchildren.

Steve Jobs on Soulful Technology

Technology alone is not enough. Technology married with liberal arts, humanities, yields the result that makes our hearts sing.

—Steve Jobs, at yesterday’s iPad 2 unveiling

I don’t (yet) own an iPad, nor an iPhone. In fact, I personally have never even owned an iPod. (There has been, since Christmas, an iPod Touch floating around our household somewhere, but I “touch” it only rarely.) But I’ve used Apple’s computers day-in-day-out for almost two decades now, and I believe Steve Jobs’ grasp of and commitment to the above principal is the number one reason behind the company’s phenomenal success and zealous customer loyalty.

Rookmaaker Syposium

The Christian arts blog Transpositions is hosting a week-long online symposium on The Life and Work of Hans Rookmaaker, best known for his seminal work Modern Art and the Death of a Culture. Daily posts by noted scholars will chronicle Rookmaaker’s enduring influence on Christians who are devoted to practicing the arts as an essential God-given means for cultural transformation.

HCSBSB: Herod's Temple, Interior View

It is very interesting to compare this rendering for the HCSB Study Bible of the interior of Herod’s Temple with the earlier one for Solomon’s Temple and to note both the points of continuity and discontinuity. As was noted in the post on Solomon’s Temple, the Scriptural descriptions are rather extensive, even if they are difficult to interpret on a number of points. With regard to Herod’s Temple, we have virtually no Scriptural information to go on. Our primary extra-biblical source, Josephus, gives a fair amount of information but it is quite selective, in some respects raising more questions than it answers.

Drawing upon Josephus, one overarching trend can be noted as a helpful guide to the would-be reconstructor: there seems to have been a Pharisaical trend towards austerity, simplification and abstraction that governed the decoration of this Temple. For instance, in the Holy Place, there seems to have been a return to one table and one lamp stand, after the manner of the original Tabernacle, whereas Solomon’s Temple had boasted ten of each. It also seems, based on some of Josephus’ comments, that any creaturely or quasi-human representations (e.g. cherubim) were deemed inappropriate (an interesting example of numerous and infamous Pharisaical attempts at a sort of “holier even than God” severity). With this as a backdrop, questions regarding the overall mode of decoration of the Holy Place, on which Josephus is pretty much silent, can begin to be begin to answered, at least with a fair amount of educated guess and conjecture.

Since the interior of the earlier Temple was decorated richly with garden and floral motifs, it seems reasonable to assume, given the symbolic importance of this imagery (Eden re-attained) and given that botanical representations seem to have escaped the pervading Pharisaical proscriptions, that these would have been retained in some form. We know that the Temple’s exterior employed the Greco-Roman Corinthian order, so it would be reasonable to transfer this to the interior as well.

Drawing on these assumptions, I developed a vision of the interior, worked out in the above elevation, which employs a three-tiered scheme of Corinthian pilasters interspersed with relief carvings displaying vegetative motifs. A good contemporary source of inspiration for these latter details can be seen in the Ara Pacis, in Rome.

The floor plan of Herod’s Temple followed the same dimensions as Solomon’s earlier temple, but the height was apparently even greater, which would have made for a very tall and slender sanctuary. Partly to help me get all the dimensions and proportions correct for the illustration and partly just for sheer personal satisfaction, I constructed a rough scale model and photographed it to use as starting reference for my sketches.

The Arch of Titus, also in Rome, which was built to commemorate the subjugation of the Jews and the destruction of the same Temple considered here in 70 A.D., includes a depiction of the lampstand, quite probably based on the actual artifact.

The publisher specifically asked that the veil separating the Holy Place from the Holy of Holies be featured prominently. The gospel accounts make special mention of this veil as being torn in two from top to bottom at the moment of Christ’s death upon the cross, indicating that man’s alienation from God had been overcome. The writer of Hebrews (4:14; 9:23-34) explains that Jesus, in His death and resurrection, “passed through the heavens” themselves, into the very presence of God as our true High Priest, and thus fulfilled in reality what the temple and the earthly High Priest merely represented in shadowy form. With this in mind, it is very interesting that Josephus states that many of the items depicted here had cosmological or astrological associations: the seven lamps of the lamp stand represent the seven “planets” that the Ptolemaic cosmology of the time recognized, the twelve loaves of showbread the twelve signs of the zodiac, etc. With respect to the veil (there was also another one of similar design at the outer entrance of the Holy Place), Josephus specifically mentions that it was woven with some sort of design that incorporated the twelve zodiacal signs (though again, the depictions were apparently abstract or symbolic—no literal pictures of lions, virgins, rams, etc.). He also associates the colors used (blue, purple, red and brown) with the four “elements” of air, water, fire and earth. Inspired by these descriptions and associations and drawing upon other sources, I created a design that incorporates a symbolic conception of the universe that was pretty common at the time: a square-shaped earth in the center, surrounded by seven planets in concentric orbits, in turn surrounded by the twelve signs of the zodiac, beyond which lies the ethereal fire of the “third” or highest heavens.

ACS Warriors Logo

Here’s a new logo design, for the athletic program at Agathos Classical School in Columbia, Tennessee. Go Warriors!

R.I.P. Charlie Louvin

Country Music Hall of Famer Charlie Louvin passed away last night at his home here in Tennessee at the age of 83. He and his brother Ira (who sadly and ironically personified many of the duo’s sin-denouncing numbers and who preceded Charlie in death by over 40 years) became legendary for their inspired harmonizing during the years in which they performed and recorded together. Charlie had a number of hits as a solo artist during the '60s and, in recent years, enjoyed newfound respect and a revival of his career thanks to his re-discovery by a new generation of old-school country and gospel music fans. But I will always remember him as the co-creator of this absolutely unforgettable piece of album cover art.

HCSBSB: Herod's Temple, Exterior View

This exterior view of Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem would be a serious contender for my favorite out of all the illustrations I did for the HCSB Study Bible. The whole process, from research, concept sketching to final result was particularly enjoyable and highly satisfying for me.

There are a number of models and illustrations of Herod’s Temple in existence and they all bear a good deal of similarity due to the fact that detailed and accurate descriptions of the Temple’s appearance (primarily in the writings of Flavius Josephus) and even a few representations (albeit rather simplistic and crude ones—mostly from coins and ossuaries) have been preserved from antiquity. In spite of this overall continuity, however, I was able to identify at least a couple of aspects that lent themselves to some interesting interpretations which, to my knowledge, no other illustrator or reconstructor has exploited.

Virtually every modern depiction I know of presents a facade with a relatively small outer doorway of rectangular shape. There are two things that made the possibility of a more open and revealing facade an appealing interpretation for me. The first is the description Josephus gives of a vast ornamental vine wrought of gold which apparently occupied the space within the vestibule between the outermost entrance of the facade and the inner (veiled) doorway into the Holy Place. (It isn’t clear whether this was fully three dimensional or some sort of relief sculpture, but I chose to imagine the latter.) Especially given that the vine is a typical biblical metaphor for the nation of Israel (cf. Psalm 80; Isaiah 5:1-7) it seemed implausible to me that such a beautiful and potently symbolic piece of art would be entirely tucked away out of the general view behind a miserly opening. Secondly, I found this one ancient coin (above) which seems to depict a relatively tall outer opening with an arched rather than a horizontal top. This sent me off in the direction of having not just the doorway but the entire Temple facade conform to the proportions of a classical Roman triumphal arch. This solution was especially appealing given the fact that Herod himself was such a fawning afficionado of all things Roman.

After sketching it out I found that the measurements could be made to harmonize with Josephus and I went on from there to produce a complete front elevation (above). I chose a dramatic low angle for the final perspective rendering in order to emphasize the grandeur of what, at equal height and width of 150' and a surface finished entirely with white marble and gold, was no doubt a very imposing edifice.

Take that, all you two-spacers!

“A page of text with two spaces between every sentence looks riddled with holes; a page of text with an ordinary space looks just as it should.”

Writing for Slate, Farhad Manjoo lucidly explains why typing two spaces after a period is not only completely unnecessary, but a crime, in fact (typographically speaking).