ECVA - Michael Prettyman - Sacrament and Image

History is Made to Seem Unfair

Oil on canvas, 2021
30" x 48"

Artist Statement: It is a mistake to limit the sublime parts of our world to sunsets and flowers- if you have ever seen a forest fire, or indeed any fire larger than your body, you can understand why our ancestors feared and worshiped this tremendously beautiful and deadly force, and why the ecclesiastical Greek phrase baptisma pyros was used to denote the grace of the Holy Spirit through baptism. To encounter God is to be awed, and to know a power that is wholly other. To be immersed in this power, even for a moment, is to glimpse the death of the small self, to have the small parts of you, the parts that burn and hurt and resent and pout, consumed. It is to stand stunned on a hillside and realize, “That was not me at all. That was never me.”

Bio: Michael Prettyman is an artist and scholar who grew up on the Gulf of Mexico in Florida's fabled Redneck Riviera. He moved to New York city in 1994. He holds a master’s degree in theology from the Harvard Divinity School He studied at the Academy of Art and the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He has been painting his entire adult life, with gallery shows in New York City, Hong Kong and Barcelona. He has exhibited at the United Nations General Assembly, The American Museum of Natural History, the Tsvetaeva Museum of Art in Moscow and the National Museum of Art in Almaty, Kazakhstan. He has studied meditation and thangka painting a the Tsering Monastery in Kathmandu, Nepal.

He has studied meditation and sacred artmaking in Buddhist and Christian monasteries in Italy, Nepal, India and the United States. Michael’s scholarly work in comparative religion dovetails with his practice as an artist. He is convinced that the practice of art making is itself a religious activity, as is the viewing of it. He writes, “Art is something sacred in and of itself. The sacred, mythological past need not be inaccessible to us-it’s not hiding in a church or a book, it is at our fingertips because it is within us. When we approach our common humanity we approach that which is sacred in each of us.” jmp829@mail.harvard.edu http://www.michaelprettyman.org/