ECVA - Michael Prettyman - Sacrament and Image

Unction: I Remember California

Oil on canvas, 2021
36" x 40"

Artist Statement: Seekers need not be limited to conventional ideas of beauty- indeed, for me the idea of unction can only take place in the presence of a kind of clear-eyed truth. Sister Helen Prajean speaks of her inspiration from the burning bush - it burned but was not consumed. One can look also to the ancient symbol of healing, the phoenix, which rises from the ashes of an age whose time has past, or the seeds from a pine cone that needs the trials of a fire in order to break through a tough seed coating, releasing the new energy of a sprout that would have, without the sufferings of extremes of heat and pressure, laid dormant, asleep to the world's healing wonders. And so the question is asked, can we ever hope to heal our earth? The answer has to be "Yes, but." Yes but only if we are able to look at the truth of what is and not despair. Yes but only if we can muster the courage to acknowledge the damage of our past selfishness, and the conflagrations that always come from such alliances. Yes but only if we can see the beauty in our mistakes and- when measured against the backdrop of God’s airy sublime-see that it we, like the cone of lodgepole pine, needed our trials in order to heal.

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/