Amidst the hurting

"And Mary took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped His feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance".   
John 12:3.


It began in my first full year working behind a camera. I was working in the studio with a model who had travelled down from London for a few days, and I noticed she didn't seem too comfortable with the images we were creating. I asked her to take a particular pose - crossing her arms in front of her chest, and she seemed to totally disconnect, as if something had been triggered by my request. I started to ask her a second time, and her eyes flashed with trauma and pain, and in a moment, she was crying, the situation clearly causing her to recall a deep anguish.

I sat beside her, allowing her to express her trouble, and when she was ready, I asked her if she could talk about it. She told me that she couldn't create the pose I'd requested, as it caused her to remember a recent violent attack by an ex-boyfriend, who had abused her after forcing her into just such a form. I allowed her to tell her story, apologized for bringing up any painful memories, and after a coffee, we continued working together over the next few days, producing some good images in the studio and in a workshop for a group of photographers.

Almost a year later, I was holding my first ever public exhibition of my work, and who should walk in but this young lady, her face a picture of delight. In the months that had past, her life had changed - she was now studying photography, and was doing a piece for this about me and my work... The day we had met had literally changed her.

Not all stories, of course, end that well. Yesterday, the young lady I was supposed to be working with called me in tears, as she had been assaulted by someone she had cared for. Over the years, I have encountered many like her who, whilst seeking to care, to love, to inspire and to share something beautiful through art, have been abused so often by the ones that should give respect, honor and support in return for the fragrance that these souls give to the world.

It is woefully easy for us to de-fault to something less than we should be, especially when we are motivated by selfishness which is expressed in a plethora of emotions or reactions to another. It is then that we can so quickly become manipulative or outright abusive, but obtaining something of true worth requires us to take a much deeper, often harder route in our relationships - one which will care, particularly when there is cost involved.

In the verses from John, Mary's costly action came from a genuine affection for Jesus, and when we seek  to do anything truly of value in life, it can only endure if we are equally motivated to give ourselves for the love of others.


In these hard pressed days, our greatest treasure is our care for one another - that is what brings genuine value, which will outlast any merely immediate forms of gain.

May we be able to give something that does not steal or crush the wonder we see in another, but encourages such wealth to flourish and shine brightly in this barbed and broken world.

Beyond the negatives.

"Flesh does have positive meanings in Christian thought, notably as the temple of God. Indeed, the Incarnation of Jesus only makes theological sense if human embodiment is seen as worthy and meaningful".  Ruth Barcan - Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy.

"God couldn't be God-with-us if he weren't flesh. The flesh of the baby is father to the flesh of the man. In his (Christ's) flesh, the spit of God mixed with the dirt of Galilee to make a healing paste. The naked baby must be flesh so that God can be stripped and seen again, trading his 'dusty garments' of distance for the immediacy of the splinters of the cross".  Mary Ellen Ashcroft - Gift-wrapping God.

As we approach Christmas, I thought I'd pen a few thoughts on what we. perhaps, need to consider as we think about life, the body, and God's immediate 'connection' to it all....


It's tellingly easy to ill-define ourselves. No where do we see this more than we when we come to the nude. 
Definition, of course, plays a key part. One popular theological concordance defines 'nude' as almost entirely negative - to be uncovered, devoid of grace, heinously sinful, destitute, and so on.

There are clear reasons, in relation to the human condition, why these statements are made,
but the concordance also speaks of another truth as well regarding being nude - "a state in which things are discovered, known and truly revealed". It's this aspect of nudity that faith, and in a smaller fashion, art allows us to encounter and embrace for some essential reasons regarding both the nature of God and ourselves.
So, let's consider our own definitions for a moment.

C S Lewis, in his study 'The Four Loves', provided some useful pegging points on various views of the body. 

These might be titled:

·The ascetic pagan or christian who deprecates the body to a mere tomb (used and discarded at death).

·The ‘neo pagan/nudist’ who view the (present) body as presently glorious (but, again, of no eternal purpose or value).

·Those who view the current state as both a virtue and a vice (“pathetically and absurdly beautiful”).

It's pretty clear that our own culture has a fairly splintered and often unproductive approach to the body - it's either idolized or hated, with very little tolerance for anything in-between. That's because, like the Greeks, we tend to 'deify' the immediate (what pleases or satisfies us now) and discard any thoughts of transcendence within the material, dislocating the spiritual and placing it in an entirely different orbit to the here and now. The trouble is we know there's a problem here, because it's actually amidst the material world that we all encounter startling moments of truth, wonder and astonishment that make us tellingly aware of the spiritual within  the material. Whether we are talking about finding out something deeper about ourselves or the nature of reality, it's these moments that truly impact upon us and transform us, so there clearly is something more going on here than merely a satisfying of the immediate - we yearn for something more, and the world, through numerous means, but often by faith and art, 'speaks' to that deep need. 

The futility which often marks our lives steers us to look at beauty in general and the body in particular as ultimately,  an uncomfortable irrelevance to our prevailing pain and strife - it's all pointless or temporary, so we eschew any notion of permanence and wallow in the ugly despair so tellingly present, or just enjoy the moment whilst we can, for there isn't anything, at least in the material sense, to really look forward to. The problem, of course, is reality is deeper than this.

Whilst we cannot deny the reality of the ugly side of life, there's clearly more going on here, and looking through the 'window' of an acknowledgment of this allows us to begin to engage with a far wider and more challenging understanding of both ourselves and the nature of our world.

As I've already noted, it's easy for religion to be deemed negative about the matter of nudity. Like the Greeks of old (which is actually where a lot of the trouble started), Christianity has often taught a 'general uptake of Aristotelian biology and ideas', thereby deeming the body to be inherently 'bad' in an of itself and the nude, especially the female nude, to be something which quickly 'communicates sin, sex and evil' (Barcan, page 108), but again, reality is far more troubling and enriching.

During the recovery of the Biblical world-view in the 1500's, artists transformed by this, such as Lucas Cranach, were free once again to genuinely paint and convey the beauty of the female form. This was because the very nature of God's validation of the material, both in it's creation and in it's recovery through the Incarnation, become restored as an essential aspect of Christianity and then culture, showing us that there was a right 'uncovering' of both truth and ourselves that had to take place, and that is still true today. It's so very easy to let our thinking and approach to life to be eschewed by the temporary and immediate, but it is often when we look closer and deeper into the very nature of these things that we will be struck with what we might term an impinging grace that can change and transform, even amidst the mundane. Art, beauty and the enticing richness of seeing God in Christ lead us to this better realm - where life can properly be uncovered.


Images: Magenta in Cornwall by Howard Nowlan.

Eyes that see

"Why do you think the great nude art of the Western World derived from its religious belief systems?  Why do you think our online art has become so empty and vacuuous today?  Because just a picture of a gorgeous nude man or woman is just not enough".  From the 'What We Saw Today" Blog, by Carla Johnson.

Ever since we walked, naked and without shame in the garden, we have known that spirituality is vitally inherent to the totality of our bodily existence, and yet, because of the pain and division we brought upon ourselves when we fell from that amazing place, we belong to a culture which so often is striving to entirely dislocate itself from the 'weight', the honor and the ramifications of that over-arching reality. We see it so often in the escapism we crave to entertain us, which lowers not only our expectations, but our engagement with the life around us - it seeks to rule us in a vacuum of the carnal, whilst any reference to the spiritual is confined to a detached, esoteric existence, either beyond the norm or beyond death - certainly beyond the here and now.

Christianity, whilst acknowledging (and resolving) our core malady does not allow us to wallow in such dull fantasy. At the heart of this message is an emphatic affirmation that God had not only made, but reconciled the world of flesh and bone to Himself by becoming part of that very pained order, and by the means of both life and death, in His own flesh, redeemed our broken earth, our alienated lives, that we may once more see His life in the fabric and weave of all creation - to become those who share in the marvel which truly underpins all that is.

It's a view which breaks the drug-like dependancy of our world upon beliefs and ideas which seek to make us far less than we were fashioned to be - creatures who deem their 'enlightenment' is defined by looking upon the universe and our experience of it as inherently brief and meaningless.

Any artist who finds worth in their work knows that what counts here is a direct, profound and immediate sense of connection with their subject, and that is what brings to the fore the defining of that work, even if the theme or meaning of the piece is dark - we are seeking to reflect a relationship to reality which inspires us to create and to convey a meaning or a hope within that. As a fellow artists noted recently, "The nudes in the Sistine Chapel express the spiritual power that resides in the flesh. The idea is transcendence. Michaelangelo's iconic image of God giving Adam his life, heart and soul, implies an integrity of our diverse elements that includes human eroticism....(contemporary) fundamentalist branches of various belief systems have tried to deny a connection between body and soul and shamed it" (Carla Johnson).

Life is essentially about our coming back to what has been lost - the bare and unashamed communion with God and each other that defined our status and nature in the temple of Eden, and that is, no doubt why art and life which invites us to move in that direction is so often neglected or ridiculed in our culture - it means an encounter with ourselves, with our reality that is brutally honest, because a return to true life, true innocence, requires nothing less.

We can fill our world with all manner of rational and spiritual pretense - we've become masters at manufacturing those fig-leaves -  but, thankfully, enough of the 'original image' yet remains to tell us we cannot really hide, not in a way that silences what our own reflection echos to us each day - we were made with a glory that reflects the splendor of the one who formed us, to express that marvel to the whole of creation... that is what lies behind our mandate to go out and engage with life.

Since my entry last month, I've had the joy of working once again with Auerilie (pictured in this latest set) - a new model who began working earlier this year. It was a joy to create together, and I hope that more projects will be forthcoming.

The Passing Days

"For everything there is a purpose and a season, under heaven".  Solomon.

For my last entry here, I marked the completion of a decade behind the camera. It was truly a mile stone, not only because of what I've achieved in that time, but because, as always, times are changing....

In September the weather finally became more 'friendly' than it had been all summer, and I was able, through the support of another local photographer, to head back to Cornwall once again with the wonderful muses, Erin and Magenta. We headed to a superb north coast beach on Sunday, which was pretty busy when we arrived, and I found myself feeling moody - the conditions were not right, there were too many people around... Erin rightly chastised me for my mood, and we went on to produce some excellent work (thanks, Erin), but later, on reflection, I realized there had been more to my 'darkness' in that moment that just the immediate issues.

Over the last decade, I have had the great joy of working with a number of absolutely superb models, who have been as passionate and enthusiastic as myself about trudging out to the back of beyond to create something fresh and, hopefully, special. Over the last few years, Erin and Magenta have become the principal focus of such projects, and as we spent the September weekend together, a trace of melancholia was laced into our time, as we were aware that life was changing - Erin had recently married, and Magenta has done the same in the last few weeks. The time has come for these two wonderful ladies to begin to focus upon family, as had been the case with others over these past few years.

The changes that will ensue, I suspect, will quickly become palpable. Finding models of such quality and skill is a hard task, for whilst there are numerous 'general' photographic models, it takes particular skill to pose well unclothed for a camera, and to be as aware and as inter-active with another artist as Erin and Magenta have been is a treasure, to adapt Solomon, as rare as rubies and emeralds!

I hope there will be further opportunities to work with both of these super artists, and I owe them a huge debt of thanks for all of their hard work (especially with regards to putting up with me!) over the years.

It will certainly be interesting to see what life brings to us in the next chapter...

Ten Years

"How we long to be revealed, knowing then we might be healed"
                                                                                   Mary Chapin Carpenter.

 Image by Howard & Kay Nowlan

Who would have thought, when I made those first, tentative steps to take images some ten years ago, that it would lead to something so special,
but it surely did.

Kay and I had been living in our new home for some nine months when I asked to seriously engage for the first time with what had always been her vocation, but much had changed that year, for not only had we re-located, but Kay had been diagnosed with cancer, which had brought us even closer in our lives and our sharing of precious days.

We'd arranged for a wonderful model named Natasha to come and work with us for that first project - a studio shoot in the morning, and an outdoor session on a nearby beach in the afternoon. I was so nervous that I completely missed the studio part of the day, but Natasha and Kay encouraged me to jump in for the afternoon, and I'm so very glad that I did - it was a critical moment which nurtured a vocation which has strengthened and blossomed over this last decade.






Images by Kay Nowlan



I was able to 'crown' and celebrate this gift this weekend. This started with my receiving my certificate of Higher Education in the Creative Arts from the new University of Buckinghamshire for my three years of study in Photography with the Open College of Arts. Kay would have been, I suspect, both perhaps surprised and delighted.
The second joy was returning again to Cornwall to work with the group of artists who have become very close in the last few years, and my Muse, Magenta. It was exactly the way to encapsulate what the last decade has meant in terms of artistic expression and the richness which working in this field (in terms of friendship and finding beauty amidst the often painful realities of life) has provided. You can view the results of the project here.

Image by Howard Nowlan

I would just like to say a huge thank you to everyone who has worked with me in this field over this time. It has been a great joy and a genuine pleasure to create and share such moments with you all. Many thanks, especially to Natasha and Magenta, who have supported and encouraged me by giving of their skills, their beauty, to many of my projects.

Let's all keep enjoying the wonder.

Why?

It's certainly been a time of changes.

In the last few months, I've been seeking to do things to develop my personal and artistic connection to the world, which has included starting a new on-line opportunity for the public to work with me in creating fine art images. I've found myself thinking about my approach to this and to my work in general, and this lead me back to something I wrote some years ago, which I think helps place my work in the art nude field in context...

Beyond Immediate Pretense.

"The hunger, and the longing, everyone of us knows inside,

Could be the bridge between us".Amy Grant - Turn this world around.

As a photographer, the tools of my trade are often those elements which might be deemed 'beautiful' - light and shade, texture and tone, form and posture, but just having certain elements around you does not equate to actually making a good image - they certainly help, but you have to break some eggs to make a good omelet!

I recall listening to the photographer Jock Sturges, and how he was commissioned to work with a very famous model on a fashion shoot, which he dutifully covered, but there was no 'connection' between himself and the person in the images, and because of that, he would never use the work himself and viewed the event as meaningless.

We often work at a pretty superficial level in secular society. The goal much of the time is to fulfill immediate wants and needs without delving deeper into why or what such attitudes (living for now) really say about us - what are we actually running away from, and why this addiction to the immediate instead of deeper pursuits?

There is clearly a difference in our relationship to others and to life in general when we do not  interact with them in a merely transitory fashion, but begin to appreciate, to value them, for who or what they really are - that the beauty of a personality, of the world around us, is an astonishing, intricate and complex reality, that can consume our own selves in the wonder of a more richer and satisfying contemplation, making us truly wealthier people.

The art of photography has really brought home to me the fact that the person before me is not just an object - a 'body' to photograph and then effectively ignore. The joy of this craft is to discover the treasure of the person which embodies the physical 'frame', and to seek to bring out the far weightier beauty of who they are in what is captured in the images.
It is what is within that animates and 'clothes' the outward grace of our bodies, and if there is no one at home, then you will only capture dull photos, no matter how long you photo shop them!

In the early chapters of Genesis, there is a clear illustration of the difference between the genuinely enriching and the grotesquely, inherently contrived.

When Adam looks upon Eve for the first time, he comprehends a person who is totally unique and yet entirely compatible with his own existence. The response is one of immediate worship, for he recognizes the profound richness and significance of this woman, and the desire within him is to truly know her, in a profoundly deep and rich fashion.
Contrast this to the image not much further along, where these two same people are seeking to run from such a reality, to hide and cover themselves from each other, to act in an entirely pretentious and superficial fashion in response to the nature of their crime - the demeaning of all which God had so graciously given them.

We do a great violence to ourselves, to our existence, when we exist at the level of the trite and the supposedly irrelevant. It stains our broken souls with a stupor to dull our deeper needs - a malady that will drown a much deeper need if unchecked.

There have been countless times in the last few years when I have seen people sit in front of a camera and gain a fresh awareness or confidence regarding some aspect of themselves.
Sadly, there have also been occasions when the person has been 'dead' - they have no desire, no hunger to do anything beyond what is immediate.

Christ holds a similar mirror before us. He wants us to see the pain of our lives when crippled by the trite and the facile, to really understand our condition, but to also see the wonder of these lives when they are set free by God's care, mercy and grace, to escape the superficial and really to become human.

There is a value to be gleaned amidst the dirt and dust...

"Just as God exists for absolutely no purpose beyond himself, so human beings are fashioned to live in this way too, to be at their best when they are as gloriously pointless as a work of art. A just social order is one which would allow men and women to be in this sense ends in themselves, not means to another’s power or profit". Terry Eagleton.

Images of Aurelie, Magenta and Andreya by Howard.

Blinded?

"Such a fatal kiss stolen from heaven's lips" Magenta - Broken

It's an argument fraught with pitfalls and betrayal, broken lives and erroneous theology... the signs are all clear, 'cliffs ahead - turn back or face deadly perils'. That's the reasoning commonly advanced when concerned people come across anything that seeks to advance any 'redemptive' message with regards to a Christian involvement in culture and especially with regards to creative nudity... don't go there, plain and simple.


There's no doubt we can suffer harm when we 'engage' with this world of ours - just getting on with the normal business of the day can be pretty distressing some days - but we can equally be scarred by an approach that withdraws from life and creates a notion of spirituality and piety that pretty well denies the value and the goodness of the material purely on the basis that it can be detrimental.


Nudity (as opposed to imposed nakedness) is beautiful, and that is why art has celebrated the human form throughout the history of our race, so is such an expression entirely wrong? That certainly does not seem to join too well with either the essential manner of our being (as defined in the creation record) or the celebration of the sensual or erotic as found within scripture itself - these gifts are good, it is purely the way we set about using them which really produces their rightness or their spoiling.

In ancient Greece, as in other cultures, nude images were fashioned to convey a manner of beauty and perfection which expressed the divine, and as such, sought to woo society into a veneration of gods (ideals) that could be achieved by the thinking and expression of that culture - a march to an ascendancy of our own doing. In the art of the Renaissance, the goal was often entirely different - to express how God, enveloped in humanity, had come to save (reconcile and redeem) mankind and the world which had been bound in futility because of our rebellion (and therefore, couldn't facilitate our own schemes of perfection). Art, then, can be used either to bind us to broken ideals or to point towards a deeper, truer understanding of ourselves and our world.

Such a consideration, of course, is fraught with troubles. If Christians can embrace a value to the unclothed body outside of the marriage chamber, then that has to mean we cannot discard the nude in art to this waste bin of 'damaged goods' beyond the reach of our engagement with life. It means we have to take on board early nude baptisms in the church, early use by Christians of the Roman baths, early Christian images that depict the naked form. It means we have to accept the illustration of the Christian life of the runner, discarding anything which would slow his advance (including clothes in the ancient world) to win the race and gain the prize, or the focus of all, Christ Himself, naked and crucified, 'placarded' before us in His death and at the heart of the Gospel, to save and rescue the world God loves.




Perhaps this is why so many in the church today wish to place any engagement with art in a 'Sunday school' imagery category... it can be used, so long as it's not too real (lots of 'meek and mild' images), and certainly nothing that points too 'graphically' at the grime and grit of life. It's not too hard, when this approach becomes key, to understand why we have so little to say to the everyday realities around us.
Christ was a man found amongst the great 'sinners' of His time, and speaking from there to the pious concerning the nature of their great blindness. Paul clearly taught the early church not to distance themselves from the immoral around them, but to hold out the word of life amidst a corrupt generation -
is that what we're about when it comes to using a medium like art? Could our church or ministry ever nurture or encourage a Michelangelo or a Bach? Where are the communities which show the vitality of a Christian spirituality that shouts God is in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself?


The genuinely spiritual has to honor and enjoy whatsoever is good and honorable, and praiseworthy, and the 'glory' of the human body is most certainly part of that, within the wonder of the union between husband and wife, yes, but also, in the redemption of our bodies for the day coming when all of creation is renewed in Christ Jesus.


Using any gift to encourage wickedness or wrongdoing is indeed contrary to what Christ has done, but burying the gifts He wishes us to use well is equally as dangerous as squandering them.


The world needs to be 'romanced' by the beauty He has given to us in our times. It's often a case that what's required is not prohibition to a realm, but seeing what's there 'with better eyes' than we have before.







Images of Magenta by Howard.