The Art of Paying Attention

Barnett Newman, “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue I” (1966)

One of the peculiar gifts that artists offer to the rest of us is the gift of paying attention, especially to things that perhaps have become overly familiar or altogether invisible to us.

In Barnett Newman’s 1966 painting, “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue I,” for instance, the abstract expressionist draws our attention to this shade of red, positioned asymmetrically to this vibrant yellow, this “zip” of blue—not any red, yellow or blue.

And the meaning of these three colors is informed by a particular conversation unfolding in the history of modern art.

Listening in closely, we hear in Newman’s title the title of Edward Albee’s 1962, Tony Award-winning play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?, which is itself a riff on the famous song from Disney’s 1933 animated film, The Three Little Pigs, “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?”

Newman’s artwork then isn’t only an invitation to attend to the nature of specific colors. It’s also an invitation to attend to a specific set of fears: for abstract expressionists, the fear evoked by two world wars; for Newman, the fear of irrelevance as an artist; for Albee’s characters, the fear of living an inauthentic life; for members of the Great Depression, the fear of economic poverty.

To see Newman’s painting, thus, is to attend to very particular things, and in attending to these things, the hope is that the viewer will not only re-see his world but also his own life.

As it relates to the calling of artists, philosopher Calvin Seerveld puts the point this way:

“God’s Spirit calls an artistic practitioner to help their neighbors who are imaginatively debilitated, who do not notice there are fifteen different greens outside their window, who have never sensed the bravery in bashfulness, or seen how lovely an ugly person can be.”

This gift of care-filled paying attention afforded by good works of art ought to be welcomed by Christians everywhere and serve as yet another reason to support the artists in our community in their own work of art making.

It’s nothing less than gospel stuff, as I suggest in the current book that I’m writing on the vocation of artists (as a kind of follow-up book that I edited many years ago, For the Beauty of the Church). It’s the stuff that makes us truly human. It's the stuff that makes me love artists (like my wife) so very much.