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Thursday
Julia and I are just back from a wondrous visit with artist friends in Assisi. Alan Feltus and Lani Irwin, accomplished painters whom we first met when we all lived in southern Maryland, relocated to Italy in 1987 and never returned, raising their two sons as bilingual citizens of the world. I report on the visit here because their immersion in the world of the visual arts has given me perspective on my own immersion in the world of literature.
Fascinated by how people use art in their daily lives, Alan and Lani are constantly combing flea markets for items that people have decorated in their longing for beauty. Often these are humble household objects, farm implements, photographs with homemade frames, and tiny shrines to saints.
Along with these are dolls and old toys, fossilized shells, Italian tiles, stuffed animals, religious icons, woven baskets, clocks, hand-painted pottery, parts of musical instruments (which will never play but which Alan loves for the visuals), Pinocchios of all sizes and shapes, animal skulls and bones, antique photos, carpentry tools, tiny human figures, folded paper cranes, mannequin hands, wooden balls, parts of games, and many, many metallic owls. Sometimes the objects on the walls and in the cabinets show up in Alan and Lani’s paintings.
These anonymous artists have applied their talents in ways that few will ever see, bringing to mind the passage from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,”
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.
Alani and Lani marvel at all the different ways that people speak beauty into the world. To borrow from Gray, they do not allow these flowers to “blush unseen”:
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Along with the items are paintings and photographs, some by Alan and Lani, some by their sons, some by friends. There are also old photographs of anonymous persons, many with fascinating expressions. Rescued from flea market shoeboxes, they get a second life on the walls of the Irwin-Feltus house.
Along with the house, Julia and I benefited from the Feltuses’ artistic immersion when we went out walking. Sometimes we were in holy places with gorgeous paintings and frescoes, such as the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. But Alan also pointed out interesting iron work on railings and the stonework on wall facings where windows or doors had once been. His curious and creative eyes took in everything.
I realized that I use literature in a similar way. Although I don’t make art, I constantly apply the poems and stories that have moved me to the surrounding world. As a result, it’s as though the world is filled with resonance and infused with meaning. Both the visual and the written arts enhance reality and reveal its luminescence.
