Through a glass darkly
We were created to be creative
A bird made her nest in my office window well, and to celebrate her choosing my window to raise her family, I’ve been making a picture of her in stained glass.
I’ve been working with stained glass for about six years now. I’ve gotten better at it, but I don’t think I’ll ever be great at it. It’s certainly never something I could make a living doing. It is a very good hobby for me.
I was thinking about that in the context of memes like this one, that’s been making the rounds lately:
About which, I have a quibble: You, fellow human, are exceptional at these activities already. You may not be as good at them compared to other extremely exceptional humans (or lucky enough) to make money making art, but that’s not why you were making art in the first place. In a world of animals stronger and more agile and more beautiful than we are, the one thing that our species excels beyond all others is in creativity, in our manipulating the physical world with our clever little paws to make pretty things. Monkeys make tools, whales sing, spiders dance, and birds do all of these things1, but only humans even attempt to make replicas of pretty things they see, to no practical end whatsoever.2 And we have been doing so for a very long time.3
My mother taught me to sew and to crochet when I was about eight. Later, as a teenager, I would make practical things, like some of my own clothes, but the first things I made were replicas of animals—stuffed dogs, crocheted mice. I never crocheted anything big, but my mother and grandmother made crochet blankets, and many women I knew as a child made decorative items, like doilies, tea cozies, and Christmas tree ornaments. Once a year, many of these would be sold at our church bazaar. I didn’t understand this as a child: Why would you sell your handiwork, and give the money to the church? No one could make a living by selling crocheted blankets and doilies. Why would grown-ups spend so much time making something, and selling something, with no chance of being good enough at it to make a living doing so? It wasn’t until much later, as an adult, I came to understand that earning money was never the point.
In the middle part of the twentieth century, relieved of much of the labor of food preparation and household maintenance by technology, but still restricted from many career opportunities by sexism4, American women produced a tremendous amount of art. Not because they wanted to earn money off it, but because that is what human beings do as soon as they have the opportunity. Why the church women of my childhood had so many pieces of art to sell is because they made so many pieces of art. They might as well offload some of them and contribute the proceeds to a community organization. After all, they’d be making more ornaments and doilies than they could personally ever use, anyway.
When I was a little kid going to church bazaars and crocheting mice, I wanted to be an artist when I grew up. It didn’t take me much time to figure out that I’d never make a living doing that, though. I did have more career opportunities open to me than my mother or grandmother had. So I studied hard, and ended up with one of those jobs with meetings and reports and spreadsheets.
I make art in my spare time, like my foremothers did. I, like them, end up with too many pretty things. I give them away as gifts, and consider what community organization I’ll give the proceeds to if I end up making so many glass birds I have to sell some to free up space in my home gallery.
I earned enough money and vacation time with my spreadsheet job that I took my parents to Paris, and we went to see the art at The Louvre. We saw the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo.
But that was not the art that made my heart stop, or my eyes fill with tears. The art that did that was this art at a museum commemorating the Battle of the Somme:
About 20 million people died in World War 1—a bit over 1% of the total population of the world at that time.5 It was the most horrific and widespread human conflict to that date, featuring devastating weapons that had never been used before, like tanks, poison gas, and explosive shells. Over 60 million shells were fired near Verdun in 1916 alone, and to this day there are so many unexploded shells in the earth in the forest of Verdun that it’s dangerous to go hiking there.6
Over 100 years ago, men went to war in trenches, fearing death from giant explosions in the sky and tiny typhus-infected lice on their bodies. Then they collected bits of shells that had been sent to kill them, and they beat the bombs into toys, musical instruments, and vases for flowers.7 There is no stronger testament to an inherently creative human nature than this.
The most common theme in trench art is nature. The other most popular themes are love and God.
So why? Why are we so driven to create that a soldier would crawl out of his trench to scavenge the perfect piece of brass to finish making his toy windmill? Why did the church women of my youth produce such a profligate abundance of doilies? Why am I willing to slice my fingertips open with glass shards in pursuit of making an entirely decorative glass bird?
All art is mimicry. The reason why so many shell casings-cum-vases have similar designs is because soldiers copied each other, the same reason so many crocheted doilies follow a similar pattern. My glass Zenaida dove is based on a pattern I found on the internet. And of course, it’s based on its referent, the actual Zenaida dove who graced my window ledge—a bird who, like all living things, is an impossibly intricately detailed, unique and irreproducible work of art.
Nature is filled with sublime, extravagant beauties like this dove. I think we create because we are mimicking God, try to understand our magnificent universe by understanding what it is to create. We love, because He first loved us, and we create because we were first created.
We’ll never be great at it. Certainly not good enough to make a living. Our imaginations are too limited, our skills constrained by both physical reality and our insatiable need for things to make sense. As Annie Dillard writes, “If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn’t believe the world existed.…If creation had been left up to me, I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the imagination or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that.”8
The best I can do is make my little glass birds as an homage. I like working with glass because of its physical reality: in a digital world of algorithm-driven AI images, the cuts on my fingers testify that my bird is real. In an online world of chatter about non-fungible tokens, my bird is something that is truly unique and irreplicable, as all material things are. There are ways I can get the glass to break the way I want to shape it, and ways I can’t. I feel a deeper appreciation for, if not understanding of, the mystery of creation of a material world in my feeble attempts to make a copy.
I don’t get to understand the nature of creation. No matter how keen my observation, I can only see how this whole natural and yet created world works through a glass darkly. But I do have the remarkable privilege to participate in it.
My copy of the Zenaida dove isn’t finished yet, as creation never is. When I have finished making my replica or her, I will hang it in the window and watch it when the light shines through.
For a review of non-human animal tool making behavior, see Bentley-Condit and Smith, Animal tool use: current definitions and an updated comprehensive catalog, Behavior (2009) 147:185-221.
While elephants can be trained to paint with brushes designed to be held in their nostrils, the paintings elephants create are designed by their trainers, with painting elephants responding to commands. This is not to discount elephants’ remarkable intelligence, just to note that elephants do not create art on their own.
Again I’m going to recommend The First Work of Art Known to Man by Adam Nathan. This archaeologic find indicates that hominids have been making symbolic art for over 400,000 years. What’s currently thought to be the oldest painting of an animal made by a human is about 50,000 years old, in a cave in Indonesia.
There’s a whole discussion in the literature about how much household technologies like washing machines and vacuum cleaners liberated post-war period women from housework, allowing pursuit of other opportunities, including by my fave, the late Hans Rosling. (See Dr. Rosling’s TED talk on the liberating power of the washing machine here.) Others like Bose et al., Women’s labor force participation and household technology adoption, European Economic Review (2022) 147:104181 suggest that women’s adoption of household technologies was a consequence of women working outside the home, not a driver of it. The explosion of folk art made by women in the mid-late 20th century confounds this discussion, as many economists would discount this as mere household labor rather than as the kind of artistic creativity that can express itself when one has more resources including free time.
Trench art—art made out of war-generated trash including shells and bullets—was not literally made in trenches, but was fashioned by soldiers when they were off of the front lines, either due to troop rotations or because they were in the hospital, or had been taken prisoner. The raw materials for trench art were retrieved directly from the battlefield, though. See Trench Art of the Great War for a nice summary. Indeed, so much art was made out of armaments between 1914 - 1918 that today you can still buy original pieces of trench art relatively cheaply on eBay or Etsy.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974. Harper Collins Publishers, New York, NY, USA. p 146. This quote is from chapter 8, “Intricacy.” This book, plus Stephen Mitchell’s stunning translation of the Book of Job, is probably the #1 reason I started my return to Christianity after several years of atheism.
What a beautiful post, and what exceptional art you’re making! I so strongly agree that we should all be dancing, singing and creating purely as acts of celebration and thanks for our existence. So well said. Thank you.
Another wonderful essay. I had no idea trench art existed prior to reading this. It's so... wonderfully, passionately human to continue creating even in the face of total devastation.