THERE'S A REFORM JEWISH Sabbath prayer that reads, “Days pass and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles. Lord, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing; let there be moments when Your Presence, like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk. Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns unconsumed. And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for holiness, and exclaim in wonder: ‘How filled with awe is this place, and we did not know it!’”
If we want to experience awe or wonder, we need to reach for inputs of wisdom that enliven our ways of seeing. As a person who struggles with overthinking and anxiety, I find visual art, like the work of Latvian American artist Vija Celmins, to be instructive. “The thing I like about painting, of course,” Celmins said in an interview with the Tate museum, “is that it takes just a second for the information to go ‘bam,’ all the way in, and then you can explore it later.” Engaging with Celmins’ work teaches me how to pay close attention to the life in front of me, noticing the beauty that pervades everything.
Celmins was born in Latvia in 1938 and immigrated to the U.S. as a child. A recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships, she is widely known for highly detailed works of celestial and natural subjects, namely spiderwebs, deserts, oceans, and outer space. Celmins scrupulously creates grayscale drawings and prints from photography sourced from magazines or history books. The black-and-white tones grant a contemplative, almost eerie quality to her work.
When I first viewed one of Celmins’ lithographs, “Ocean” (1975), I was transfixed. I wondered, “Is this the sea captured by a camera lens or an imagining of the ocean, dictated by hand?” The uncertainty suspended me in a place of not fully understanding, forcing me to move closer and look at each individual stroke. This is what wonder can do: suspend us in a liminal space between beholding and understanding, beckoning us to lean in, look more carefully, and appreciate what we see for what it is, without naming, controlling, or subduing.
Detail and scale play together differently in each of Celmins’ works. In her words, “[My work] lies somewhere between distance and intimacy.” Spiderwebs appear larger than they do in real life, an amplification that calls our attention to their astonishing intricacy. Her night sky images scale down the cosmos. Similarly, the way Celmins crops her drawings of the sea calls our attention to one fragment of the vast ocean and the texture of each wave. By zooming in on something particular within the infinite, we can learn to embody a posture poised for awe. As Celmins’ work reveals, the world is teeming with beauty unnoticed. In the face of intricacy — or deep intimacy — we stand in wonder. And we remember how beautiful this world actually is.
Sarah James, a biracial Indian American woman of color, is a graduate of Yale Divinity School and founder of Clerestory Magazine.
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