An Interview with Illustrator Stephen Crotts [The Pugcast]

0:00Hello, welcome to the Theology Podcast. We're glad to have you here with us episode. I'm C.R. Wiley and I'm a pastor and I'm a senior editor at Touchstone magazine. How about you Tom? I'm Tom Price. I teach theology in Christian ethics, Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, and I'm a minister in Connecticut. Okay, Glenn. Glenn Sunshine retired history professor. Right now doing a lot of freelance writing, teaching, speaking, and that kind of nonsense. Okay, and we've got a special guest today. Steven, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and let folks know a little bit about your professional work. Sure, I'm Steven Krauts. I'm an illustrator and graphic designer in South Carolina. So I work on mostly book covers, but also fully illustrating books and doing various logos and album covers and things as well. Cool. Cool. Well, really pleased to have you and I'm going to kick it over to you, Glenn. You can kind of lead the way on

1:01the interview today, but I'll be sure to jump in and I know Tom will at different points, but we're looking forward to a good conversation. Yeah, so Steven, I actually thought of being a good place to begin to just ask you to elaborate a little more on the work you do. I mean, you just gave a quick thumbnail sketch of things, but I know you do other things as well, printmaking and such. So tell us a little more about your work, what you do, who you've worked for, that kind of thing. Sure. So I mean, I went to college at Winthrop University in South Carolina doing illustration years ago and I've always done it on the side, but my main work was with museums doing graphic design for several years and in the last five years or so, I've been able to focus full-time on freelance design and illustration. So that's largely been in the context of Christian publishing. That's just been the work that's come to me, which that sort of began. There was a bridge that was

2:05from doing work for musicians and some of whom wrote and then the publishing work kind of took off. So yeah, my medium is kind of a woodcut-based drawing. I mean, I do some wood cuts and learning engraving a little bit, but with time constraints, I'm often drawing with the apple pencil and the iPad. But I'd say that relief printmaking informs the bulk of what I do. So when it comes to the relief work and the carving and all that, do you print like limited edition runs of your work and that kind of thing so people can have it, say like number 20 or whatever, you know what I'm getting at? Yeah, I have done that a few times and I was

3:07doing that more before the book work kind of took off to the point where that's eats up the bulk of my time. So pulling editions where I really am getting enough prints that look good enough for me to number. Besides some days to do it. So I would love to do more. But yeah, it's that that whole thing is, you know, the primary thing is that you're taking out of the surface, the parts that will be the line. So that's the same way that I'm drawing is starting with a dark surface and carving out the white line rather than drawing black on white usually. Yeah, you know, even that is an exercise and kind of, well, it's a challenging exercise because you're also working in reverse if you have any, any lettering. That's right. I'm not sure if I carved them and it had to be very careful with the right time. That's right. Yeah, I've got a friend

4:09and Jack Bungartner. He does a lot of woodcut prints and stunts them for me. What's that? I'm a huge fan of Jack's work. Yeah, Jack is great. And he's doing, he's doing actually doing a piece for me right now that I'm going to be able to use to stamp. So he's actually making rubber stamps. So initially it's going to be just a drawing that would carving and then it's going to be a rubber stamp that I can stamp anything I publish with something that's intended to authenticate it that it's not AI. Betruvian man. Yeah, that's you saw it. Yeah. Anyway, so that's that's that's pretty cool. So now, you know, we could talk shop, but we got a couple academics here. So I won't try to monopolize, although I could, the conversation with, you know, what he got in the back there that looks pretty cool. Anyway, so good stuff. Yeah, so you did a you did a series of

5:14woodblock prints or an only in block, I'm not sure exactly what what the medium was that that had Tolkien and Lewis on it. I've got one of those actually on the other side of the bookshelf over there somewhere. And another one with Malcolm Guide. Now actually, it turns out that one year ago today, we recorded our episode with Malcolm Guide. It's been that long, wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I found that out from your Facebook post like they showed up on my memories, Chris. Okay. But so that that image of Malcolm Guide actually has a certain amount of significance for your additional work where we're things. That's the image. Oh, cool. Malcolm. And yeah, I did this initially as a kind of a piece of fan art. And I had heard rumors that Malcolm was

6:17going to be launching into this writing of a new telling of the Arthurian. So in the image, I've got him holding a book and the sword and the stone is on the cover. And I was thinking, maybe he'll see that. Maybe he'll be looking for somebody to decorate the pages. And at any rate, it seemed to work. And we were connected and have since then over the last couple of years had an incredible journey, literally journey across England, working on this this project. And I've sort of immersed myself in what he's doing and in the sources that he's going to in order to make a pretty densely illustrated series of editions. So there'll be four volumes. That's taking up most of my time. I bet it. And the first volume is coming out in the states

7:23later this month. That's right. Yeah. Galahad and the Grail. So we've just done our sort of heralding the book tour in England and in the states. So I'm just back from from a lot of engagements with full houses of people coming to see an old guy talk about Epic poetry. So that's kind of exciting. Yeah. That is great. So when it came to that particular book, how long did it take you to complete the work? I mean, I think sometimes people have maybe unrealistic expectations about how long it takes for visual artists to create a work. Yeah. So with the first one, it wasn't just a matter of, okay, here's the list of drawings. When you draw this, it was, I mean, I wasn't all that familiar with the subject material to begin with. So I had to dive in and really go go to the sources and learn the full arc of the story,

8:27which he hasn't written the full thing yet. So I'm having to read Mallory and Rosler, Lancelain Green's condensation of Mallory and other things. So I had to get into the story world first and then I had to pick, you know, do my kind of world building visually and figure out when am I going to place it? Is it going to look high, medieval? You know, what are the costumes and all that? So I've gone to a sort of sub-room and late antique fifth and sixth century kind of makes good sense. And what is the kind of, it's interesting from that, of course, academic going to ask this kind of question. But what is the process of informing the details? Because when you're having to learn a different, I mean, of course, you can use your imagination to do a lot of things, but on the flip side, you know, how much time do you spend looking at, you know, what the look is or was and how close to authenticity D.A.

9:32Yeah, well, so let's see, just to close the loop. I think it's been a year and a half for me working on the first one. And, you know, I also wanted to look at what you're talking about the detail and how much are you diving into. I wanted to see what is the history of illustrated Arthurian, you know, stuff, everything from illuminated manuscripts and tapestries to the books, which came in really heavy in the Victorian and Edwardian and then throughout the 20th century. So I've got a big collection. Thank you, Thrift Books. Now, so just trying to see what have other people done, how am I going to fit into this sort of lineage of things. But historicity is interesting for me as a visual artist. A lot of times when I've worked on biblical subjects,

10:32like I'm really keen to get historical details right because I haven't seen it done, and it's just interesting. It's like I'd like to get into the story that way. So now, historicity is not a concern of, say, Mallory Lighting and Medieval time. It's just not on his radar. And to some degree, it's not really Malcolm's priority in the writing of his either. But he gets to work out all his things in the writing. And he's dealing with this kind of collision of Christianity and Celtic spirituality and how one comes into and fills up the other. And he can do that with words, but how am I going to do it? And so historical details become important for me, not that I'm trying to do a literal. Yeah, exactly. But those things become keys for me to be able to express what's happening in the filling up of native British things,

11:39with this surprising news of resurrection for the Middle East. Yeah. And the reason I ask is because it's when you're familiarizing yourself with something. I imagine, especially in doing something like that, the focus isn't the historicity. And you don't want something so flat. It's just historical detail. But you could do a blunder in the middle of something by getting the time period off. And it doesn't necessarily matter. So I mean, that's why I ask about how much familiarity does it take to kind of make yourself at least have a feel for the time you're referencing. Yeah, I mean, I want to at least know the rules before I start breaking them. And of course, you'll see that I do break them plenty of times for the sake of clarity. You know, like I'm working on the next book now, and we've got to have the sword and the stone, which is set through an anvil into the stone. And anvil's in, you know, late sub-Roman Britain or anywhere, or just like a block of metal, you know, it doesn't

12:45look like an anvil. So I've got to, you know, go to like the 8th or 9th century to get something that begins to look like an anvil. So, but I want the viewer to recognize some I'm breaking the rules. And then, you know, like I've got round shields. But then I'm imposing onto those, the kind of heraldry that we get later, you know, like Lancelot has three binlits ghouls, these red stripes on his shield. And, you know, you wouldn't see that in, in, you know, the 500s, right? Well, this is interesting to also think about with regard to say, kind of artistic license when it comes to not just working out historical details, but also so many subtle things are going on when an artist is trying to portray something visually that are intended to, like,

13:48connect with a viewer. And the kind of the thinking process when it comes to, say, writing a story and illustrating a story, there is some overlap, but they're, but they're very different things. You're kind of working on. When it came to your work, were you running it by Malcolm? Were you saying, hey Malcolm, here's something I'm doing. What do you think? Yeah, initially I just had a lot of questions from. So I've, I printed off the manuscript, got it bound, and just went through and, and started doing little light sketches at the things that jumped out to me the most. And I was also trying to figure out, what is, what are these books going to look like in general? And we decided eventually that we'd have a system of kind of like every, every chapter gets an illuminated capital, the sections of the volumes get a stained glass window, and then each chapter gets a full page sort of engraved looking drawing. So yeah, I'm going

14:50through and making notes and thinking like, what is the image that really needs to come through with each chapter? And eventually I kind of sent him the list, you know, and went through it all. Actually, I went through it with him in person at a conference where we had dinner that night after I showed him, but, you know, so I'm like nervously showing him the, like, am I, am I doing the point of the story here? Did he, did he at any point say, no, wrong terrible. Get it out of here. The best word is hospitality. He's been really hospitable to my ideas. And there's been several moments where he kind of turns his head and smiles and goes, yeah, I haven't thought about it that way, but, okay. And so he's an easy writer to work with, in other words. Yeah. It's more than that. I mean, it's been amazing. And he's even, at least with me, he's

15:52used the language that he's calling me a collaborator. So it's a way that I drew the grail castle in this volume. He writes about it further in another volume. And he told me, you know, the, the sort of grandiose vision that you had making this epic looking place has informed the way that I'm writing about it. So, you know, that was a very touching point. That's great. But I'm mainly on how to, like, continuity questions for him and things like that. And he's just generally been very open to what I'm bringing to the table. That's great. That's probably because he's an artist himself. And, you know, obviously he's working with, you know, poetry and prose. He's also a musician, isn't he? Am I referring correctly? Yeah. So he's got a range. Now, I think about, say, like Pauline Baines and her illustrations for Tolkien and Lewis, that they never really liked. I kind of learned that through the grapevine that they weren't all that keen on her illustrations, but now they're kind of classic and they're sort of like, you know,

16:57what comes to mind when you think about, like, the original editions. And then you think about Tolkien's attempts. He was good at landscape, but really left a lot to be desired when it came to figure drawing. Yeah. And he was great with the little fumbles and like, right. The nicest for, you know, who's the end of it. But, you know, at the end of the Narnia, though, when Lewis received a big award for children's literature, he wrote to Pauline Baines and said, this is yours as much as it's mine. And that's great. I think you know, it came around. You know, it might have been Tolkien that I'm thinking about that was more kind of negative on her. Yeah, I've seen some of her original work and it was really quite good. I mean, when you see it in person, it's very impressive. Yes, she had quite a range. She did a book about mythology where she illustrates all the mythologies from around the world.

17:57And they're all in different styles. It's incredible. She's had a huge range as an artist. Yeah. Now, one of the things that I found intriguing following you on Facebook again is the work you did at the Bodleian. Now, just since, you know, I'm sorry, I'm a researcher. I'd like libraries that kind of thing. But I was really intrigued by the range of manuscripts that you were able to access there. Yeah. Yeah. So last month, I guess it was, I went over and I was able to get kind of a scholar in residence stay at Lewis's home at the kilns, which was, you know, as they say, in the Passover Seder, Dayanu, it would have been enough. I've got to somehow adieuped the people at the Bodleian and letting me look through the stacks there. So that's not an easy thing to do. I sure, I sure, I'm sure Malcolm Guides' involvement

19:03helped. I didn't drop his name, but we're writing essay and say, here's why I want to get in and look at these things. And the things that I requested, you know, looked a little bit like strange things to come in the same delivery from the archives, but I was looking at 750-year-old Arthurian manuscripts. Yeah. They have this one thing called the Rochefouco Grail. They have a portion of it, but they had the part of it that has the Grail journey on the boat, which I have illustrated. And so to see that image, like, singing out from over 700 years ago with gold illuminations. And I'm like, wait a second, that's that's Bores and Perseval. I know those guys. I've sailed with them myself, you know, in the drawing process. I feel like I've come to know them. And to seem like, I'm in conversation with this thing that's been happening a long time.

20:06And so that was one end of the things. And then the other side was documents from between Lewis and Charles Williams and some of the other Inklings, because they were all circling around Arthurian themes. And, you know, of course, like, Tolkien got a little bit out with his going. And then the unfinished fall of Arthur, Lewis, there's things that come out, of course, in like the ransom trilogy and even Narnia. Williams got some stuff out, but it was, you know, indescribable to normal people. Does those poems in Tally Estons through Logus are really difficult. They're really weird. But now I feel like I've got access to them a little bit. If you have a good familiarity, at least with kind of what's going on in Mallory, and you can enjoy T.S. Eliot,

21:06then you were kind of ready for Williams. And I'm finding his stuff very refreshing. And one of the things that was in the body in this unpublished is his Galahad poetry sequence. So that was amazing to read. And Malcolm hasn't even spent time with that. So seeing the resonances, it felt like this thing that all the inklings were circling around never quite got through. Like it's been passed down for this moment. And maybe that's a bold thing to say, but it seems like that's what's happening, because guide has so much inklings thought going into what he's formed his heart and his mind. And now he's delivering it in a way that I think is pretty accessible. Well, the other thing about guide that is just so that absolutely astonishes me is the range of his knowledge of the English poetic tradition. Oh yeah. I mean, he just seems to have completely

22:10absorbed what's there. And there's a lot there. But he really seems to have it. And so he can draw from that. He talks about how poets write sort of in dialogue with each other. So he can pull all of that into what he's doing. One of the things I'm trying to do, he was flipping through my manuscript of the coming of Arthur, which will be the next volume. And I've underlined and tried to make notes about all the illusions that I'm seeing and everything from Shakespeare to Leonard and he goes, oh, you notice that. That's good. So I've told him this doing this work has been like a survey in English literature for me because it sent me down and given me keys more importantly to get into texts that I couldn't get into before in a way. So he's good at letting people in the door with all the things. Well, it's interesting you put it away because it is being immersed into

23:11a tradition in many ways. And it is a conversation that's going on, especially among a people and across the time. And being brought into the tradition and the conversation takes formative. I mean, it takes all these forms to bring you in. And it is. It's like this symbol connects with this. And this, and it brings you into a great mystery. And that's I think the neat thing about the humanities in any way is how immersed you're brought into something that is just filled with mystery and wonder. And it's aware of that. And that's part of what drives the creative impulse is that it's just a way language and rhyme work in the way in which one person is influenced by another. And the way in which another is shaped by that and carries it or rebels against it. And then the way it brings, you know, music and likewise drawing and art into it, it is incredible when you start to think about the pieces involved in it. Like you say,

24:13looking at looking at in the body, especially the tradition of it and being able to learn of it, it does start to peel back. Probably opens as many mysteries as it solves, but at least let's you know what's going on with these figures. I mean, Williams has always been a difficult one, but I think it was wasn't it Lewis of them all who just kept bringing Williams back and say, no, you need to listen to this guy. Yeah. Well, yeah, the need to go and research something, you know, you feel this need and then you go looking for for something and it meets your need. And then spurs on more poetry. And I just think about the kind of initial generativity that we see in in Genesis, like the Adam, you know, feels the need for a helpmate and then is given the gift of the helpmate. And then he explodes in poetry, you know, on my bone. And so it's this responsive conversation that keeps building. And I think Malcolm

25:21II is like plugged into one of the things that England's got best, which is I mean, they all could have spent their whole lives just being great critics and doing, you know, literary criticism, but they saw that the best response to great literature and great art is is more art, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Let's let's think a little bit about that Stephen. So, you know, you made the point that they could have been great critics. Well, I mean, that's a good point, but at the same time, it's a very derivative, you know, sort of kind of writing. Obviously, I've done a little bit of it myself. It's a whole other animal when you try to write your own story, create your own, you know, work. And a lot of critics can't pull it off because it's such a different animal. It's interesting to know too that Lewis was a frustrated poet. You know, we remember him as an accomplished novelist and a polygist, but his real dream was epic poetry. You want to do something more like Milton

26:30than ended up being known for. Now, when it comes to that kind of thing, when we think about, say, the visual arts, is there is there stuff that has inspired you? I mean, we've talked a little bit about these historical resources, but are there other artists that maybe are more contemporary, other, you know, sort of like traditions? You know, we're out, we've talked a little bit about woodcutting, but you know, who are the people that you look to for inspiration when it comes to the visual arts side of things? Yeah, I mean, that can just be an old day extra stuff. I'd find it fascinating to go for it. Not only the things that on the surface look like what I'm trying to do in a surface texture kind of way, I mean, I spent several years trying to immerse myself with plain air painting. So

27:30looking at all of those types of folks from Turner and whoever else and getting out into the world and sketching in color, which doesn't really look anything like what I'm doing professionally, most of the time, but it's still in forms. I mean, observational drawing and all the people who helped teach me how to do that, that undergirds everything I'm doing. So that's one angle. And then there's, I mean, there's illustrators and comics artists and people that do things that look nothing like my style, but I'm still learning from them. And so, you know, I've been really lucky and blessed to meet some of my heroes artistically like Josephine and John Hendricks and who wrote an inkling book himself. And Heather Pollington was an iconographer that I've met in England last trip. We actually met at the kilns. She brought her family and she's

28:35one who's illustrating the great fairy tale series with Jonathan Peugeot now. So, oh nice. So yeah, there's contemporaries like that who are doing a different look for me all together. But then there have been the wooden gravers that I've sought out as well like Wesley Bates in Ontario who's done a lot of stuff with Wendell Berry and has loved his work and he very graciously gave me a day to come learn from him in the studio. And on my first trip to England, it was actually the day before I met Malcolm, I went out to see the great wooden graver Simon Brett who's done tons of folio society of this and he's done a grail epic as well. And I just wrote to him and said I'd love to come meet you and he said why don't you come stay because I'm kind of remote. And we get to talking, he shows me the studio, finally he asks, so what are you working on? And I just

29:37got in this gig to do the art or thing and he he heard me out and then he he's a frail man and he puts his hands on his on his knees and starts to lift himself up and he says, well, I must take you now to Merlin's grave. So we get on the car and I do the horrific mound in Marlborough, where you know it's near Silbury Hill and the Aries standing stones and and I mean he just invites me into the world of fairy, I had no idea. And so you never know like what happened when you reach out to someone who you know you look up to sometimes they say yeah come on. And I'm sorry to do it because he recently died. Oh yeah to get to me. Yeah so now you're going to have to write a short story about your actual trip into fairy as you and then how no time passed and then you returned. Yeah, strange things have happened since the start of work.

30:44Well from from what you've said you were probably at more than one fairy spot when you were traveling with Alchem too. Yes, yeah that's true. So we last summer set out on a trip into the southwest mostly of England and so in summer set you've got and in Wiltshire you've got all the standing stones and summer set you've got Glastonbury and then Cornwall there's Tintagel which is like the birthplace of Arthur. So we went mainly Tintagel and Glastonbury as where we spent a lot of time and we had a film crew with us as well but we had plenty of time off camera to to immerse ourselves and do writing and drawing and I carry along a sketchbook and got to make little you know plein air sketches of Tintagel and and so and we were doing a lot of

31:49talking and he was composing on the on the next book but yeah I mean I've got several moments from that trip. We actually encountered people who called themselves Druids. We met members of the war band of King Arthur. There's a guy who's sort of inherited the mantle of Arthur in his mind but like the heritage trust gives way to him on you know Solstice days at Stonehenge and lets his followers come in and things like that but but yeah we we encountered a guy who is incredibly tied into the myth of Joseph Fefair Mothea. Yeah right that allows to England and that story involves Joseph's staff you know blossoming into a Hawthorne tree that still bloomed at Christmas in the Easter and this guy

32:51considers himself a keeper of the thorn and they have hidden sions in case the the public ones are chopped down which they are from time to time and so you know fascinating stories one of the things that made me feel like I was walking into a myth though was when you know I had read in a book that when the Puritans came to chop down the glass and brave thorn thinking it to be you know superstitious a thorn went into the eye of the guy chopping it down and then we heard from a local that a few years ago that the tree was hacked down again and the guy who did it got a cancer in an eye so there's something about lost sight you know and it feels like I don't I don't have a way of verifying either of these stories but it's interesting the stories exist they might want to put up a warning sign with yeah don't miss but I think it's that that connectedness to things that's one

33:56thing I do miss about England very much is the way that their myths are lived out in their places that you can you can touch them and they're the best way of telling the story of those places and its history uh thington the white horse I mean all this stuff is just right there you can walk on it yeah now what you'd mentioned that you had a film crew uh is this a film crew that is making a documentary or something about what's going on yeah there's they've made a 30 minute film called Merlin's Isle the tale this land still keeps and we're kind of showing it in in person events and you know things like that where people want to get reading groups together and then probably in the fall we'll do a wider release of it but it ends up not being uh it's not like an ad for the book it it's actually a really great little summation of kind of division of what Malcolm's trying to do in in conversation especially with young people who feel that the world has been

35:02disenchanted for them and you know it's kind of about his effort to reconnect you know people in place and ideas and so you know that that thing of going blind in an eye it it's like it's not just an intellectual exercise you know meaning it there's this idea and at least the thing that I was taking from that story is that places and matter are shot through with meaning after all and um you know I think we as Christians have to deal with that like that that's a whole thread I'd love to pursue or like follow but before we I attempt to do that uh who's the publisher by the way of the book that you're working on with Malcolm uh rabbit room press all right I'm sure who of course are inspired by the the inkling's meeting in the back room of the burden baby pub

36:03the rabbit yeah right that's the thrust behind that yeah in case folks aren't familiar with it it's out of Nashville right right I remember right right anyway getting back to this thread I have a that theory that especially uh folks with an artistic bent um have a kind of sympathy for the materials they're working with and have an ability to kind of read them and maybe into it the meanings of things in ways that others can't because they just don't have an occasion or maybe don't have that uh kind of disposition but I also think that when that is skewered or disillusioned because of a heavy dose of kind of postmodern thought it inevitably leads people into a kind of very dark place and the the kind of art that is made at that point is intended to sort of desacralize and uh death desecrate and it's sort of what you know we've referred to

37:10oh who is it uh is it Philip Reef death works right yeah so do you have any thoughts do you agree with my my sort of my take Steven or is that something that maybe it's just a idiosyncrasy of my outlook I'm trying to just follow again what do you think leads to the de-sacralization? well basically when they're kind of hit with a heavy dose of postmodern or even modern thought that that essentially says everything is just a power game and uh any anything like a myth is just serving the interests of some ruling class and or some kind of that interest group that kind of thing it was the sort of thing you get when you get to a lot of the elite art schools anymore so we had a guy up from my church in Connecticut who was a gifted uh visual artist and ended up at Goldsmiths in London and he told me that his entire time there uh it was just basically Marxists trying to shove this stuff down his throat he insisted on believing in beauty but that made him kind of persona non grata in the school yeah yeah i mean i think it's related to like most art

38:21throughout the world now and throughout history in the west has been connected to a tell us you know um it and it's been for something besides itself and especially besides it's it's maker and in this in the wasteland of the last century and a half you know we we like we turned our cathedrals into museums and made museums into the cathedral of the self you know the the gallery it's like where we put ourselves on the throne and and also this you know the this pop music stage or whatever is you know like the the new altar and everything like that so uh yeah when the self becomes uh the point it's just gonna turn into rubbish and and darkness is gonna invade and i mean now we're you know we're at such an extreme end of it now with you know bananas stuck on walls

39:22and the right thing i think people are done you know in general like the masses are kind of like okay we'll have meaning instead and we're looking around for it and looking for something integrated and something connected to um unseen realities that are bigger than us and of course without a proper guide um we can fund our ways into other dark sentiments yeah right right yeah better not the self right yeah now that actually is uh another point that uh uh i i had wanted to mention you talked about uh meeting with uh and iconographer in England who's working with Jonathan Peugeot um i'm seeing in well first of all the orthodox seem to be really big on a lot of what's happening in terms of art and christianry and chantman and so on

40:27but i'm also seeing a lot of cross fertilization between traditions there you know so Malcolm is a um you know is an anglican there are Protestants like the private room i think they're predominantly Protestant certainly evangelicals are involved in it you know that are that are working in these areas as well so can you comment on that that the the kind of cross fertilization between traditions and maybe a little bit of the overcoming of some of the the barriers that we put up between ourselves yeah one of the things i guess not so much of my anxiety uh through the years related to the life of faith has been around this breakdown of um traditions within christian just this desire to see us pull together when we've got so much threatening to pull us apart and i've just felt deeply the sense that of gift that i've been given as as an artist to join hands

41:35with people across you know traditional divides um to find ourselves rallying around a common story um i've felt that uh particularly in meeting artists like other pollington and Jonathan Peugeot recently got to meet him uh with Malcolm and um and other people that are speaking into it um in those traditions so um it's interesting to see that rallying around beauty is an arena where schism is being healed up i mean i that's the only way i can say it that's what it feels like is we're um because we're putting our hands to the plow together to get at this ancient story of resurrection um it it's just been a means by which the Lord is starting to heal some of the

42:42divides it's what it feels like to me um yeah i see i see that yeah it's a sort of thing actually but to tip that to Chris a little bit it's the sort of thing you see touchstone doing you know when it is if you go online and you know you're on a youtube or whatever uh what you're going to find is the orthodox explaining everything that's wrong with Protestantism Protestant's attacking the orthodox and the Catholic Catholics attacking the Protestants usually ignoring the orthodox you just see that's it when when you look at it you see what looks like constant sniping at each other um and you know i don't want to downplay the differences there they're important but one of the things that that Lewis says in in your Christianity that i think is really helpful is you know you you need to pick a room you know you need to pick a tradition um to

43:42enter uh but you should not snipe at people who are who pick other rooms especially not in public right now these are in house conversations tab you don't have them in the public sphere because if you do you're just going to discreet at the whole house right it's almost the reverse of the way people actually behave i've had lots of uh you know opportunities to see say people who are say controversialists who when they get on on the stage are attacking everything but in terms of their own personal interactions with everybody they're pretty chill you know it's not it's not actually kind of how they live their lives it is it is a very different thing i mean i remember as a student going to the uh 13th ecumenical conference in debositally and it was on iconography of that was it was a growing interest starting to develop in the west especially a young young people and they invited i mean everything from Andrew Laufe you know kind of the british convert to

44:44to orthodoxy probably front of the finest scholars of orthodox theology calistos where was there Alexander men who was a murdered priest in russia his daughter is an iconographer and they get they presented i mean we have we have people in every language from every christian faith tradition um probably the least represented um they're probably other than me were not none that had a background at all in any connection to the evangelical world um and it was all the other and they weren't fighting they were having conversations i'm not saying this is true of all their members across the board but they understood that these rich things need to be engaged in a rich way and learn learn from you know why are we doing this why do we bring this here is it all about just what we think you're doing or do you know do we listen to it and and i think out of those conferences some amazing stuff you know took place uh especially in the arts and in the way in which theology in the arts were integrated and a lot of work done on it so it's valuable to to have

45:48these conversations and and not just bicker in public especially online by the way i would i would bet that uh you were probably missing a significant contingent guys from the reform tradition as well they were they were none yeah so that's my background so uh at least for the last for my adult life so i'm trying i'm trying to bring some well i think there are a number of people out there who are yeah it is they're not necessarily um people who are trying to garner big following so so they're they're not necessarily known as well as as probably they should be um now in terms of your your work now i mean obviously this seems like an all-consuming project that you're currently engaged in but is there anything else you're working on i mean or things that you're looking at doing down the road well i've always got ideas and i'll take occasional jobs i'm working on i've recently got to do some

46:49work for wendelberry which was really exciting um and uh and then i've got a sort of backburner project of uh personal reflections on pilgrimage through the holy land um and that kind of become journaling through that and processing it has become like my recording my journey from a materialist frame into an enchanted frame or something like that uh into a sacramental worldview and um even though the trip was a few years ago now it going into like i was earlier i was talking about historicity and how that's like a priority in my art or it has been historicity led me into the holy sepulcher because i thought that this is the spot and then ever since i'll walk out of those doors i've been haunted by symbol and myth and sacraments uh yeah yeah yeah yeah that's neat so

47:52yeah most most people i think in you you are artists have have kind of a pet project that they have been working on it forever keep returning to so that does a surprise now you you mentioned kind of this transition or sort of this journey from materialist outlook to the one that you have now where you at one time i'm materialist in your outlook you know i mean i was that would be unfair to say like purely that but i'm just realizing even though i was raised in the church and i think came to genuine faith at a young age um the older i get the more i realized how split my view of things was it was like i have an intellectualist sent about some some part of the jesus story that i think will get me out of the bad place one day you know but until then it's just trudged through this world of stuff you know so i was still accepting a lot of the assumptions of mere materialism and and you know it was i was super skeptical of

49:00meaning really being inside of uh matter in the world so yeah i guess just getting to the place where i'm realizing in that matter does matter um in the incarnation forces me to deal with that um uh so was it was the artistic uh you know work instrumental in helping that come about or was it just kind of brought along because of a spiritual journey or already on yeah i mean it's like now i i can have language and see what the art was always doing to me and or or like why i was so compelled to do it um you know now i i can see what it was about um you know so yeah yeah i think that makes a lot of sense yeah i guess the thing i'm wondering about is um does this mean that maybe artists have an advantage or is it a challenge for people

50:03who aren't an artist in ways that artists maybe have uh kind of access to something that other people don't seem to have as ready access to i'm not trying to like create a false dichotomy i'm just trying to think it through uh because it does seem to me in terms of my experience with people the people who already have an artistic bent tend to get to this place quicker in in many cases yeah i mean artists are out there on the edges of things um it's i'm so torn about this like when i get in a room full of artists especially artists who call themselves Christians i find myself amazingly uh frustrated about how like fudgy the thought is sometimes which mean i don't mean but then if i get into like a like a theological conference or something i'm wishing that these people could feel anything you know so i'm never happy but uh no and i do think one time mucco

51:11Fujimura said like artists are like the shepherds of Bethlehem they're the first to see the miracles they're out there on the edge and and that's you know they've got a clear review of things and they're maybe true to that um i do think there's like a sensitivity to um mystery you know a willingness to sit with mystery that lots of us in the church could afford to foster a little bit more um but then the artists usually need um people who with robust thinking lives um and conviction uh to to kind of help form and give place to what they're doing so i mean we we need each other and uh that's what the church is it's like it's everybody's in there at once you know a young and old and who knows for me like we all know each other right yeah that it is it is interesting i mean you do you know different different art has led and been able to communicate

52:15those dimensions you're talking about out of materialism i mean i remember just the films of Tarkovsky doing the same thing long stretches of scenes of natural things but they're trying to communicate this transcendence without getting killed or arrested in an atmosphere where you could die for for having it but also like uh the the Welsh but i i'm sure you know the the Welsh english Welsh poet and engraver David Jones um fate he was you know his he talked about an engraver um but he he took this very thing he realized kind of like Elliott he's a modern but he is not just a modern and this drive first the history then to the myth and then then to the you know the spiritual world and i think he ends up converting to catholicism at the time but he his engravings he did a lot of biblical themes if i remember right and then was part of another community that we're in england that were specifically aimed at integrating the spiritual mythological historical christian themes with these traditions of course again he got out there

53:22with um erick gill and erick gill yeah gill's community that's it that's the one in the hero yeah that's right but yeah they were doing amazing thing and actually of course jones was always returning to the grail and um the stories of Arthur uh somebody uh in dc the other day brought out an original uh unpublished david jones piece about the grail so it's like an engraving so that was a great thing but nice yeah so steven i'd like to work in close to the to the end of the show here um something that a lot of artists are kind of thinking and talking about these days as artificial intelligence i'm sure you've been asked about it a lot um i've heard about it just sick so i guess what i'd like to just have is your your sense of what um it means for the arts and what it means for artists and you

54:25go crack like yours well i'm waiting on your book i keep telling everybody just the books coming out from wild you know there's you know there's big questions i understand the the appeal of using it even it like the people who can convince themselves that they're just using it as a slave i mean i'm still pretty skeptical or that um it's hard to know what to say i just try to like i don't talk to the devil you know um i'm not using it um i think it's a Ouija board you know like i i just i'm so skeptical like i've got friends that show me what it can do look aren't you amazed and you know it's it's amazing in a way but like my reaction is not to be cool it's to be

55:31yikes and i don't understand the people who are saying cool i mean it just seems like i'd like do you know the story of what's going on in christian like this is uh there's a lot of danger here so i mean i think the at this point messing with it it like is risking ourselves um well i'm with you now the people who are saying cool are they fellow artists or just friends who are just wanting to get you into techy things um i haven't heard it from artists but i've heard it from art directors oh really okay who are who spend their lives having to deal with the problems of us artists and they're like you know tempted by this thing that might let them bypass us um and therein lies part of the problem yeah well i mean our director would be working for someone like a publisher or a company and they just wanted to get out uh content you know as they say yeah

56:31but i'm amazed with that like even apparently in so-called christian publishers that are just willing to replace people on their teams with with these monstrous uh hot technologies i think it's um unconscionable uh what some people are doing and the degree which they're doing it so i think we've got an extreme amount of skepticism and not give up our responsibility as sub creators um it's just seems like really obvious and important that we're not gonna hand that over to machines right right well the good thing is the nature of your um medium uh you know woodcuts uh at least at this station till we get um embodied AI in the form of like uh some kind of robot uh from Boston dynamics is uh not as you know you can fake like uh a woodcut you can say that this is an a woodcut style that's not actually the product of a woodcut

57:36um but the medium that you're working with tonight and i also think this is kind of where we're gonna find um kind of review of every i revival and a valorization of uh traditional media people are gonna want to own things that if you got physical characteristics and not just be pixels on a screen well yeah it's already giving up a premium um to embody experience and i i think the fact that there's all this renewed attention and sort of repentance really turning back towards the the sacramental practices that were handed down to us um you know we can all tune in to cool sermons online and whatever and that's helpful when i listen to you guys all the time but but you know there's there's a big difference between this space and breaking the bread together and um so i think that you know Pasha recently described uh when i was with him he described the like we're in a flood of AI

58:40slop and you know there maybe there's a rainbow on the other side um that it embodiment and sacrament real real you know the scary thing is that it would probably be possible to ask AI to create a podcast episode and it would be able to produce something that sounds like us but isn't well we've given it plenty to work with yeah i don't i don't want robot glen sunshine yeah i think we're heading to the 500 episodes so there's a lot of that a lot of work with yeah they can they can they can mimic that's what he would plan a surreal thing you want to kind of wrap up with in terms of questions or comments well just one comment that uh i i've mentioned to steven before but i just want to give credit where it's due i had never heard of Malcolm guide until steven introduced me to him at a retreat we did with ken bowah oh wow

59:44so um so i i owe my entire knowledge um that that has come from that to steven showing me a video of Malcolm discussing what kind of a habit he was well now we're going to have to link that video is it online uh where he describes his type of habit because there are different kinds uh yeah i'd be fun to do that at time do you have any thoughts as we wrap up the questions well i think it you know i think a great way of uh ending my point is it's uh there's always a distinction that the real makes that these the attempts to copy the real the parodies of the real the not real that look like it makes and i think we're being forced to have to make those find those again and this is what our connectedness to these really embodied not just physically embodied but spiritually embodied domains are supplying us with this is familiar territory for

1:00:49Christians who had to mark out their difference in the world and yet a difference that showed it was the fulfillment of all these other things as well there's a place an integrated place that's something that we could maybe mimic the parody um but it's it's the only way to mark out the difference the real makes and and again we're just learning what that means and i think this show you know talking about art really really pushes us in that direction so steven is there anything that you want to say as we wrap up are the places people should go to see your work follow you then anything like that uh yeah i think merlin's isle.com is the place to go to see the the things i'm working on right now or my website i'm steven crots on whatever platform so and thank you so much for what you're doing i've benefited from these conversations y'all held for a few years now i really appreciate. great well thank you steven it's pretty great great to know that

1:01:51and thank you for listening to this episode of the theology podcast and if you'd like our work and you want to help us pay the bills there is a link in the show notes to our patreon page and you can learn about how to do those things there anyway that's enough for now thanks a lot bye bye oh theology podcast is a ministry of west minster presbyterian church in battleground washington the theology podcast is produced and edited by a widely craft productions of Nashville Tennessee