My whole growing-up family loves art.

I don’t think there’s one of us who wouldn’t jump at the chance to visit an art museum.

Sure, I know there are plenty people who want to eat up those places, they are filled with wonder, after all.  But I love that all of us are firmly planted in the art loving camp.  There’s something about that love that goes deep into our bones.

And sometimes I wonder, like I do on lots of parenting facets, how did my parents orchestrate that love?  Did we all come with it?  All nine of us?  Was there some gene they passed to us that caused us to ooogle over paintings or did my parents just take us to enough art museums, or did my mom’s tears about the beauty of art (back HERE) make that love sink deep?

At the beginning of the summer, my brother Eli wrote to us on our group family email and told us about this cool exhibit up in Utah (at the church history museum) by this amazing artist named Jorge Cocco Santangelo.
He said there had been an exhibit with Cocco’s art in New York (where Eli lives) and that he had fallen in love with the art and told us we should get our booties over to see it when we were in Utah over the summer.  (I kid about the booty part, because he wouldn’t really say that, but you get the idea…)
Anyway, Eli has a good eye for beauty, he has a good track record of suggestions that I have fallen in love with.  So we hustled on over to that museum while we were in Salt Lake City.

This is the description the museum gave:  Argentine artist Jorge Cocco Santángelo captures the majesty of Jesus of Nazareth using straight lines, blocks of color, rounded forms, and angled and dramatic shafts of light.  He calls his style sacrocubism because of his sacred subject matter and the clear influence of cubism, an early 20th-century art movement that abstracted objects to simple, geometric shapes. As a style, sacrocubism moves the viewer’s attention away from superfluous details—textures of fabric, the accuracy of historical backgrounds, or the impossibility of capturing an exact likeness of Christ—by depicting simple shapes that allow the viewer to focus on the essential and most holy aspects of the sacred events themselves.

Those paintings were majestic.

Here’s a video to give more in depth background:

And here’s another one I loved:

Ok, so back to my question: how in the world did my parents instill such a love of art in our family?

I wondered this as my girls, at first, gave me some rolly-eyed looks.  “Why, oh why do we have to go, mother??” they whined.

Lucy perked up pretty quickly though, and fell in love with those beauties right at my side.

She read all the descriptions up close and personal like this:

After a while Claire too realized that we were in the presence of greatness in that hallowed place.

Something about those lines depicting light, encased around Christ was just so beautiful.

There was another cool exhibit there filled with pictures of missionaries and church-goers from all over the world.

It was so beautiful in an entirely different way.

I hope, as I continue to expose these kids to all the art I can (helped by great uncles like Eli:), the seedlings of that art love will continue to grow and blossom.

Because art can move you.  And that is a beautiful thing.

Thank you, Cocco, for giving us all that beauty to enjoy!

More about that awesome artist HERE and HERE (you have to scroll down a little on that last link).

6 Comments

    1. Yes I love both! Rose was my neighbor in Virginia and she is amazing. I actually took drawing classes from her. And Caitlin is a friend of my sisters (at least I'm pretty sure she is)…and she does such beautiful work. Love artists who bring so much thought and beauty into our world!

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    3. My sister in San Diego hosted an art workshop with Rose last year, and another of my sisters participated in an art project with her in NYC in December! (We are an artsy family). Also, my friend Lynn posed for one of Rose's new works, "Meither Do I condemn Thee." It's visible on Rose's IG and it is beautiful. I love her work.

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