Re-digging Art’s Foundations: Essays on Gospel and Art

by David Thistlethwaite

Publisher:

Wipf and Stock

, 2024

Overview

The experience of looking at contemporary art can be baffling, even alienating. But good art, Thistlethwaite asserts, makes you feel more human, not less, and certainly does not undermine your ability to make judgments. Too often we have been told "it's all so subjective," and this has permitted purveyors of ugliness and the second-rate to occupy the public square without hindrance. But beauty, goodness, and truth, far from being the ragged tatters of a civilization in its death-throes, are in reality perfectly objective and thrillingly real. Everything depends on what sort of world we are living in, whether a good God's good creation, though marred, or one that is, according to expert opinion, pointless and meaningless.
The twelve essays here show how a central core of ideas works out when different questions are asked, and in one longer, narrative essay, how they were arrived at. The foundations that need re-digging for art are discovered in common sense, the Bible, and a little theology. One aim of the book is to bridge the gap between Bible and art, and by so doing, to liberate art-viewers; and another is to free art makers into truthful and powerful real-world connections.

Praise for Re-digging Art’s Foundations

“For many decades, David Thistlethwaite has been pointing us to the things that matter more than anything else in art: what kind of world we inhabit; the interweaving of beauty, goodness, and truth; and (most of all) how the Bible, far from being alien to the art world, will offer the deepest wisdom the artist will ever find. Bold, humane, and winsome, these essays will be a considerable encouragement to all who care about art today.”

—Jeremy Begbie, McDonald Agape Directory of Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts, Duke University



“My friend David Thistlethwaite has been engaged with art all his life and his writing is bound up with his experience as a painter as well as a thinker. In his new book he takes us beyond the formalist-conceptualist debate, to consider deeper presuppositions that would give meaning to both. . . . This is no stuffy intellectual treatise, however. It reads like an artist’s sketchbook, as something highly personal, full of memories and experiences. It is this combination of the intellectual and the personal that excited me and challenged me to review and re-examine my own understanding of what I am doing as an artist and a Christian.”

—Alan Wilson, Glasgow School of Art, Open Studio tutor



“This delightful book dares to reclaim beauty and meaning as the fundamental properties of art. Written from a Christian perspective which nevertheless transcends religious boundaries, Re-digging Art’s Foundations re-asserts the need for judgements of value in the visual arts. In language as original as his thought, Thistlethwaite blends erudition with gentle humor to argue that aesthetic truth exists, and that it points ultimately to God.”

—Jennifer Floether, lay reader, Scottish Episcopal Church, and contemporary artist

Product Details

• Title: Re-digging Art’s Foundations: Essays on Gospel and Art
• Author: David Thistlethwaite
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Print Publication Date: 2024
• Logos Release Date: 2024
• Pages: 190
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Ebook
• ISBNs: 9798385218165, 9798385218141, 9798385218158
• Resource ID: LLS:9798385218165
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-23T00:26:35Z

About the Author

David Thistlethwaite read history of art at Cambridge, and after a few years at a prestigious London art dealer, returned to Cambridge to research English art theory. Following another year in the art trade, he worked for seven years for UCCF (the Christian Unions) as Professional Groups Secretary, before retraining in figurative art in London and Florence. He is the author of The Art of God and the Religions of Art (1998).