“Politicians and law men are perhaps the least creative professionals I know anything about. It’s true, however, that I have never sat across the table from a government culture creator. It’s not a stretch to imagine that they employ their inventive wills even less, simply based on the dross they scum up and send across the cables. Still, the solutions of our local house are rarely more than a shift in directives from some previous plan. Impersonal peace and ratified graft are the only cares they can conjure high in their fortified towers. And in the name of that peace, they have canvassed our city.
“The Way, on the other hand, is a single body made up of the most colorful hands, feet, elbows, and noses I’ve ever laid my eyes on. This congregation, especially, hosts the highest order of civil dissenters in the city, and I am proud to call each of you a brother or sister in this higher art.
“Years ago, City Center was an amalgamation of common metals formed into common shops and factories. We used to produce in Newburgh. We used to create. We used to dream. Of course, professionals began to infiltrate that furnace of industry and created one of their own. Soon the financial district rose out of the remains of the smelters, and civilization came with it. Tall stone edifices and wide stairways flourished, feeding on the tastes and pride and greed of financiers and public officials. Grand as they are, the facades are flat, cold, and now crumbling.
“To abate the acid rain and palliate the staining ash that still blows east into the city from the displaced foundries, our governors have, in all of their creative wisdom, fallen back on the only remaining industrial buildings inside the city limits. The Canvas Shop.
“The Canvas Shop defaulted on their loans before any of us were born, and its bankruptcy left the city with years worth of back taxes paid in full with miles and miles of cloth canvas. Canvas which was the sad result of production outpacing sales for what is rumored to have been decades. Three warehouses now stand full. Of course I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. Needless to say, the city owns a bit of canvas. Undoubtedly, we’ve all noticed.
“The unfurled density of a fraction of the first warehouse now weighs our city down with a burden greater than the cloth itself. Sure, the politicians argue that the canvas, like an acoustic board, softens the din of traffic. Surely, it also billows and reaches out with the breeze to grab the dusts of western industry, a laundering away from the soft grays turned bleach white again. But what else is assured, is the depersonalizing mask that unicolored cloth drapes over the entire city.
“Once wonderfully unique neighborhoods now drown under the white tide, gasping for fresh personality and wisping color. Bakeries and florists and dentists and coffee shops and arcades and accounting offices are now only denoted by the black letters stencilled over their doors, the doors themselves blanked by a sheet of canvas attached from the inside.
“Lovers of peace and quiet and easy mediocrity are as snug as a bug under this sterile rug, but I can personally vouch for 19 suicides over the last week alone, three times the city’s average. The imperfections of our daily walks, our houses, our friends, and our lives are being drawn back behind the veil, allowing our personal imperfections to be framed in stark focus. Life and love earn worth by their stains. We need our failures. We need the city’s brokenness. We are built up by building up. We are comforted by comforting. We are fixed in the effort of fixing. We build faith by practicing faith and are not purified by the whitewashing of the social elite. And that’s why I love every single piece of graffiti I’ve seen.
“The breadth of content, the quality of execution, the ubiquity and creativity of the art is astounding and heartening and just plain ol good. A piece I saw in action was a depiction of the artist himself, back turned to the street, hand and can to the wall, impishly looking over this shoulder to check for authorities. Toward the end of the work, the artist did turn and saw the police. In a furious attempt to finish, he hastily sprayed the left hand gripping the can, and with an ingenious, last-second inspiration, held down the nozzle as he was tackled and dragged away, leaving a first jagged, then fading red line, the less-skilled work of his two-dimensional twin.
“I cannot vouch for the loyalties of that boy in this War for Beauty, but by far the most meaningful pieces I have seen were done by our own congregation. Last week I asked Hank and Sarah Fieldman to visit a single mother who has reached out to me on multiple occasions for a visit. As we all know, the Fieldmans’ fervor for hospitality and care is the feather in the cap of this, our Sigma Chapter of Newburgh Way Community. After taking bags’ worth of unrequested groceries to the young woman and spending the entire evening with her, Hank somehow got his hands on a now useless window washer’s platform and sent Sarah home. He created the largest piece that I have seen and, I would imagine, the largest piece yet done in the city. He told me he used 15 cans of paint, and couldn’t do much more than get the outline and fill in a little before he ran out. Now on the front of her 10 story apartment building, stands a depiction of the woman, 120 feet tall, crushing cars underfoot and punching through the wall of the neighboring building, a bank by the stencil over the revolving doors. Yet in the other hand she held her five month old baby, bent over and evidently cooing her to sleep. The uncontrollable power and love of the woman in that piece is reminiscent of this new movement. We, the artists, with the canvas of monotony folding over our city, burst out of the average with grace and color and emotion and beauty and divine power.
“The last piece that I would like to recount this morning was done by Jack Angsly and Camden Bernish. The two of them were leaving East Street’s Commongrounds Coffee Shop around 5, when the crowds of the city pulsed with the energy released by the quitting time whistle. This being last Friday, of course a Friday that introduced a three-day holiday weekend, the energy was feverish. Caught unwisely in the midst of the bustling legs and brushing shoulders was an elderly woman with a rackety walker. Jack and Cammie rushed to her aid, holding both arms as they crossed the street to the calm of City Park East. There they sat with her as the sun set with the afternoon rush. The sun lowered behind them until it was under the horizon, yet the white of the city held onto light, like a fresh snow. I know this because I was taking a walk along East Street Friday evening. After Jack and Cammie saw the old woman safely onto her bus, they went back to the bench, where they doffed their bags, of course full to the brim with paint cans. These two were our most talented before the War for Beauty, and now have been awarded the battlefield commission of First Lieutenants for their constant devotion to the art.
“They had to work fast, because although the commuters had long left the city, the streets still entertained more than a few urbanites. As soon as they began their work, the police would be notified and on their way. So with concentrated effort and matchless speed, these two put to canvas their hearts. Behind and to the right of the bench, on the sheets that covered the concrete retaining wall and the grass above it, they painted the scene that had transpired. Jack sat on the right side of the bench with his arm around the back and hand on the opposite shoulder of the old woman. Cammie was bent over with laughter on the other side. Both with jubilant faces turned toward the old woman, who with a sly smile was clearly the source of the joke and their joy. This happy trio was embraced under the shadow of the old woman’s broad wings and illuminated by the golden glow of the sunset, her halo. Above the trio, ‘Angel Unaware’ was written.
“Although I was there as they finished their art, I only received the explanation of the piece the next day when I visited the pair in prison. I saw them arrested as soon as they returned the cans to their bags. For these petty crimes, the jailers aren’t even separating men and women, so Jack and Cammie got to spend the night together in their cell, singing praise to the delight of some drunkards and to the chagrin of the more peevish inmates, arrested for domestic abuse or bar fights or whatever. When I got in to see them in the morning, both Jack and Cammie were in the highest spirits. I believe while serving their 24 hour sentence, the two of them have planned a multitude of projects for the soft white walls of our city. I suppose that to more effectively enforce their laws, the authorities should have simply driven the two to opposite ends of the city and hoped for them not to find each other for half the night.
“As we approach the end of this very strange service, I would like to remind our congregation about some of the practicalities of the art of civil disobedience. There are punishments that you will assuredly face if caught by the police. Of course, in the liberality of our dictatorial parliament, nothing is any longer ‘illegal,’ simply ‘discouraged.’ So, we are all ‘discouraged’ from defacing public property, of which the city-owned canvas has always been, at least since the bankruptcy of The Canvas Shop. Per the statutes laid down alongside the institution of our canvas-covered city, ‘anyone caught defacing public canvas will be subject to 24 hours of imprisonment in City Penitentiary.’ And when caught in the act and approached by police, I encourage you all to gracefully accept the punishment.
“Apparently when Parliament, in all of their uncreative lack of foresight, drafted the law, they figured that the main dissidents would be unhappy homeowners and shopkeepers who would cut out their buildings from under the sheets. A night or two in prison would probably be enough to quiet their disquieted tempers. They didn’t figure that we artists would attack with purpose, with fervor and love and purpose. So now, as is law, they have one year with their statutes untampered. They are bound by law to add or subtract nothing from the law, neither weakening, nor strengthening it. So we are assured, for one year, to have the city as our canvas. And they are assured, for one year to fill the penitentiary with the most loving and well-meaning of criminals they’ve ever laid their hands on. This revolution, my friends, is a War for Beauty.
“I only hope that our rulers will have the wisdom to save the pieces that they cut out of the canvas, when they sew new blank sheets back in place. Years from now, we could fill the warehouses once again with the canvas and have a grand museum dedicated to the creativity of this city. I for one, will do my best to document this wonderful time for posterity’s sake with my own camera.
“Now hear me. For the next year, fear not going to prison. Embrace it. Nowhere but within these walls will you find a more concentrated collection of believers. The Way will give light to the shadows of each cell and touch the wounds of those found therein. City Penitentiary will overflow with charity, care, kindness, and joy. I cannot think of a place I will rather be over the next year. And with that, this church, along with all chapters of The Way in Newburgh, officially condone the civil disobedience of public art on the canvas of the city.
“Lastly, remember, when you find, as you surely will, your pastor in the cell next to yours, be kind to him for he is your brother in arms.”