SOUL FOOD:A transforming art experience

I first heard Gertrude Stein’s last words while eating rose petals and nasturtiums in the living room of my best friend’s house. Her sister, a UC Berkeley student, was home for spring break.

Attending Berkeley in the ‘60s was akin to sitting at the feet of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, if more political. My friend and I were high school pals. Her sister was holding court.

She’d told us we could snack on rose petals and nasturtiums (in full bloom in the garden just then) without poisoning ourselves. Alice B. Toklas had died that spring, which brought us to Stein’s deathbed story.

Toklas, Stein’s longtime companion, recorded it in her 1963 memoir, “What Is Remembered.” My friend’s sister conveyed it to us.

“What is the answer?” Stein inquired of her friend. When Toklas was too long silent, Stein then laughed and asked, “In that case, what is the question?”

That my friend and I were supposed to think them clever was obvious. They did sound profound, kind of like Bob Dylan lyrics.

I didn’t begin to know what they meant. I never asked my friend’s sister if she did.

In the years since, I’ve come to think this: Whatever Stein meant, “What is the question?” is the better question because so much of what we come to know awaits our grasp of it.

Like the planets and the stars and the galaxies, there are so many questions we have yet to glimpse or fathom. They elude us because we look, but fail to see.

I learned this anew during a recent visit to the Norton Simon Museum, which I made at the invitation of Anthony Keller, a member of St. Wilfrid of York Episcopal Church, whom I met last summer.

He was introduced to me as Prof. Clarence C. Fesselbinder, curator of a new museum established to preserve the history of the Protestant Episcopal Church through its collection of books and papers and art. He was a player in the church’s vacation Bible school — dubbed “Treasure Seekers” by its creators — a take-off (or send-up) of the hugely popular book and movie “The Da Vinci Code.”

Keller’s role as curator, like the museum, was pretend, but his interest in church history, museums and art was real. He took me aside to explain another endeavor; he’d christened it “The Artist, the Word: An Exploration of the Creative Spirit.”

Like so many of his best ideas, this one came to Keller in the shower. He envisioned taking a small group of people on field trips to local museums, where they would view and discuss works of art with ties to biblical stories.

The tours would be interactive. The group would stand before a painting and take it in. Someone would read a related passage of scripture out loud.

Participants would discuss what they saw. They would share those things they understood as well as those they didn’t.

What questions might they have for the artist, could the artist join them? Keller saw the experience as a way to spark fresh insights into scripture and its place in one’s life.

It would help, of course, to have someone along who could explain the work’s history, its content and the artist’s process. Someone to field the questions bound to arise.

Keller approached Joanna Roche, a fellow member of St. Wilfrid of York, to help him realize his inspiration. She was keen on the idea.

Call it providence.

Roche is a contemporary art historian with a doctorate degree from UCLA. She teaches at Cal State Fullerton and is a prolific writer, penning both scholarly articles concerning art but also writing poetry, which she considers her own art form.

As a professor, she assigns a lot of writing to her upper-division students. It is important for them, she believes, to be able to express in words what they are doing as artists.

Roche has clearly honed her gift for articulating the meaning and process of art to the uninitiated and novice. She has a knack for making it accessible without stripping it of its mystery.

A quick Google search of her name quickly turns up praise for her clarity from both readers and those who hear her speak at professional art association conferences.

Last May, Roche joined Keller in selecting eight biblically themed works of art in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Then they compiled a tour booklet of information about the art and corresponding scriptures.

With a group of seven other church members, they took “The Artist, the Word” on a maiden voyage. It went so well, they soon repeated the tour with a group of two dozen.

Late in January, on a Saturday morning, they visited the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena with a new tour of nine paintings from its permanent collections. Keller invited me to join them.

I expected to thoroughly enjoy it. Visiting museums — especially art museums — ranks at the top of my must-see list when I travel.

I majored in art for a while in college, until I let a professor talk me out of it as impractical. I took several semesters of art history. I still read about it for pleasure.

For as long as I can remember, writing and art have been like two rails of the same track. There was simply no way, though, to anticipate the pleasure — the eye-opening delight — that awaited me when I joined Keller and Roche at the Norton Simon.

Since there is so little in the way of contemporary art with reference to specific biblical texts, the art studied so far has been drawn from periods outside Roche’s expertise. It’s something she enjoys. Her passion for art clearly transcends genres, cultures, gender, geography and times. “The Artist, the Word,” offers her, as it does amateur participants, a conduit for newfound knowledge. She does her homework like an eager student.

No question asked by those on the tour appears too thorny or too trite for Roche. Her — and Keller’s — enthusiasm for inhabiting the artist’s mind and vision is contagious.

The experience is transforming. As I stood before each artist’s work, each painting in its answer seemed to ask, “What is the question?”

Next week, with the help of the Norton Simon Museum’s website (whose architecture is nearly as dazzling as the museum’s itself), I’m going to try to give you a taste of “The Artist, the Word.”

This is a mission awaiting missionaries.