“But Heaven is still overhead, even if it is very far overhead. We have all the impression of a simple truth that has receded, until it was remote without ceasing to be true. And this phrase alone would bring us back to the same idea of this very notion of the withdrawal of some higher power, in all those mysterious and very imaginative myths about the seperation of earth and sky… As to what it means, a man will learn far more about it by lying on his back in a field, and merely looking at the sky, than by reading all the libraries even of the most learned and valuable folk-lore.” 

-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

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J. M. Jensen Artist Statement

 I am interested in two primary themes throughout the body of my work. The best words that I have found that describe the focuses of my work are the numinous and Weltschmerz.

nu·mi·nous  
1 :Supernatural, Mysterious
2 : filled with a sense of the presence of divinity : Holy
3 : appealing to the higher emotions or to the aesthetic sense : Spiritual

welt·schmerz  
1 : mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual
 state of the world with an ideal state
2 : the feeling that the world is not what it ought to be

 With the majority of my work I am interested in the Numinous, and with a tenth of my work I am interested in the Weltschmerz. These disparate themes are loosely connected in what I think of as a type of visual theology. Each piece is something like a meditation on man and the eternal. Or to phrase it another way, it is a narrative of the Heavens and the Earth. 

These two themes seem to coincide in the feeling of Joy, as C. S. Lewis uses the term. 

“Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.” -C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

Weltschmerz is not the opposite of this Joy, or antithetical to it. Rather it is oftentimes most present at the height of joy. The sublime beauty that the romantics searched for was what led to the baptism of the word Weltschmerz. The fact that Lewis’ Joy cannot be fulfilled in this world is proof that Weltschmerz points to a fact about the way the world is. Weltschmerz and the Numinous are antipodes of the same world of Sehnsucht (deep longing). 

As to the development of the work, I want to say that I am seeking the numinous through what I describe as visual theology. This visual theology is often expressed in my paintings in the power and awe of the landscape. In the tradition of the Hudson River School I see nature as sublime, romantic and allegorical. The sky or heavens and its relationship to earth often become surrealistically closer in my works, referencing the wonder and awe of dreams and also the universality of myth.

" ...while it describes a fact, it reveals a mystery."

-From Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica [I, I, 10]
(quoting Gregory):

Closing Reception at Regis University Fort Collins