Read more
"To call Upton's book 'original' or 'creative' is to understate the case. I regard his approach as extraordinary; [it's] unlike anything I have seen during my forty years of engagement with these issues."
--Parker Palmer, author of
The Courage to TeachContemplative Beholding: A Way of Life and Love is not a treatise on the history of art, though it will enhance one's historical knowledge; nor does it present an argument toward a particular theory of art. Instead, through guided engagement with over 500 photographs and works of art of various mediums, Joel Upton offers a training in
beholding.To behold is to see, yes, but in an enhanced way, better and more deeply. This way of beholding applies, ultimately, to much more than art: to life itself, and its source, which is love.
A note on format: Because of the sheer number of images referred to in the text of
Contemplative Beholding, images that are meant to be seen (beheld) in the course of reading, inserting them in the printed book proved impossible. We are grateful to Amherst College for hosting the book's companion website, contemplativebeholding.org>, which features all of the images, arranged by chapter, in gentle, user-friendly galleries. In addition, the book itself has been bound with a special "lay-flat" spine, to aid in the unique process of reading called for with this text and its companion website.
About the author
Joel M. Upton graduated with a BA in American Studies from Rutgers University. He served as an officer in the Air Force, assigned to the NATO headquarters of the allied air forces of central Europe in Fontainebleau, France.
He was a Fulbright Fellow in the Centre national de recherches "Primitifs flamands" at the Institut royale du Patrimoine artistique, in Brussels, Belgium, and a Chester Dale Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. He received a PhD from Bryn Mawr College with a dissertation, published as
Petrus Christus: His Place in Fifteenth-Century Flemish Painting. While teaching at Amherst College for forty-three years, he offered his students courses in the art and architecture of early Christian Europe, Romanesque and Gothic architecture in France, European art and architecture from 300 to 1500 CE, Dutch and Flemish painting from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and
Ai-no-ma the construction of space in Japan.
Extensive travel in Japan and teaching American exchange students in the Associated Kyoto Program at Doshisha University led Upton to discover how the construction of space in Buddhist temples in Japan revealed a fundamentally different way of understanding the world. This experience, which he integrated with his teaching, inspired an increasing interest in exploring how we respond to works of art and in defining an art and practice of contemplative beholding, a journey that led him to create
Contemplative Beholding: A Way of Life and Love.
Since retiring, he has lived in the highlands region of western Massachusetts in a home surrounded by ponds, gardens, and forest.
From this place of stillness and quiet, he has sought to share his commitment to a path formed by the synonymy of art, beauty, and love in the embodied embrace of reconciliation.
