Things Fall Apart; the Centre Cannot Hold

My Looming Excommunication from the Arts Community

Fifteen years ago, I didn’t know any local artists. Now I think I know about 100. Here, briefly, is how it happened.

Around 2010, I met a world-class pinstriper. She did some automotive related work for my son, and at one point (probably to deliver a helmet or valve covers she had pinstriped) she came to my house and saw my tiny little spare-bedroom art studio.

Up until that time, I think I had only entered one art show - an outdoor event held in 1993 in my hometown at the time. But this new art friend urged me to start to show my art publicly. She gave me a list of three or four places that held art exhibitions I could enter. So I started doing that. It was slow at first, but around 2013, I won my first and only “Best of Show” award. But my art “career” did not exactly take off.

“Ever Love” - Best of Show winner - Paul Erlandson

Several years later, I was awarded Second Place in a church-sponsored sacred arts contest for this painting:

The Bishop’s Angel - Oil on Canvas - Paul Erlandson

I eventually visited the pinstriper’s house in a nearby town, and was startled to see this handwritten warning on the door:

”If you have come here to tell me about Jesus, GO AWAY! I don’t want to hear it!!

That was the beginning of my difficult friendships with artists and models. I didn’t help myself back in those days, by being clear and perhaps sometimes forceful about my political views. Some few of my fellow artists could tolerate me, forgiving the politics for the greater commonality we had found in art. Others could not. The model for the “sinful woman” in this modern adaptation of Luke 7 was a very politically vocal individual: non-binary, intersectional, BLM, Trump-hating, etc. At the photo shoot, we exchanged “socials”, but I said to myself she wouldn’t be able to stand me for more than 2 weeks. But I was wrong. We ended up as friends for more than ten years, and she even visited my church once, and also a church picnic. But she utterly disconnected and discarded me after the 2024 Presidential election. No communication since then. I miss her rather badly.

“For She Loved Much (Luke 7)” - Paul Erlandson

When I started to become active on Instagram and to attend more shows and to buy more art from local and distant artists … that’s when my art community blossomed from a handful into a hundred.

I think the loss of my ten-year friendship was only the beginning, though. The crack in the dam. Everything is so polarized, and 98% of the art people who dominate my social media feeds are people of the Left. Much of their content is aimed at getting rid of President Trump (including a few who advocated for assassination), DOGE, and ICE. In my estimation, being so worked up politically has not been good for the quality of their art. In some cases, perhaps through some type of “compartmentalization” it has not effected the brilliance of their art. But more and more, they are pressuring for politics in art, pressing for all their friends to condemn ICE, etc., and eventually I think that most of them will figure me out and abandon me.

It won’t matter then if I have spent hundreds or thousands of dollars on their art, given lavish words of encouragement for their art, attended their art shows, etc. Nothing will ever be able to atone for my sin of having wrong politics.

In their Instagram rants, it becomes clear that they and I are reading different news sources. Nobody can even agree on the facts, much less the meaning of the facts. What I’m afraid this means is that (for almost all of my art friends) allowing illegal aliens to come into our country at will and usurp things that belong only to citizens … that one right (or the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy) … these things are more important to them than anything about art. And that, if true, would be a shame.

Nobody in my art crowd is purposely trying to do bad things or be bad people. Quite the opposite!! Based on their presuppositions of what is moral, and about how the world works, they are all of them doing the things that are virtuous in their minds and hearts. Some of them have been very gracious to me, and have had valuable discussions with me about my art, their art, and the creative process in general.

But I fear this looming “Excommunication” from the art world. And it’s not just that. The title of this essay is from William Butler Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming. Indeed, we are no longer one nation, but two. The centre cannot hold! Entire groups of Americans are alienated already from other Americans, because of political views (i.e., because both groups, believing in doing good and helping people and making the world better, have come to opposite conclusions about the solution).

Five years ago, I thought something more powerful, some common human good such as art, could bring us together. But I am no longer hopeful. Still, I will be careful what I say, and keep as many art friends as I possibly can. This should have come much earlier in the story, but I just now recalled it. I used to be on very good terms with the woman who modeled for this painting:

St. John’s Gate - oil on canvas - circa 2005 - by Paul Erlandson

But during an email or Messenger exchange, I happened to mention that G. K. Chesterton, less than 100 years earlier, had advocated against Women’s Suffrage. I didn’t agree with Chesterton or laud his view, but simply mentioned it as a reminder of where we, as a society, have been. But it was the Unforgivable Sin. She cut me off completely and instantly. I hope she still has the original of this painting which I gave her. It’s quite possible that she destroyed it in her hot wrath, seeing as it was the work of an “infidel.”

May God have mercy on us all.