As part of my thesis research I went back through stuff I’ve written on the creative process and Christianity in the past. This is from the Art and Faith School of Theology class I took at Vintage in 2007. I made a few clarifying edits, but mostly this is the original text:

Since I often find it easier to put down my thoughts in type after thinking them over for a while, I wanted to continue the discussion we had tonight in an alternate medium.  The “data dump” exercise for me was a chance to get some thoughts about the nature of art out of my head that have been annoying me for the last couple weeks.  In the fairness of full disclosure I have a hard time considering myself an artist sometimes.  The project we worked on last week with the boards was difficult for me.  I had no problem gluing things together on my board and creating something, that was easy, what I found difficult was the ascribing of meaning to what I created.  I took “synthetic pulp” as my title and found it very fitting.  What “art” I do create has little meaning beyond the face value of what it is, there isn’t some allegorical meaning laying beneath the surface.  Because of this, the artistic merit of the end product has very little importance to me.  I work in photography because what you see is what you get.  Photographs evoke emotions but you don’t have to explain them for the most part, there is no meaning other than what you see.  When we start forcing our art to have meaning–synthesizing it–or make a statement, we place artificial importance on what other people think of it and how they receive it.  It suddenly becomes important for the final product to be “good” and for people to understand it.  For me, I create for an audience of two, me and God.

We talked about struggling to bring ourselves to work on our art even when we sometimes don’t want to because we aren’t happy with how it has turned out in the past or because we feel we lack the proper skills and abilities.  God doesn’t care.  We talked about the L’Engle quote about how we have to wade through our petty prayer requests for a new car or a new house or more money or whatever before we can spend time just listening to God and then how we often have to work though periods of “bad art” before we create something worthy of God’s attention.  God gives us a compulsion to be creative beings because he takes joy not just in our end product but in the physical work we put into it.  I think he takes great pride in even our crappy stick figure sketches.  I think, to God at least, a finger painting by a pre-schooler has just as much value as the Sistine Chapel.  That said, the beauty and power of great art from the human perspective is that it gives us a glimpse of Heaven will one day be like. But even the greatest pinnacles of human achievement in art pale in comparison to what one day awaits us. When we get frustrated with our art not turning out how we picture it in our head it is really an expression of the brokenness of creation.

I think  inside of our soul we still have a little remnant of a collective memory of what Creation was like Pre-Fall and we desperately want to be able to create art in that space again.  We wish we could all sit down and play beautiful music and paint beautiful paintings and write beautiful sonnets we can be proud of when we present them to God but instead we have to accept that we can’t be perfect and our art will sometimes suck. I was watching Bob Ross (he of “happy tree” fame) the other day on PBS and he was talking about how he didn’t want to teach people a proper way to paint but rather he wanted to just get them excited about painting on their own.  He talked about the time he spent living in Alaska and how he thought God must have really enjoyed creating Alaska and how much he (Bob) enjoyed painting landscapes resembling Alaska because of that reason.  He didn’t paint to showcase his skill as an artist but rather about reflecting the glory of God.  I think God has called us to this as artists.  He hasn’t called all of us to be DaVinci’s or Michaelangelo’s, He has called us to reflect his Being in our work.  I believe God smiles every time I write bad poetry or clumsily play my guitar while singing off key or take poorly exposed photos, because I am trying to put into some comprehensible form a tiny portion of the beauty of His Art, His Creation.  I don’t think we should feel like we have to struggle through periods of bad art before we feel like we have an end product that will be pleasing to God, He is happy that we are just trying.

Filed under: life by Jonathan