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Yikes...has it really been December since I posted last?
Well...here I am..married, in the midst of spring and a million art projects, including my first actual exhibition...and I wrote a little something today about art.
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As many people who know me have found out by spending any length of time around me, I am an artist. But what most people don't know or understand is how I struggle with creating art and living my faith. I think the two are not mutually exclusive, yet I have definitely encountered Christians who believe otherwise. As a result, sometimes I have been met with disgust, misunderstanding, and perhaps even some venhemence by my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ because of what I am pursuing as my career.
Somehow being an artist makes me more prone to be a "heathen"...
However, not all of my acquaintences feel this way, as I have had some great encouragement from the church as well. I have met a few other Christian artists who struggle along the same path as me, and some great friends who have come alongside me to support the work I do.
Today, I was reading an articles at the online webzine, Boundless, and encountered something that gave me some comfort and assurance that I would like to share with anyone who is interested...here is the excerpt that I found particularily interesting...
Struggling with Art
The Christian Church has had a love-hate relationship with the arts, oscillating between using the arts for liturgical and educational purposes and dismissing the arts as merely decorative and even offensive and idolatrous. But today there is a growing trend in the use of the arts in congregational life and in the study of the arts in religious educational programs.
Many Christians, however, still wonder what role the arts can play in forming our spiritual lives. The visual arts are still too often relegated as indulgent with little to offer in Christian discipleship. But on the contrary, art reminds us that we are made in the image of a Creator and pulls us into the presence of God while calling us to live as we have been created to live, given the gift of joining in God's creative activity.
Christ, as the new Adam, reconfigures our relationship to the Triune God, making the divine visible in a completely new way, one that forces us into relationship with that which has been incarnated. A God made flesh redeems the act of human creativity and the possibility of making our human grasping and glimpsing of God more tangible.
Because of the incarnation our confession and worship of God requires that it be more than intellectual. It requires corporeal practices. The sons and daughters of Adam are invited anew to join in God's creative activity through imaginatively naming new realities of all that has already been given. Poetry, literature, visual art, sculpture, dance and music are all ways of creatively expressing the human condition and creation's interaction with the Divine.
Artistic expression is a striving for more, a visual hunger for transcendental realities that can only be shaped out of what has already been given to us, unlike God who creates out of nothing. But like our Creator, such creative shaping can also lead to new realities we can live into.
To read the whole article...check out this link. http://www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0001487.cfm |
| | Posted 4/24/2007 12:17 PM - 74 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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