Image: Evening Lagoon, Original Oil Painting ©Helen C Read
I’ve been working on revising and refreshing my gallery website in the last few weeks. Kinda like online housekeeping! I realized that I had more to say about why I am drawn to creative work than I had previously written. I’m intrigued as I dive deeper into the reality of my faith and how it informs the things that I create. These things are difficult to articulate – but they drive me to seek a deeper understanding.
I see a thread of mystery to follow. If you know me, you know that I believe I’ve been created with a specific design. I believe all of us have been – our interests, our abilities, our experiences, our personalities… all play a role in our unique shaping. And there is no piece of it that God has not planned and supervised. Even what we would call negative elements, they too are woven in. But in it all, there is a purpose and plan for good… for each of us and for those whom we touch.
Part of the mysterious thread also includes the work we do; the kinds of work, the different ways we work and the unique outcomes of that work. From surgeons to astronauts, bakers to teachers, homemakers to executives, farmers to artists… and everything in between…it is all meant to bring goodness and beauty and wellness and provision to this world for the benefit of all of us in it.
Maybe because the things I’m called to in this season of life reside in the arts, I have come to see how much the arts are needed to bring depth and joy into a world in great need of it. They act, in a way, as a counterbalance to what often feels heavy and uncertain. The arts are a powerful agent that speak, often, to the soul in a different language. I’ve been reading what some influential thinkers have had to say about the role of the arts, and it’s an encouragement to embrace the idea of our artistic purposes.
“The arts are not the pretty irrelevant bits around the border of reality.They are the highways into the center of reality which cannot be glimpsed, let alone grasped, any other way.”
N.T. Wright, Theologian and Biblical Scholar
And this from an article by Joel Clarkson in Christianity Today (April 30, 2021) quoting Makoto Fujimura, contemporary artist:
“God’s design in Eden, even before the Fall, was to sing Creation into being and invite God’s creatures to sing with God, to co-create into the Creation.”
These thoughts are energizing, don’t you think? They present a different view of creating and why we create than is typical in an age that gravitates toward what is practical and efficient. This way of looking at the work I do, gives me room to breathe and think, imagine and create with God.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this! Leave a comment below ~ how do these ideas excite your imagination?
Here are a few links that I think you’ll find to be an encouragement.
A podcast I really enjoy: Mere Christians with Jordan Raynor Jordan has great interviews people from all walks of life about how their faith influences the work that they do.
More on N.T. Wright, an English New Testament scholar, Pauline theologian and Anglican bishop. He was the bishop of Durham from 2003 to 2010
Christianity Today article I referenced and more on Makoto Fujimura, American contemporary artist.
Of course, I’d welcome your visit to my gallery website that I’ve been updating! Work is progressing, but your ideas would be helpful!
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