by Christy Tenant

If I paint more excellently than any other, but I do not communicate love in my painting, I am nothing more than an offensive noise; like Pavarotti accompanied by an out-of-tune piano: a mockery of the beautiful.

If I possess divine insights and wisdom, and even if I have strong spiritual fortitude, but I cannot speak the truth in love, I am nothing to boast about.

If I am generous with my art, my talents, and my creativity – exhausting myself for the sake of my craft – but the people around me do not feel loved or served in humility, I have accomplished nothing to speak of.

An excellent artist can wait for her moment, though years in the making, because she understands that recognition does not equal excellence; Van Gogh never sold a painting.

An excellent artist is kind; he makes his gift accessible and available to all who love and appreciate beauty.

An artist devoted to true excellence does not envy those who are more accomplished than she is, nor does she boast to those who have not accomplished as much as she has.

An artist of excellence does not reek of arrogance, nor does he have a reputation for being rude.

A truly excellent artist works well with others, appreciating the unique gifts and insights they bring to the table, rather than immediately assuming her way is the only way. (And she doesn’t get an attitude if the team decides to go in a different creative direction!)

An artist who is excellent does not secretly get a charge out of others’ failures, but rather encourages those who have tried and failed to try again. By the same token, he does not offer false compliments or patronizing feedback. He finds a way to be gently honest and constructively critical, because he values truth.

An artist or creative catalyst devoted to excellence in his craft sticks with it to the end. She doesn’t give up out of ego or pride or frustration or failure, but keeps hoping and believing in the source of creativity, turning frequently to that source for sustaining inspiration and grace.

Finally, an artist committed to excellence understands that creativity does not happen in a vacuum. Rather, it flows from a deep, rushing river, created by God and fed and filled by others who have been given the creative gift as well. The artist who stays close to the river and drinks often from it, by looking to and appreciating the beauty reflected in others, grows in ever-increasing excellence.

This artist is truly excellent.

One might say each artist is connected to the river from which all creativity flows, sometimes as a spring and sometimes as a tributary, and through this connection we have access to an ever-flowing source of inspiration, grace and hope, available to all who come to drink.

Christy Tennant, of the International Arts Movement

Colorado Springs, June 6, 2008
VAF Gathering

Post a comment for Christy here  and see the IAM website at www.internationalartsmovement.com

by Gary Bradley and Donald McGilchrist
 
Long before men could articulate their ideas in written form they captured the divine experience, the mysterious, with art. Cave paintings, rituals, voice sounds, instrumental sounds and gestures were among the many attempts to convey the
abstract.
 
In “Art: A New History,” Paul Johnson writes, “The first point to grasp is the immense fecundity of humans producing objects of art.” It’s arguable that art predated not only writing but that it was closely associated with the ordering instinct which makes society possible, and therefore, that it has always been essential to human happiness.
“The artist was the first professional,” says Mr. Johnson.
 
It’s fascinating how God could have so trusted the spirit and ordering instinct of man to engage in His truth and convey the spirit of it to his neighbor. One wonders, “Why didn’t God invent structured writing ‘in the beginning’ so there would never be error about those mysterious eternal essences?” Somewhere in the human spirit there emerges a longing to express the divine artistically. Perhaps error was not God’s big concern with man.
 
What role did Christendom play in celebrating and/or crushing the iconographic urge?
For, to represent God in form through the arts seems to be inevitable, irresistible.
 
As I reflected upon the verses below, it thrilled me to see that God has entrusted the revelation of His being, though the ages, to the hands and hearts of those who longed to see Him.
 
“God, after He spoke long ago…in many ways…in these last days has spoken to us in His Son…through whom also He made the world…And [the Son] is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power …” Hebrews 1:1-3
 
Apaugasma (a- pow’-gas-mah); Greek word that expresses the visual radiance from a source; or effulgence: brilliant light radiating from something.
 
This has helped me to see that through both the written word and art, and many other ways, the radiance of the Divine shines forth and is seen.
 
What has been the history of the church in lifting up the works of the artist to express  such radiance? But more importantly: What will our role be in this endeavor? Have we paid so dear a price in our pursuit of error free living that we have placed the artist at the rear of the room of truth?

by Elizabeth Webb

Sometimes you slip on the ice a little.  Sometimes you climb that mountain feeling like nothing can slow your stride.  The ice has been a little dangerous lately, but being the survivor that I guess I am, what can I do but keep trying to climb that mountain, cross that impossible river and keep walking through this fire.  Just gotta keep walking and slipping and forever falling because the minute I think I can walk upright without anyone’s help is the day that I deny the very thing that allows me to stand at all.  Beyond the smoke and mirrors of this life is the truth that none of us can stand on our own.  Not one.  Not me.  Not one.

Gary Bradley recently spoke on this topic at the Minneapolis gathering.  The following is another reflection by Gary on the work of our hands…

“If I knew the world was going to end tomorrow, I would plant a tree today…” Martin Luther

Psalm 90
12 So teach us to consider our mortality,
so that we might live wisely.
16 Let Your work appear to Your servants
And Your majesty to their children.
17 Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us;
And confirm for us the work of our hands;
Yes, confirm the work of our hands.
Psalm 104
24 How many living things you have made, O LORD!
You have exhibited great skill in making all of them;
the earth is full of the living things you have made.

I have been wondering about the culture in which I was formed as a Christian and a few things that do not seem to fit have caused me to ask, “What is the value of the work of my hands?”

First, I have heard that everything is going to burn up and that the earth will dissolve. Is this true? Because if it is, then, this raises the question that perhaps the only things that are useful are those with the greatest utility for right now.

This conclusion would go nicely with the idea that we often hear: people are “resources” rather than uniquely created expressions of the triune Godhead. What about a piece of art, a composition like “the Messiah” or Aaron Copeland’s Appalachian Spring, or any other multitude of expressions? What about your pet dog, Fido, or a well made pair of jeans? What has value if it is all going to burn? These questions wrongly answered drive us to make “Christian art;” they drive people to work at “religious occupations” which do not reflect their first born gifts (as painters, carpenters, web masters, writers, et al).

A similar question that has pushed many to live denying their first born gift is “What really counts for eternity?” The answer often given is: “The souls of men and the word of God.” I agree that they are both of eternal value. But is that all? What about the works of my hands? Do they have eternal value or does all of this life stop at the grave? Such thinking has given rise to the vacuous concept that “art for art’s sake” is a valid motif for making art.

In an immature way I could respond and say “perhaps I should destroy everything that I do because it is all going to burn anyway. I could save God some time at judgment and maybe he would look favorably on me for having seen the fruitlessness of my work.” In my worst dreams I could end up in heaven in a white robe singing Kumbaya.

What do you think is the value of the work of our hands?

“This is not a desk” my freshman English professor explained while pointing directly to her large oak desk.  We all sat silently in our 8am class, some of us still in our pajamas, thinking that our professor probably said something that made sense; we were just too tired to know for sure.  She elaborated, “That tree out the window,” we all turned to look, “that is not a tree.”  She is old enough, I thought, she may have fallen off her rocker.  “‘Tree’ and ‘Desk’ are metaphors for what is actually there” she clarified.  So this is what college is like, I thought.  Despite my professor’s best efforts, I was still pretty sure that her desk was actually a desk.

Today, however, I am not the skeptic that I used to be.  It is clear that there is so much more to an object than the abstract English name we have decided to call it.  When I was in second grade I rode my bike over to a friend’s house for the first time only to be greeted by a charging dog.  Teeth bared and growl out, the dog’s quick advance made me instinctively turn to run—the last thing I should have done.  My run would soon be cut short, not by the dog, but by my imagination and a rather old tree.  Like the cartoons I had watched that very morning, I assumed I could just scale the tree all the way to the top in a matter of a millisecond.  Instead, I didn’t go up at all; I ended my run hugging a tree with my nose scrapped up from my first tree climbing and bark kissing experience.  While I can use many different words and adjectives to describe that encounter with a tree, I can never capture completely all that that tree was to me at that moment.  Even if I could, someone else’s experience with the same tree is likely going to be very different.

The words humans use are limited in their ability to describe what all of our sensory receptors actually encounter.  John Milbank would go further to say that not only does a ‘tree’ loom larger than our aptitude to describe what is knowable about the tree, but that the tree actually possesses qualities that are invisible to all of our sensory experience.   These invisible qualities give life to the visible (what we ‘see’ by embracing all sensory experience) and the visible does the same vis-à-vis the invisible.  While the philosophical importance of this assertion escapes most of us, Milbank opens up intriguing ways to speak of how an object’s possessed beauty, visible and invisible together, draws those who would embrace the object’s beauty:

Beauty arises where the attraction exercised by a formed reality is ineffable and escapes analysis.  We speak of “beauty” just because we cannot capture this attraction in a formula that would allow us to produce other instances of the beautiful.  For the same reason, we cannot substitute an abstraction of essence for the concrete aesthetic experience.

Neither, on the other hand, does an exhaustive description of the object and the way it appears precisely convey our sense of its specific instance, though it may present a beauty of its own, and “bring out” aspects of the object’s beauty…

So it seems that there is an excess in the experience of the beautiful…Since we never entirely bring away from the object all its beauty, this implies that even when we stand before the beautiful object, we are “held” by something that binds us only in its not-quite arriving.  To experience the beautiful is not only to be satisfied, but also to be frustrated satisfyingly; a desire to see more of what arrives is always involved. (from Theological Perspectives on God and Beauty, pg. 1, 2)

In this sense, each tree, painting, landscape, or building is not just ascribed beauty by our words, but beauty actually resides within it, acting as a sort of gravity or destiny towards that object’s truth or goodness.  In all of our encounters then, as subjects held by an object’s beauty, we are on an unfinished (never ceasing?) journey towards that which is good and true.  This is what Milbank describes as “frustrated satisfyingly.”