Today, use your list from yesterday and try exercising these ideas throughout the day.
Prayer: Pray for God's revelation as you as you try these ideas through the day.
Showing posts with label creativity and faith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label creativity and faith. Show all posts
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Connecting our Community through Conversation
Last night, we had a follow-up conversation to Thursday’s Art and Faith in Community Lecture on “Artists in Christian Community.” I truly enjoyed last week’s lecture and the informal conversation afterward. That conversation explored issues like the difference between creativity, imagination, and artistry. Last night’s conversation took a different turn. We spent a lot of time talking about artists’ contributions to worship as participants, leaders, and visitors in the pews. We talked about our creative work; critique and encouragement, and allowing our work to honor God when we’re pleased with our efforts and when we’re not. Later in the evening, the conversation moved from worship as public event to worship as living out our lives as God intended in our creation.
Even though this lecture series is focused on worship, we have to be careful not to limit our consideration of art and artists to worship. As I’m preparing for this week’s lecture, I am reminded that liturgical art – or art in worship – has some specific constraints. Of course, any constraint is an opportunity for inspiration and discipline, blah blah blah… but even constraints imposed by a community’s values and the purpose of worship can inhibit the working of the Holy Spirit through the artist to call our attention anew to some issue in our lives.
I truly believe that not just the art that artists produce, but their ways of seeing and being in the world can teach us something. The artists themselves are a resource for their interpretive skills, their visionary capability, and their modes of communication that capture an idea and a spirit of an age. As the night wore on, I felt privileged to hear mature Christians speak about small group experiences, prayer, confession, acceptance and the joys and challenges of contributing your gifts to God. I’ve been in churches many years and participated in discussions, retreats, and all sorts of teachings on these topics, but approaching these issues from perspectives of people who engage in creative work helped me see these topics in new ways. I’ve frequently been in small groups where I identified with common experiences of being a woman or student or single person, but far more infrequently have I been able to share a common experience about being creative.
-Elise
More blogging about last night: Amanda's blog: http://badcaseblog.blogspot.com
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Creativity and the Faith Experience, Bud Hensgen
From Sunday, June 1st Dinner and Communion Service
Artist, Bud Hensgen, Vice President, the Arlington Artists Alliance
During the next few minutes I will try to describe something of what for me is the process of creating an abstract painting. I will talk a bit about how I experience this creativity. And then I will try to relate it to how I experience faith.
I believe that creativity comes from many sources, or paths, within us. I would like to talk for a few moments about two of those sources – inspiration and desperation.
What I mean here by inspiration is fairly general and straightforward and I think is something that everyone experiences in life, whether they create art with it or not. It is something that comes from outside us and moves me. For instance, if I am painting outdoors walking through a field and I come upon a woods with the light at dusk reflecting onto the shapes of a row magnificent oak trees, I am likely to be inspired. I am forced to stop, to look, to be silent, to absorb what I am seeing and feeling around me. So inspired, I may try to express that inspiration with my paints.
Desperation, no doubt a word insufficient to express what I want to say here, is the inverse or the opposite. It is something inside me, lying hidden, waiting to -- or crying to --- or demanding to -- be expressed. It has no words and feels rather opaque. Often it is actually nothing at all until I actually begin warming up to paint. Then it may become a wordless energy in my body that wants to be expressed.
It is much harder for me to describe or talk about this second source of creativity, this desperation. But perhaps the word, desperation, is appropriate after all, since it is often unclear to me where I am trying to go. I know there is a path and I hope it will reveal itself to me as I work. I am familiar with what I am trying to do. I know my paints, my brushes, my surface, and I have an idea that I want to develop. But I sometimes find, once begun, that I must take a different path and follow it. I have to stop, to look, to listen.
What is happening inside me may be something delicate, gentle and beautiful, like a tiny green Mayflower shoot one stumbles across and uncovers from the winter’s leaves in the woods in March. Or it may be dark and powerful, like an angry and sorrowful storm that howls somewhere within me. It may be like a storm that whips up leaves and blows scattered papers in every direction. It lifts up sticks and thorns and even rocks and heaves them to a new place, then soaks them with a pounding rain.
My job is somehow to respond, to let go, to get it out and then to look to see if it makes any visual sense at all.
And of course very often it doesn’t, and herein lies yet another sense of desperation, because what if my expression, my creation, doesn’t work on canvas, doesn’t work at all! And I have to move the paint, push it, scrape it, cover it, start over and over again. I look at this formless junk, this undecipherable mess of lines and forms, this patchwork of irrelevance, this meaningless mess, will it ever come together? Will it say something that is authentic, that is real? And it won’t come together, it looks like crap, and then I tire and I have to stop.
Sometimes I find I have to rest and wait, sometimes in silence, sometimes in solitude and sometimes in the midst of a turbulent city throng. I hope the artistic sensibility will return and that I will be desperate enough to get it out and onto the canvas and that it will come together.
But sometimes it does work. It appears before me, perhaps gradually, perhaps suddenly, often unexpectedly. How did I get
here, to this place? What made it come together? Perhaps the images of yesterday’s forms and shapes percolated overnight -- or over years. Whatever the sources, it feels to me to be real, to be engaging, to be authentic and I know it is time to stop.
When I reflect on this rather bizarre and frequently turbulent process, it occurs to me that when I am working to create something, when I am listening to both inspiration and attending to this desperation, I am living in a part of my inner being that may be right next door to religious experience – to faith, hope and charity, if you will.
After all, when I am painting thus, I am working from a source that seems to me to be a mystery, like seeing through a glass darkly. I am on a path that is sometimes dark and sometimes revealed to me and in order to express it I must turn myself over to it and follow it wherever it takes me, and I don’t know where it will lead. And when nothing happens and the path remains dark, I must hope that tomorrow the path will be clearer and that something will emerge. And I hope that what emerges will be authentic, at least to me and perhaps to some others. Finally I desire that this work, this expression of my own personal being will connect me, bring me into a closer relationship with others in this universe that I may never see and know, because I desire with a great desire to be a part, if only a tiny part of the mystery of this universe -- that envelopes you, that envelopes me and contains us all.
Artist, Bud Hensgen, Vice President, the Arlington Artists Alliance
During the next few minutes I will try to describe something of what for me is the process of creating an abstract painting. I will talk a bit about how I experience this creativity. And then I will try to relate it to how I experience faith.
I believe that creativity comes from many sources, or paths, within us. I would like to talk for a few moments about two of those sources – inspiration and desperation.
What I mean here by inspiration is fairly general and straightforward and I think is something that everyone experiences in life, whether they create art with it or not. It is something that comes from outside us and moves me. For instance, if I am painting outdoors walking through a field and I come upon a woods with the light at dusk reflecting onto the shapes of a row magnificent oak trees, I am likely to be inspired. I am forced to stop, to look, to be silent, to absorb what I am seeing and feeling around me. So inspired, I may try to express that inspiration with my paints.
Desperation, no doubt a word insufficient to express what I want to say here, is the inverse or the opposite. It is something inside me, lying hidden, waiting to -- or crying to --- or demanding to -- be expressed. It has no words and feels rather opaque. Often it is actually nothing at all until I actually begin warming up to paint. Then it may become a wordless energy in my body that wants to be expressed.
It is much harder for me to describe or talk about this second source of creativity, this desperation. But perhaps the word, desperation, is appropriate after all, since it is often unclear to me where I am trying to go. I know there is a path and I hope it will reveal itself to me as I work. I am familiar with what I am trying to do. I know my paints, my brushes, my surface, and I have an idea that I want to develop. But I sometimes find, once begun, that I must take a different path and follow it. I have to stop, to look, to listen.
What is happening inside me may be something delicate, gentle and beautiful, like a tiny green Mayflower shoot one stumbles across and uncovers from the winter’s leaves in the woods in March. Or it may be dark and powerful, like an angry and sorrowful storm that howls somewhere within me. It may be like a storm that whips up leaves and blows scattered papers in every direction. It lifts up sticks and thorns and even rocks and heaves them to a new place, then soaks them with a pounding rain.
My job is somehow to respond, to let go, to get it out and then to look to see if it makes any visual sense at all.
And of course very often it doesn’t, and herein lies yet another sense of desperation, because what if my expression, my creation, doesn’t work on canvas, doesn’t work at all! And I have to move the paint, push it, scrape it, cover it, start over and over again. I look at this formless junk, this undecipherable mess of lines and forms, this patchwork of irrelevance, this meaningless mess, will it ever come together? Will it say something that is authentic, that is real? And it won’t come together, it looks like crap, and then I tire and I have to stop.
Sometimes I find I have to rest and wait, sometimes in silence, sometimes in solitude and sometimes in the midst of a turbulent city throng. I hope the artistic sensibility will return and that I will be desperate enough to get it out and onto the canvas and that it will come together.
But sometimes it does work. It appears before me, perhaps gradually, perhaps suddenly, often unexpectedly. How did I get
here, to this place? What made it come together? Perhaps the images of yesterday’s forms and shapes percolated overnight -- or over years. Whatever the sources, it feels to me to be real, to be engaging, to be authentic and I know it is time to stop.
When I reflect on this rather bizarre and frequently turbulent process, it occurs to me that when I am working to create something, when I am listening to both inspiration and attending to this desperation, I am living in a part of my inner being that may be right next door to religious experience – to faith, hope and charity, if you will.
After all, when I am painting thus, I am working from a source that seems to me to be a mystery, like seeing through a glass darkly. I am on a path that is sometimes dark and sometimes revealed to me and in order to express it I must turn myself over to it and follow it wherever it takes me, and I don’t know where it will lead. And when nothing happens and the path remains dark, I must hope that tomorrow the path will be clearer and that something will emerge. And I hope that what emerges will be authentic, at least to me and perhaps to some others. Finally I desire that this work, this expression of my own personal being will connect me, bring me into a closer relationship with others in this universe that I may never see and know, because I desire with a great desire to be a part, if only a tiny part of the mystery of this universe -- that envelopes you, that envelopes me and contains us all.
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