Glimpsing God in the Making

This post was prepared for my friend Neely Stansell-Simpson's blog, 'Glimpsing God'.  She asked me to reflect on God and the creation process in my work. 

Making art, good work, honest and inspired work, is not easy.  It has to originate from a place that is deep inside of you.  It is the easiest thing to spot – someone faking it - when an author or artist is reflecting what is expected of them instead of what is unique to them.  And as an artist creating something from nothing, something that is authentic and true, is one of the hardest things to do.  To make and embark on that journey, where the brush meets an empty canvas, is to have faith that though the end is not clear, God will help you fill in the blanks.

This is the reason I struggled so long with the challenge I gave myself a few months ago:  to make a painting for my baby.  I stared for months at the huge empty canvas, waiting for inspiration.  I do not paint often because of  this problem – figuring out what to paint – is so daunting to me.  In this case: what do I want to say to my son or daughter?  What do I want to tell him or her about the world and the way I have come to know it and see it?  What can I create that is unique to our story and the life we are about to share? 

The subject that kept speaking to me was home.  See, home isn’t really where we live right now.  We live in California, which is lovely, but it is a place I know only superficially.  What I want to show my son or daughter is the beauty of a place that is intimate and true to me.  I settled on an image from the Tietje farm in southwest Louisiana.  It is the homestead my great grandfather settled and cultivated.  Through the generations it retains the stories of our family’s growth and evolution.  We can name who planted every tree and who built every levee.  I can’t relate the importance of this place and heritage enough… art may be the easiest way to describe my connection to it.  

Winter citrus on the farm.  Grapefruit tree (to the left) and lemon tree (on the right).

This is the image of the lemon tree my mother, Mary, planted.  Winter citrus is one of the wonders of the farm.  Just as you expect the whole world is dead you are met with this blessing.  In the orchard we have kumquats and satsumas and grapefruit and lime, but the lemon tree is most reliable, and prolific. Lemon Meringue Pie is one of my mom’s specialties and these mild, sweet lemons are her secret ingredient.  

I took this picture in the winter of 2009 during our visit at Christmas.  I used my dad’s old Nikormat camera, 35mm 1.4 lens.  The wind was blowing fiercely (as it does across the prairie of South Louisiana in the winter)… I remember the struggle to focus the camera, waiting for the wind to die down a bit before getting the shot.  A digital photo of the same scene would have looked completely different… the color and the depth of field would have been ‘auto-corrected’, the blurred mystery and atmosphere of that gray winter day would have been lost.

These were the things I was trying to talk about in my painting:  the imprecision of the photograph and the beauty that lies in all the fuzzy details.  I know that I don’t have it just right but it is an attempt and an interpretation.  More than anything it’s a struggle.  And in it, in the process, in that struggle, there is God.  It’s not an easy thing to talk about because the process of creation is so hard to define… but for me there is a time when my left-brain takes over and God shows up.  He is there in all the small problems of mixing colors on the palette, of switching between brushes, of shaping the forms.  He is in the patience and persistence required to work and rework a section of the canvas.  He is in the story of the piece, in our family, in our land, and in the blessing of winter fruit.  He is in the painting, which is itself a prayer to the next generation of our family tree. 

Creating and making art is inherently impractical in today’s world.  What a leap of faith!  It is not an easy step to make, overcoming fear and the pressures of society to follow this call.  I’m still figuring it out. Despite all the obstacles I consider myself blessed to have found an authentic way of communication with God.  All I can do is make and hope that God shows up to walk beside me in the struggle and in all the fuzzy details.