Create: Transforming Stories of Art, Life & Faith

Create

Transforming Stories of Art, Life & Faith

Joey O'Connor, General Editor

Contents

Create

Copyright

Rise Above - A Free Webinar for You

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Creative Transformation

Seeking Real Presence in Painting

Kicking in the Shadows

The Artist, the Community and the Call

Following the Work

When Your Jesus Poems Suck

Art & Fundamentalism

Artist Incorporated

There’s Beauty in the Mess

The Power of Plodding

Called to Create

On Painting Nudes for Christ

The Arts: Generous Gifts for All Believers

Schock and Art

The Importance of Spiritual and Artistic Community

Outsider

When You Believe

Art for the Church

The Story Behind the Story

SEEDS Fine Art Exhibits

Vision for the Nations

About the Authors

Would You Please Leave a Review?

A New Novel by Joey O'Connor

The Grove Blog

The CLARITY Course

Are You Stuck? Free Webinar

About The Grove

About Joey O’Connor

Copyright © 2020 The Grove Center for the Arts & Media

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13:  979-8-61-686309-6 (Print Version)

Cover design by: Augustson Design Studio

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The Rise Above Procrastination & Perfectionism to Creative High Performance webinar is designed to help you deal with the creative blocks that keep you from rising to your highest perfomance. Listen in as Joey O'Connor and Grove team members, Bob Murphy & Erik Peterson share their authentic stories and practical strategies for rising above procrastination and perfectionism.

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DEDICATION

To Christene Sloan

Lover of God, people and art.

Acknowledgements

I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to a number of key people involved in the development of this book. For years I dreamed of creating a book designed to share the personal, professional and spiritual journeys of artists from different disciplines in the hope of inspiring other artists to persevere and excel in their craft. The original version of this book was a video ebook published on the Vook platform. The original version contained videos and beautiful artwork not contained in this print version. Still, since stories are what make up our lives, we thought it important enough to share the artist stories in this version. As a lifelong reader and lover of books, I often find my way and my story through insights gained from the stories of others. This book would not have been possible without the leadership, creativity and hard work of:

David Meacham served as the project manager of Create. His role was instrumental in reaching out to our artist contributors and acquiring the essays and artwork. Over many coffees and much collaboration, David offered helpful ideas, creative feedback, and needed assistance.

Nicola Augustson of August Design Studio was essential to getting this project across the goal line. She created a beautiful cover and offered pivotal design solutions to the final layout of the artwork. I can’t say enough good things about the quality of Nikki’s work and what a pleasure she is to work with.

Special thanks to my good friend, Wayne Forte, for offering his painting Assuaging of the Waters for our cover and drop-cap designs.

Thank you to Alison Kagamaster for your research, thoughtful edits and quick turnaround. We couldn’t have finished this project without your keen eye.

Last, I want to offer my sincerest appreciation to each of our exceptional artist contributors for their willingness to offer their personal stories, spiritual insights, professional wisdom and creative work to spur other artists on in their God-given creative vocations. Thank you to:

Cameron Anderson

Steve Bjorkman

Sandra Bowden

Amick Byram

Michael Card

Tom Clark

Karen Covell

Cheryl Cutlip

Dean Del Sesto

Craig Detweiler

Wayne Forte

Dr. Colin Harbinson

Bruce Herman

Barry Krammes

Edward Knippers

Nick Macedo

Charlie Matz

Rory Noland

Denise Kufus Weyhrich

Cindi Zech Rhodes

To learn more about The Grove Center for the Arts & Media, please visit http://www.thegrovecenter.org

Creative Transformation

Joey O'Connor

THE INITIAL STEPS of my journey into a life immersed in the arts emerged from a very unexpected, painful chapter in my life. Early in my writing career, I developed chronic tendonitis in both wrists. Minus the ever-present pain, life was good. I worked at home, which was the best commute in Southern California. At the time, my wife and I were proud parents of two young daughters. One book deal after another offered the promise of building a solid writing career. I moved from assignment to assignment, juggling freelance writing jobs for several magazines with my book projects. Except for that dang tendonitis, I was eager, focused and optimistic about using my creative gifts in the days ahead.

If I had only known.

The physical and emotional toll finally caught up with me. I learned the hard way that despite all of my trying, I am not bulletproof. Simply human. To give you a picture of what my daily writing looked like, I completed my final three books (each over 200 pages) hunting and pecking at the keyboard clutching two pens I held in my hands. I know what you’re thinking: That’s not perseverance; that’s pathology.

After seven years of struggling with increased chronic pain, the burning in my wrists led me into an emotional descent that bottomed out into a full-blown depression. There were days when my head felt like it was wrapped in 100 pounds of gauze and I couldn’t see through the emotional fog that blurred my thinking. If the pain and depression wasn’t enough, the traipsing evil stepsister of acute anxiety bore into my brain as if a construction crew were working overtime with jackhammers on my cerebral cortex. Like all good humans who resist change, I fought the unwanted reality that my writing career was coming to a definitive end. I was haunted by a dark, looming fear not knowing what lay ahead. All of this with two young sons now in the mix and a family of six to feed. I did not go down easy.

One day in the shower, a still small voice caught up with me and asked, Joey, what do you want? What do you really want?

My response was simple, I want to get well.

Those words began a new twist in a creative journey that I would have never imagined taking at my own initiative. Letting go of a multi-book deal that would have given me work for the next three years and a writing lifestyle I thoroughly enjoyed, I returned to work at our church where I had served several years earlier. I literally crawled back into church-based ministry with no mere amounts of kicking and screaming along the way. It took me at least a year to become reoriented with working in a ministry setting, adjusting to new schedules and demands, not to mention trying to make sense of the chronic pain snake pit out of which I’d just crawled.

Fortunately, I returned to a church staff of cherished friends and a church community who valued, practiced and appreciated the arts, which eased this difficult transition. From it’s inception, Coast Hills Community Church in Aliso Viejo, California, had embraced all the arts including creative productions in music, film, visual art, drama, dance, graphic design and photography. And although I loved the freedom, independence and flexibility that accompanied a writing lifestyle, in my heart I knew I was living a fairly isolated life as a writer. So it was into community again that I was thrust and it was from this community, a new story began to write itself. And to my surprise, the Author wasn’t me!

After a year of working at Coast Hills and a much-needed respite from writing, an unforeseen event emerged out of the community that helped nurse my broken spirit back to health. During a time of prayer in the gardens of Mission San Juan Capistrano, a very distinct calling from God impressed upon me the need for the development of a creative spiritual retreat center. Sitting among the mission's beautiful garden's and historic architecture, I mulled this idea over in my heart and mind. Again and again came the questions, What if there was a place of beauty like this where people could experience spiritual transformation? What if there was a place where artists from all disciplines could cultivate their hearts, souls, minds and creative gifts?

Three weeks later, to my surprise, twelve acres of lemon and avocado grove were donated for this very retreat center. A year later, a few friends and I founded the ministry of The Grove Center for the Arts & Media. Soon, we began hosting artist retreats, gatherings and events designed to cultivate the spiritual life and creative work of artists.

So, it was from the very fragile seeds of brokenness, despair and letting go that God began a new and wonderful work. The past eighteen years have been an immersion into the creative world within the hearts of artists whose lives are filled with hopes, dreams and aspirations to create work that reflects the deeper work of the Spirit of God.

For the past few years, our focus in the Grove community of artists has been Small is beautiful. Whatever I build or create, I want to come out of a place of listening and responding. A place of surrender instead of self-initiated Tower of Babel name building. I don’t want to create, write or build anything for God. I want to enjoy the process of being and doing all these things with God just as Jesus modeled for us what it means to live in intimate relationship with his Father. The Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. (John 5:19-20) I simply want to listen well, follow well, and from that space in my heart and mind, to create well.

From this place of a very unexpected creative transformation in my own life, it is my pleasure to present twenty artists and their stories of art, life and faith. I believe that the heart of all creative transformation begins with one person with one story. One story is all it takes for one word, one thought or one idea to click inside our hearts and unlock whatever door that we have no way of opening ourselves. We are all brothers and sisters in this one Great Story whose author is God and as we tell our stories, we spur one another on in the greater works of faith, hope and love.

As I read the essays that follow, I couldn’t but help see the familiar themes that kept emerging––story themes that I believe will both encourage and challenge you as an artist. As you read the following stories of art, life and faith, you just might discover our contributor’s stories bring up questions that are on-going themes in your own life as an artist. Themes, questions, and musings such as: What is an artist’s relationship to his or her Creator? How important is the role of community in the life of an artist? How does an artist respond when family, friends, peers and the Church challenge their work and creative calling? Or, to be more succinct, family, friends, or Church who doesn't support their artistry at all? How can an artist grow in their understanding of the creative process? What is an artist’s unique relationship to the tools of their craft? What is the role of mentoring and apprenticeship in the life of an artist? How do artists, especially young and emerging artists, commit to the values, disciplines and pain-staking tasks of improving their craft? How can artists who are Christians make authentic creative contributions to culture (i.e. create new culture) as opposed to getting sucked into the vortex of campy Christian sub-culture that produces sentimental, substandard art that neither glorifies God, the artist nor enhances the spaces where it dwells? How can artists who are serious about their faith and their art live within the tension that the Church (in many respects) and the culture don’t know exactly what to do with them? Finally, how is the life and heart of an artist best cultivated so that whatever creative work is born, the obvious source flows from a heart that is fully alive. As St. Irenaeus once said, The glory of God is man fully alive.

Whether you are a young or old artist, an emerging or frustrated artist, a person who loves the arts or someone who’s itching to finish that book, pick up a musical instrument, camera or brush, I trust you’ll find a few glimpses of your story as you read the transforming stories of art, life and faith found in the following pages. You’ll watch and read authentic stories of real faith, heartbreaking setbacks, moments of brilliance and imagination, success and failure, spiritual struggle, frustration, disappointment and joy. The goal here is to nudge you along in your creative calling. Because when you discover that art is something you cannot not do, you’ll want to surround yourself with mentors and friends like the ones in these pages who will humbly, yet boldly challenge you to offer your creative gifts first to God and then, to this world.

When you do this, there's no telling what creative transformation lies ahead. You just might find yourself quite surprised.

I know I was.

I still am.

Seeking Real Presence in Painting

Bruce Herman

Art critic, Gordon Fuglie, writes about Bruce Herman[i]:

In the past twenty years, and throughout North America, there has been a notable blossoming of figurative, narrative and religious-themed art that is derived from the Bible, probes the Judeo-Christian legacy, and utilizes narratives from contemporary life that relate to scripture. Some of this work has a full-blown sensibility of our age, while others freely draw from the wellspring of historical religious art yet remain firmly rooted in the concerns of the present.

One seasoned practitioner of this phenomenon is the Massachusetts painter Bruce Herman. Raised in the 1960’s in an Episcopal environment that failed to slake his spiritual thirst, Herman was a quester early on. In high school he pored over sacred Hindu texts and became a disciple of Meher Baba, an Indian guru with disciples in North America. Moving up in the Baba sect, Herman became president of the Meher Baba Information Center in Cambridge in 1980. Two years later, disillusioned with what he saw as serious contradictions in his master’s teaching, he renounced Baba and became a Christian – changing but continuing the quest.

During this time Herman was studying art, choosing figuration as his mode in the mid 1970’s – a counter-intuitive choice at a time when conceptual art and video were seen as the hot tickets to fame in the art world. The artist’s inspiration for this direction was the triptychs of the German-American figurative artist Max Beckmann (1884 – 1950). As a graduate student at Boston University, Herman studied under the figurative painters Philip Guston and James Weeks (see his Foreword). Following graduate school and his Christian conversion, Herman produced a series of realistic paintings, pastels and monotypes with biblical subject matter and filled with the conviction of belief. In the late 1980s his work became more expressive and boldly limned; his current paintings tend to be large, employ one or two figures and are composed of spiritually charged abstract planes.

Herman is equally interested in the theology and history of Christianity and is an avid reader. Of an outgoing temperament, Herman values the stimulating fellowship of artists who either share his Christianity, draws on Judeo-Christian themes or reckon with the meaning of the body in contemporary art. Through a grant he received in 2001 he was able to host a gathering of such artists at rural Gordon College where he teaches art and runs the campus gallery.[ii]

This later led to an exhibition and book entitled A Broken Beauty, taking up the current discussion of beauty within the art world, but adding to the mix the ancient Christian concept of human brokenness. Herman and many of his colleagues see a symbiotic relationship between beauty and brokenness that can shed light on our understanding of the human condition.

I BEGAN CREATING art in early childhood and have never stopped. As I approach my sixtieth birthday, I find myself full of gratitude that God has allowed me to continue creating art for more than half a century, and I understand art making as my vocation, calling, and an outworking of my inmost nature and not as a mere profession. Making art is essential to self-understanding and worship of my Creator. As the reader can see from Gordon Fuglie’s narration above, I’ve had a fairly exotic path to Christ, with art making always part and parcel of that path, leading me into the precincts of holiness and at times into error. God’s way is approachable in any discipline, but in art there is a particular direct way our work echoes that of the divine Maker.

In the first chapters of Genesis we learn