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aDesignINprogress
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Name: Laura ^_^
Country: United States
State: Maryland
Metro: Baltimore
Birthday: 1/2/1985
Gender: Female
Interests: Jesus, learning and trying new things, camels, Japanese culture, having conversations over a cup of tea or coffee, Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, and art (especially art involving being covered in paint or coming out of the darkroom smelling like rotten eggs)
Expertise: Tripping up stairs, ambidexterity, staying up much later than I should, fumbling the on English language, and making mashed potatoes from scratch
Occupation: Artist
Industry: Art
Message: message meEmail: email me
Member Since:
12/1/2005
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| I need to talk more. I'm
not so great at verbal communication, but I think a lot of that is a
result of assuming that my verbal skills are borked and possibly
ruinous. I think this mental build up probably messes me up more than
anything. I have noticed recently that when I do speak, (shockingly or
something) things go all right. I mean I have word dyslexia and my
vocabulary isn't impressive, but I'm able to get my point across.
Before church Sunday, I got to share my story with the Young Adult
Group. Another reason why I am seeing communication as important isn't
just for the benefit of others knowing where I'm at, but also for
myself. I usually go through the process of mental rehearsal of good
things to say before speaking to more than like three people. Before
this has left me nervous and it unfortunately can have self-depricating
consequences. Before sharing on Sunday, I didn't give myself chance to
do much prethinking and something happened. I felt free. I felt God
even taking over and speaking through me about my own life. And in that
I saw connections being made to how God became real to me so that I
would understand His love for me.
And this is what I saw on Sunday: I felt really broken about
relationships in high school, and not just the boy-girl type (even
though that was a prominent source of tension for me), but I felt like
an outsider and that even the God of the Universe didn't care. Now to
get my attention, God could have sent me a burning bush or He could
have written me a message in the sky, an email, whatever, but God is
practical - see especially the work of Jesus in the Gospels. Instead,
God sent me people. He had one coming to me through the bathroom, one I
often used as practice for my jujitsu, people inviting me to meals...
God met me in those places and it reminded that He had never actually
left. He knew He needed to be real, and that this would be the best
way. Recovering my trust and allowing myself to be loved is still
something I have been continuing on doing, or should I better say, God
has been helping me to do so. We need people to love and affirm us
because it is one of God's ways of saying that He indeed cares. Jesus
might be seated at the right hand of God right now, but He is very much
alive in our hearts and His love being ours, we need to love each
other, pray for each other, build up each other. Both the people that
we see in a given week, and the people that we may never see. We are
the Body of Christ and we share the heart of God and having that love
is enough to be called to praying, loving, and lifting up those that
are the least, the broken, and the persecuted.
And I want to be challenged to keep dialoguing. And don't get me wrong,
there are times where little can be said because processing is needed
first, but something that this is reinforcing in my is that my identity
is in God, that I'm just a mockingbird or a mouthpiece. Everytime I
open my mouth, it is on God to speak and not me, and it's His
reputation on the line, and still I get anxious. My mind understands
this, but my heart needs to be changed. I need to pray and just keep
talking, and God will work in me because He is in me. | | |
| Ben S. sent the following article he found in Relevant Magazine to
me. I don't know much about Relevant Magazine, but it is
interesting to see someone actually wrote an article on a topic that I
really specifically have been thinking about these past three years.
I'll probably post my thoughts on the article when I get back from
Boston at the end of next week along with making a few other posts I've
been brewing for awhile now. So expect a whole slew of entries in about
a week. In the meantime, feel free to comment on the article.
And thanks for the article, Ben.
Doing Art
by Tom Wilkinson
During film school I worked in the digital production lab on campus.
Tours of the college would come through, and my boss would tell each
group of eager-eyed prospectives exactly what we were about: “If you
can think of anything else you could possibly do other than
film—please, please, please, go do that! Go to another school, get a
four-year degree in physics or finance, become a well-educated audience
member and we will gladly take your $10.75 along the way . . .”
At this point, you could tell from the relieved look on some parents
faces how thankful they were for the reality check in their son or
daughter's life. They, after all, only wanted for their child to be
successful with a steady income, which clearly requires a bankable
degree. So can we cut this art school crap, please.
“...but, if you're sick,” he continued, “because everyone who comes to
this school and succeeds has the sickness, that film is the only way of
life. You must be willing to, no, you must long
to eat, breathe and sleep film, to work 14-16 hours a day, forfeit
sleep altogether, and fight through the battle to bring your finished
film to a jaded audience in hopes that someone other than your parents
can appreciate it.”
You could hear the whimpers. Dreams crushed. He was an intimidating
man, a former Hollywood producer speaking from experience—that film
demands your all. And, over the next several years, how to reconcile
what he had said with my faith would become a crucial issue. (And for
me, the next several years were spent learning how to reconcile what he
had said with my faith, and I would like to spend this and a few
subsequent articles exploring why these issues are so critical to us as
Christians in the arts.)
- - - - -
I had a friend get miffed at her husband one time because he introduced
her, “This is my wife, Michelle,” when she considered herself
“Michelle,” a person first, and then a wife. Such distinctions were
important to her and the same should be true for believers working in
the arts.
Living in New York, I'll often meet someone new at a gallery opening
and our conversation will start something like this: “Hi, I'm George,
I'm an artist. What do you do?” The problem this time is not the order,
but that people take something they do (“I paint,” “I work at a bank,”
“I practice homosexuality”) and turn it into an identity. It's
elemental to their world view, a presupposition that colors everything
else, and the foundation for how they live. People build every aspect
of their lives around their identity.
Go to any university, and you can tell almost instantly which students
define themselves as artists; their clothing is often eclectic and
over-hyped, their demeanor either sullen Sylvia Plath, “Woe is me. I
must be depressed to create great art,” or manic ADD, “Look at me. See
how cool I am for being an artist.” They're in love with being artists before they're committed to creating art.
The focus, however, should always be on the art first. We should come
to the act of creation with reverence rather than ego, and the
discipline of a practiced craft rather than pain as our muse, trusting
the process for inspiration rather than waiting for it to show up.
Most importantly, we create art, because like anything else, it is our
calling, discovered by revelation rather than choice. Our commitment as
believers is to follow and glorify our Maker, who set out all our days
before us and planned these good works for us before we were born.
Obedience, then, means following the path He calls us to, wherever it
leads.
Thankfully, God has put desires in our hearts and talents in our hands
for a reason, these things are not arbitrary, the great artist designed
us with intention. But we also can't assume how He plans to work them
out or that this one task of art is what He has called us to forever.
At every step we must listen for His leading.
So if our identity is grounded in God and all that He is to us, the
mentality of tortured artist falls away as we seek to magnify Him with
our work and with our lives, a fragrant offering from the overflow of
our hearts. Joy becomes the catalyst, rather than pain, and God gets
the glory.
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| God
is the Creator. Darn it, you would think that an art major would make
the connection that God is creative. And He is. Just thinking about the
considerations God made in designing man and woman, let alone the earth
and all of creation, is mind blowing. And I can see examples of this
just in considering what I have learned in my Sensation and Perception
class. Most of the semester we've dealt with just the visual and
auditory systems. And from this, I think God has made us just right for
what we need to function and interact. For example, audition is a
particularly keen distal sense, that we are able to utilize for good
temporal resolution. Our most sensitive hearing is in the 2 to 4 kHz
range. If it were any more sensitive, we would be experiencing a
phenomenon called browning in motion - which is the sound of molecules
smacking into each other. At the same time, it is often held that the
shape of our pinna (the external part of the ear, the part you can see)
is terrible for catching pressure changes and it is often wondered how
we can see so well given that the light that hits our retinas has to do
things like travel through some seriously cloudly goop we call the
vitreous humor. Perhaps a part of being creative is being flexible to
use things that seemingly wouldn't work well but actually do like the
components that make up our visual and auditory systems.
So, God got all creative on
everything. I find myself passionate about creating things, too. As of
late, however, I have not. Creativity has not been a metaphorical
faucet for me. I feel like graphic design has proven difficult for me,
especially this semester. Let me tell you, 6 credits of a graphic
design class has turned out to be much more than I bargained for, but
that isn't so much what has been frustrating.
Art is process. Really, a "complete"
art piece is a subjective term. There is always room to make changes
because it is about exploring your medium or subject and there is
always something new to discover, though perhaps there are less changes
to make as the process continues. If classes were longer than a
semester, the syllabi for my classes wouldn't need more projects; the
current projects would happily fill the extension.
Perhaps I can parallel process with
God creating people. As with a design concept, you create a solid basis
to work from (this is of course after doing a whole bunch o' thumbnail
sketches and now beginning to hone in on one), like our physical selves
serve as the structural basis. Then into that you continue to develop
the concept, adding detail, fine tuning, and sometimes scrapping the
original. I find that parallel to God's process: starting with our
physical and rather borked selves, our receiving the Holy Spirit,
rejecting our sinful selves, and now God is continuing to work on us,
carving out who we are meant to be from the rough exterior of our sins
and shortcomings and baggage, and He will be for the rest of our lives.
And that why my Xanga name is what it is. Because that is what I am. A
design in progress. God's design in progress.
But I disgress. What has been
frustrating me this semester is waiting on God because His answers come
on His time and not mine. That is good because then my need and
dependence on God is clear, but that is frustrating because I struggle
with wanting instant gratification or the quick and short Cliff Notes
sort of answer. I am rather certain that graphic design is not what I
will be doing later, but it is a part of me now. I know it has purpose
and I am going to see it through, but I struggle with what purpose it
serves me now, especially when I feel like my creativity is being
forced. What is good is that I can trust that God does know what He is
doing, and what is also good is that even if I wake up feeling
especially frustrated about design, that doesn't mean that God is going
to flip the graphic-design-is-important-to-Laura-now switch to void.
In thinking and praying last night,
there are some things that I do understand about me and art. Working on
a process and making art are both a form of personal expression and a
form of worship for me, which is why when I feel more pull to work on a
project because of an approaching critique than when I am really sold
on exploring process, it is frustrating.
As a means for personal expression, I
think it is one of the best ways that I can communicate, both what
others communicate well verbally and those trickier non-verbal abstract
ideas. I am not so good in the verbalization department and I think
part of that is because I think visually moreso than in words or
sentences. Something that is important to me and that I hope continues
to be is that I think everyone needs to be an artist some of the time
because of what doing art has to offer. How you define art can be
radically different to everyone else - to qualify as an artist doesn't
mean you have to be able to paint the Mona Lisa or sculpt the Venus de
Milo, as long as you have some sort of mark making tool and something
to mark on, then by me, you are set. Even if I am in a creative slump,
I still enjoy watching other people do art because it is watching them
pour themselves onto the paper or graph paper or canvas or mother's
living room walls. It has proven itself as a peaceful thought
processing and communication medium for me, and I hope that I would be
able to show other people the same and that the potential to be
creative doesn't ever leave us.
As a means of worship, I do art
because God made me to be passionate about doing art. Plain and simple:
He is the capital C Creator, and I am the lowercase c creative, and
remembering that makes me feel small. Just look at the sky. No chemical
processing, no pigments, no grouping of pixels, will ever be able to
quite capture its grandness. I have a lot to learn and to explore about
how God put stuff together, but I know God loves that I love His work
and that I try to be creative too.
When I was a kid, we painted these
flowers in elementary school. We were to use the sides of a piece of
cardboard dipped in paint to achieve the thinness of the stem. I of
course didn't even wait for the teacher to bring out the cardboard and
took this fat brush we were to use for the leaves and just totally made
these bamboo sized stems. It looked so silly and the teacher wouldn't
let me start over, but it got to hang proudly with the rest of flowers
in my first grade class room. I am certain God has a file on every
little doodle that I have ever done. I bet it makes Him smile, too, and
some of it probably makes Him roll around laughing. And I bet if God
has a fridge or a spare wall, He hangs up my work even. I bet he likes
my bamboo flowers.
You know just writing and praying on this is giving me a lot of peace of mind right now.
So what I am beginning to understand
is that even though I have struggled with my design being about
personal expression and worship. I just feel spent and empty and that
my motivation has been deadened, but if for no other reason, it is
still pleasing to God. I might not be on fire about doing a particular
something and I'm sure being a graphic design major in college is not
the last time that I will encounter something that I rather opt out of,
but God is still hanging up my design work on His fridge with His
favorite camel magnet. Perhaps the purpose of graphic design is to be
reminded that what I am doing, I am doing most of all for Him, and not
for professors or peers. That could be the simple answer, it could be
more complicated than that, I don't know, but I do know that God knows
and that should be enough right now.
If anything besides frustrating, this
semester is proving to be quite humbling because I have felt a lot more
emptied, so I am seeing much more of what I do is a result of what God
puts into me. In small group two weeks ago, we were studying the first
half of the letter of Paul to the Romans, chapter five. "And not only
this, but we also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation
brings about perserverance, and perserverance, proven character; and
proven character, hope, and hope does not disappoint, because the love
of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit
who was given to us (Romans 5: 3-4). The last part of this really stuck
with me, that in order to get hope from tribulation or even to just
love other people, God has put His love into my heart. As a visual
person, I definitely can picture myself as volute krater (if you don't
know what this is, go take a quick read on ancient Greek pottery). Even
though my metaphorical krater is cracked and full of holes, I remember
that God continues to work on me, and at the same time, He also
continues to fill me. I see fluid spilling over the brim and spilling
all over the place out of the holes, and I am humbled because God uses
what He puts in not only what is held by the vessel, but especially
what gushes from the cracks where I am all messed up and that is what
waters the earth, too.
I have decided - I want to sketch that.
If you have stuck with me and feel
that I make some sense, whoa. Then I ask you to be praying for me, and
I'll pray for you too, because there is no denying that we're all
messed up and we're all like those video game characters that if you
stop pressing the controller, they'll be patient and idle for a few
seconds before starting to tap their feet or yawn or something to get
the gamer's attention. We all are hungry to hear from God, and
sometimes, that really frustrating to be patient for, but we just got
to keep on waiting.
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