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And so I begin.....| | 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.
| | | Posted 12/1/2005 3:36 PM - 34 Views - 4 eProps - 3 comments
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I only know this because I've dealt with a lot of stuff on that scale, and it's a big deal there. That, and, my whole research project is about how Brownian motion is too small to account for crawling molecules.