aDesignINprogress's Xanga

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 05:23:37 GMT

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.

"Doing Art" article

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 19:04:07 GMT

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.

And so I begin.....

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 19:36:54 GMT

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.