Fiction writers create characters. By putting words on a page, the fiction writer makes these characters come alive in the imagination of readers around the world. The fiction writer also creates plots, weaving these characters together into intricate storylines that reveal the unique personality of each character, revealing and growing each character in the minds of his or her readers.
Sculptors take a raw mass of material and shape it into something purposeful. The shape becomes the art, the form is the beauty. A sculpture speaks of intent, of realized potential. When we look at sculptures, even putting our hands on them or at times standing within them, we get a sense of spatial awareness, of carefully designed form, and of the features of the material itself.
A musician takes the physical stuff of this world, manipulates it into making the sounds which that particular matter is capable of projecting, and combines those sounds in ways that resonate with both body and soul. A musician carefully shapes sounds and lyrics, where every tone, every syllable, every phrase carries more meaning than we might think possible.
A painter takes colors in a variety of mediums and combines them in ways that are pleasing to the eye, provoking to the mind, even moving to the body. The painter spreads his or her colors across the canvas and creates a window to a world that is often simultaneously familiar and odd.
The poet uses sounds and syllables to wring every ounce of meaning, connotation, and suggestion out of the words we use every day. By juxtaposing phrases and drawing on rich imagery, the poet creates through language and draws us to contemplate, to enjoy, to rethink.
The dancer uses movement to communicate. In a language that no mouth speaks, the dancer moves his or her body in ways that call attention to our physicality even while pointing beyond it. Beauty in motion, beauty in using the most practical of instruments—a hand, a leg—for the most impractical and meaningful of displays.
All of these human artists are mirrors. In their artistry, they call attention to the ultimate Artist. Each art form in its unique way points us to the God who stands as the Master and Originator of that form, who has taken that form of art infinitely farther than is strictly possible.
God creates characters—not purely on pages and not merely in imaginations, but in reality. We bump into these characters daily. We are these characters. God makes use of plot, but his version of plot is far grander, encompassing all of human history as it does, and far more intricate, making brilliant use of each boring daily detail of each of the lives of each and every character—even those who seem the most incidental to what we would consider to be the main plotline.
God sculpts bodies out of dirt. He shapes trees and oceans and canyons. His sculptures come alive and swim, run, fly. He breathes life into his sculptures and they live and act, displaying the unique properties of the matter from which they are formed and pointing infinitely beyond.
God made the possibility of sound itself by ingraining musical qualities into the raw materials of this world. He gives each human a unique voice, ensuring that his creation will be filled with a diversity of musical tones and timbres.
God paints in colors every day, as the light he creates refracts through water in the sky, a brand new water-color masterpiece for literally every second of every sunrise and sunset. He adorns us with irises and skin tones and hair colors, paints in flowers and vegetables and fruits, splashes color across the skies and oceans and plains and valleys and canyons. His combinations and juxtapositions are endless, most of which will never be seen by human eyes.
His poetry creates worlds. He spoke and the then-nonexistent world obediently came into being. His words fill the Bible with more meaning than we can imagine, which every generation mines for meaning and comes to the end of their lives seeing the infinite depth of suggestion, connotation, and imagery still to be discovered.
He fills his world with meaningful motion, from the everyday dances we do with friends and families, embedded in hugs and acts of service, to the flight of the hawk and the rhythm of the ocean and the unexpected shift of the breeze. Each movement calling attention to the physicality of the world God made and pointing beyond.
God has filled his world with art. He has shown himself to be infinitely skilled in each art form. He constantly demonstrates his capacity to mix these forms, to transcend the boundaries that we place around specific disciplines. God is the ultimate Artist, and he has ingeniously created humanity with the ability to work within and continue his artistic endeavors. Each human artist is a mirror, each work of art a reminder that art is possible because God is the Artist, a fresh vision granted by the One who created sight, a testimony to the meaning injected in every corner of this world by the Creator.
Every day we encounter his artistry. Every day we are his artistry. We are his characters. We move within his plot, traversing his canvases, traveling as his sculptures, speaking according to his meter, moving as his dancers. We seldom notice the art we inhabit, the art we embody, but the art is there nonetheless, and it is magnificent.
That is a wonderful post! Good stuff! What is that painting you included in the middle of it? I am not familiar with it.
Ah, I see from the image URL that it is Rembrandt’s “The Artist in His Studio” (Museum of Fine Arts in Boston). I suspected that it might be a Rembrandt.
“In this small painting, the young Rembrandt seems to represent the daunting moments of conception and decision necessary to the creation of a work of art. An artist confronts his easel in a studio bare of everything except his essential tools. This drama, with its emphasis on thought rather than action, is intensified by the expressive use of light and shadow. The painting’s daring perspective is also important: the distant figure of the painter seems dwarfed by his work, looming large in the foreground.”
Source: Museum of Fine Arts Boston
I like your style: ask a question, then answer it yourself! That makes my job easier. I was first introduced to this painting by Andy Crouch in his book Culture Making. At the end of the book, he has a cool discussion where he talks about the light reflected back into the artist’s face, suggesting that the canvas is still blank, and therefore highlighting the infinite possibilities in the act of creation that’s about to begin. Definitely a cool painting, I’m glad you liked it.
[…] In the “world” of Interstellar, there is no supernatural (though it had to make a few “leaps of faith” to reach that conclusion). But before you get a chance to apply that idea to the real world, the end credits start rolling. Interstellar did not come from nowhere; a huge team of people put hard, intentional, and creative work into the movie. Eternity’s professor Mark Beuving would agree that Interstellar, as a work of art, actually functions as a mirror which reflects the ultimate Artist and Originator of all artistic forms. […]