Actually an Artist

I’m in Montreat, NC this week for the Arts, Recreation, and Worship Conference. It’s my fifth (?!) year going after a long hiatus. (Covid, job loss/changes, life.) I’ve missed it so much and I’m so glad to be back and doing workshops for myself. Formerly, I would take something more about worship planning/music ministry as a music director/organist, and as someone getting continuing education money for it. But not now! In the morning, I’m taking a Printmaking class, and my afternoon workshop is titled Prayer in Motion. I’m not going to get into all of it (I couldn’t in one post), but I wanted to pause in the middle of the week to meditate a bit on what I’m noticing so far.

I have this complicated relationship with the arts… particularly music right now, but a longstanding struggle in the visual arts to not be paralyzed by my perfectionism or fear or unaware exactly what it is -ism. So any process/approach that is a step away from what I’ve done before is freeing to me. This is definitely not anything I’ve done before, though now that I’ve gotten into it, I’m not so scared to keep trying at it. On Monday, we did gel printing. On Tuesday, we did paste paint. On Thursday, we did block printing. And on Fridays, we figure out what to do with these papers. I’m thinking collage.

This all appeals to me because there’s a large element of randomness and an inability to control much of it. Sure, I can make choices, but I don’t have the experience or technique to claim any sort of knowledge about what it will need exactly. And, frankly, my vision starting out is just one of play. If I think too hard, I remember how there are people making a living at this sort of art, and I analyze how much they control/predict/precision paint, and then I’ve lost the game. Really, this is about play. It’s putting some dots on a gel and rolling them and seeing if I get a gradient (sometimes I do!), what stamps look good in there, and what kind of layering I can make work. I’m really pleased with this one, even though it’s not ‘perfect’.

That’s another thing! The order of operations is fantastically backwards for these sorts of prints. Gel, you put the ‘top’ layer on first, then add your texture like lines, waves, stamps, whatever. You let that dry, then you can add another color/layer on TOP of the first… and it comes out on the bottom. I like that reversal. The first shall be last, and the last shall be first. That could make a good meditation verse for a group working on spirituality and the arts. Want to be a part of my spirituality and the arts group? We’ll have to start one. But there we go, week one: gel prints, the Order and Priority of God, and stunning reversals. 😅

In all seriousness, the spiritual and meditative depths of art as play is so profound and little explored by the masses, in my opinion. We all want to see beautiful works by professions and hear fantastic arrangements of liturgy and verse… But we have so much intolerance for the vulnerability of creativity and play. We can’t allow ourselves that option to make a mistake. My fellow conferees are very much ‘my people’-they’re here to play and try out different things they can