The Christian Creative Process
I don’t know how many of you consider yourselves “artists,” or “makers.” I don’t really consider myself an artist. But I do adore making art.
My favorite art form is the short story. There is absolutely no feeling in the world like awakening from a half-stupor, looking at a computer screen (or a note-pad, if you are old-fashioned) and realizing that there is a finished piece of writing there, beginning-to-end, poured out from yourself and extant in the world. So many stories remain hidden, and die unexpressed. So many ideas that we have in waking from a dream, or in moments alone, spark a little fire in us that dies as the idea drifts back into the void from whence it came. But when on rare occasions I wrestle that idea down into the material, the feeling of satisfaction I get from it-- even if it’s a shoddy piece of work, but especially if it isn’t-- is almost transcendent.
“the ‘image of God’ imprinted on all people
is the ability and drive to create”
Dorothy Sayers proposed in her book The Mind of the Maker that the “image of God” imprinted on all people is the ability and drive to create. “When we turn back to see what [the author of Genesis] says about the original upon which the ‘image’ of God was modeled, we find only the single assertion, ‘God created’. The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things.” We don’t create things out of nothing, in the way that God does; but, Sayers continues, “It is the artist who, more than other men, is able to create something out of nothing. A whole artistic work is immeasurably more than the sum of its parts.”
I like this idea of creation as the thing that makes us human. There is something inside all of us that desires to call something into being that has an existence outside of us, and that’s what art is. It’s something that we form from raw materials-- words, pigment, clay, marble, gut-strings, breath, the motion of our bodies-- an idea that we transplant from our souls into the world, where others can experience it.
If we all have an inherent drive to create, and human artistic creation allows us to share ideas or parts of ourselves, then Christian art is the act of grasping hold of those ideas that have a glimmer of God’s light about them, the thoughts that bring us into a feeling of joy or holy peace or even righteous anger, and to turn those thoughts into something material.
The artistic process is different for different people, but it always involves grappling with a material form, as well as with an idea that, in my experience, clamors for attention, but vanishes the second I look away from it. “The business of the creator is not to escape from his material medium or to bully it, but to serve it; but to serve it he must love it,” says Sayers. Before I knew about any of the conventions of story-writing, I wrote what I thought were some perfectly decent pieces; but looking back, they languished due to my lack of understanding of plot, story arc, themes, the power of the sound of words and the way they feel on the tongue, and so many other things that the medium teaches. Good art requires an artist to know the rules he is working with, and to let those rules bend his desires so that he can create something in collaboration with the medium. If I wrote whatever I felt like writing, I would still write only mushy, romantic word-pictures about how it feels to listen to crickets in a field under the stars: stuff of no substance. Now I know better, and though it feels like I am making sacrifices in bending my will to my materials, my work is much improved by those sacrifices.
Ultimately, I believe, with Ms. Sayers that sub-creation is how we are fully human. Not everyone has to consider himself “an artist,” but making art that brings an idea conceived from the love and worship of God into the world where others can receive it and think it too, is one of the most beautiful exercises in submission that a Christian can partake in; and it leaves me, for one, with the best feeling in the world: the feeling that I’ve done well what was asked of me, and that in the process, I have made a part of myself known.
That’s what art is to me: a part of my soul, made visible. But Christian art is more than this. It can’t just be self-gratifying. It’s human to desire to be known, but Christian art cannot be about the human artist. There’s a danger of a desire for worship in that. Christian art should express the part of the soul that gives glory to God.