THE CREATIVE IMPULSE

'Every act of creativity is an intuitive response to offer back to God what has been given to us. We twist this intuition and may create something transgressive and injurious, but the source of the creative impulse is the Creator.'

Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith, p.177.

A PARABLE FOR MAKING

'Here, then, is the central parable for our Making journey:

Imagine a father taking his child to the beach. The father watches his child make a sandcastle, which will be washed away by the high tide.

But the father happens to be an architect. Imagine that this father loves his child so much and is astonished at the design of the castle that is child has made.

Several years later, the child looks in amazement as the father creates a real castle that is based on the the sandcastle that the child created.

This may be close to what the New Creation will be like. God desires in God's heart to be with the child as the child plays on this side of eternity. God chooses, out of God's gratuitous heart, to co-create into the New World. There is no particular need for the architect father to create an actual building, but the father re-creates in love, and he has the power to do so. The New Creation is filled with such attentive, self-giving outworking of God's love toward us.'

Makoto Fujimara, Art and Faith, p.35.

HOW BEAUTY SUSTAINS

'Art literally feeds us through beauty in the hardest, darkest hours. Christians can have a foretaste of what is to come by celebrating through making and through the exegetical work of culture. Through this wine of New Creation we can be given the eyes to see vistas of the New, ears to hear the footsteps of the New, even through the works of non-Christians in the wider culture.'

Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith, p.34

WHAT WE SHARE WITH GOD

'The characteristic common to God and man is apparently...the desire and ability to make things.'

Dorothy L Sayers in Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith, p.6. 

THE LIMITS TO SERMONS

'Some things, of course, are best conveyed in a three-point sermon. But we would lose a great deal if we heard the Good News delivered only as linear, propositional information, for the gospel is a song!'

Makoto Fujimara, Art and Faith, p.6.

HOW ART HELPS

'Art is the poem that finds the words when all other words fail. Art is the painting that knows the colour of our grief. Art is the actor identifies with us and says, "Yes - this is happening and it might not be OK.'"

Alastair Gordon, Why Art Matters, p.92.

CHRISTIANITY & ART

Christianity...never leaves us in any doubt about what art is for: it is a medium to remind us about what matters. It exists to guide us to what we should worship and revile if we wish to be sane. It is a mechanism whereby our memories are forcibly jogged about what we should draw away from and be afraid of.'

Alain de Botton in Alastair Gordon, Why Art Matters, p.15.

ART STOPS US IN OUR TRACKS

'...art is saying Stop. It helps us stop by putting a frame around something and makes us see it in a way we would never have seen it under the normal circumstances of living, as so many of us do, on sort of automatic pilot, going through the world without really seeing much of anything.'

Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary, p.23.

THE FUNCTIONN OF AN IMAGE

'An image is something that helps us catch a glimpse of reality.'

Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet, p.17

THE ESSENCE OF ART

'What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind.' 

Carl Jung in Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters, p.155. 

READING/ WRITING SOMETHING VS. CREATING/ APPRECIATING AN OBJECT OF ART

'Reading text is a linear progression where one idea follows another like the news crawl at the bottom of a television screen. On the positive side, this gives a writer significant control of the step-by-step process through which a reader accesses ideas. On the downside, only one thought can be presented at a time.The remainder of the author's composition is either receding into the netherworld of memory or invisibly waiting in the wings for its moment on stage. In contrast, a craft object, is a collage in which many pieces and levels of information are read in relationship to each other in the present...A craftsman cannot control a respondent's path through this information as tightly as as an author, but the craftsman has the advantage of making complex structures of information simultaneously apparent. His picture is worth the proverbial thousand words.' 

Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters, p.64. 

IN THE ZONE

'Through personal experience, acquaintance with hundreds of other craftspeople, and interaction with thousands of students, I have witnesses the pleasure and empowerment that skilled craftwork offers. There is a deep centredness in trusting one's hands, mind, and imagination to work as a single, well-tuned instrument, a centredness that touches upon the very essence of fulfillment. What better way to inhabit one's innate human capabilities productively and powerfully, like an engine firing smoothly on all pistons.'

Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters, p.53.

THE SECRET OF LIFE

'The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of every day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.' 

Henry Moore in David Brooks, The Second Mountain, p.295. 

THE FUNCTION OF ART IN WORSHIP

'Art is not meant to be an object of worship; it is an aid to worship.' 

Paul M Gould, Cultural Apologetics, p.102. 

APPRECIATING BEAUTY

'I love all beauteous things,
I seek and adore them;
God hath no better praise,
And man in his hasty days
Is honoured for them.'
Robert Bridges, from 'I love all beauteous things' in A Choice of Bridges's Verse, p.55.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEAUTY

'If we keep our churches, homes, and bodies bereft of art (or, alas, bereft of good art), we are saying something about what we hold to be Kingdom values - and what we are saying is heretical, namely, that God doesn't care about beauty.' 

John G Stackhouse Jr., Why You're Here, p.99. 

AN AUDIENCE OF ONE

'The public for which masterpieces are intended is not on this earth.' 

Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, p.87. 

EVERYTHING CAN BE WORSHIP

'All our merely natural activities will be accepted, if they are offered to God, even the humblest: and all of then, even the noblest, will be sinful if they are not. Christianity does not simply replace our natural life and substitute a new one: it is rather a new organisation which exploits, to its own supernatural ends, these natural materials.' 

CS Lewis, 'Learning in War-Time' in CS Lewis Essay Collection: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories, p.174.  

JOY IS A PHYSICAL SENSATION

'For I myself find that if, during a moment of intense aesthetic rapture, one tries to turn round and catch by introspection what one is actually feeling, one can never lay one's hand on anything but a physical sensation. In my case it is a kind of kick or flutter in the diaphragm.' 

CS Lewis, 'Transposition' in CS Lewis Essay Collection: Faith, Christianity and the Church, p.269. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF ART

'Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellowmen beyond the bounds of our personal lot.' 

George Eliot quoted in David Lodge's Introduction to Scenes of Clerical Life, p.15.