Starting Again

I set this blog up awhile ago to highlight some online art sites for a few friends ....but I think I'm going to try to make it into a real blog. I'm at least going to try to document my next month to get into the hang of it.

I'm a week away from heading up to Vancouver. In fact I sent a box of my art supplies up yesterday so that must mean I'm really going.

I'm going up to assist Makoto Fujimura as he teaches a class at Regent College in Vancouver on Nihonga (traditional Japanese painting technique using mineral pigments) and the theology of art.

It would be enough of an excitement just to have three solid weeks in a row to focus on and make art. I haven't had that much dedicated time since grad school. But I have the added benefit of working with and assisting an artist I have deep respect for and whose work has such power to move me.

But probably the most unusual and interesting part of this for me is to participate in an art class that is also going to try to talk about the meaning of art.

I have had precious few opportunities so far to discuss with others in the arts such questions as to the value of art within our culture and what do we bring to our communities as artists. These questions seemed of little value during the time I was in grad school in the late 80's-early 90's. Maybe it made some sense during "modernist" times that these types of questions weren't high on the hit parade. It makes less sense now in a post modernist and whatever "post-" we are currently in, to not delve into such things.

I'm not sure though, that academia has really proven to be all that robust in developing a discussion around aesthetics period. Although the dialog that's developed around visual culture is pretty interesting. But those artists who are actually being artists within the community and marketplace aren't really engaged or informed by it. However, that is probably due more to the the general divide between academia and the marketplace...which is a whole conversation in itself.

For those of us who are Christian, there seems to be an even greater silence. The arts and the church have had a relationship of suspicion and mistrust for quite awhile. The church has removed itself so thoroughly from the arts it has become little more than an disengaged critic, periodically hurling judgements over the fence from a distance. In return many artists critique religion and the church, throwing "mud pies" of their own over the fence line. As the church remains confused about the meaning of being "in the world but not of it" and as so many who feel they have been wounded by the church seek to personally work their pain out through the ritual of the art of shock and dismay, there seems little time focused on asking what art generally means and what kind of beings are we who have been made in the image of a creative God to begin with.

So its refreshing to be able to spend some time with a few others asking questions about what art means, and how does it fit within our concept of God and our concept of the world.