A Note on Art and My Religion

While I was in Germany I remember having this revelation one evening spent alone in my apartment.  There I was, sitting at our ridiculously tiny table, thinking very hard over my bowl of fancy European Ramen.  I was surrounded by artists and people who had known they were going to be artists since before I even gave up on my dreams of being an astronaut because I thought you had to go through the army first.  As my Ramen began to cool, I began to stew, and I decided to start looking at my life like a puzzle.

I try to avoid lame metaphors, especially when they liken themself to life in general.  But this one's actually stuck with me for longer than 10 minutes.  So maybe it's a good one.

The only problem with my puzzle, though, is that mine is not even close to being put together yet.  I just have a giant box of random pieces.  I don't even have a lid for the box to see what it's supposed to look like, or how many pieces it is.  I have some bits put together.  The really large and especially well-put-together looking bits are the ones I wish everyone would see, but there aren't many of those and they often get buried in piles of more pieces while I try to sort through things.  I don't like people knowing that I have an unfinished puzzle because I'm worried they're going to judge me and stare over my shoulder while I try to put two pieces together that clearly don't seem to belong together.  However, I also really enjoy puzzles.  There's an excitement to connecting dots and slowly seeing how things might turn out.  When I was younger, I always wanted to be the person to put the last piece in.  But, as I've gotten older, I've developed a fear of endings - putting the last piece in means no more excitement of hunting through the box to find that one piece with the funny swoopy corner, or methodically arranging each piece first by shape and then by color.

Basically, what I'm saying is that I've come to grips with the fact that my puzzle isn't put together.  I'm enjoying putting it together and I'm okay with people seeing my progress (for the most part).  Of course I'm still scared of the snooty stares and I'm still trying to shove the wrong pieces together, but I'll figure it out eventually.

Recently, I have put a few more pieces into my puzzle and connected two rather large sections.  I had a hard time believing that they would ever connect.  At times I was worried they'd come from two separate puzzles, but as soon as I put one piece in, dozens more seemed to fit obviously into place.

And that brings me to the actual, real-life subject of this post (which is no longer a metaphor).

Ta-Dah!  I made a painting.

It was for a semester-long project I had to do in my New Testament class.  We each had to come up with some sort of creative project and work on it for an hour each week.  This painting in and of itself, isn't really all that great or special, but as an object it kind of represents the connections and things I discovered this past semester because of that class.

Again, this story has it's beginnings in Germany.  I thought harder about art while I was on that trip than I ever have before and I think I had my first major life crisis.  I knew I enjoyed art and that it was what seemed like the only form of communication I was somewhat good at.  However, at the same time I also felt incredibly selfish.  As many of you know, I'm Mormon, and I love my religion.  But I suddenly couldn't figure out how art would fit into the grand scheme of things.  I don't make religious art and personally I don't even really like it.  (I'm not saying it's bad, it just doesn't do much for me).  But I couldn't help but feel like if I wasn't creating blatantly religious art, then there was no use to being an artist.  This sort of feeling had manifested itself before in my life when I struggle with the amount of space finished art takes up and not having anything to do with it.  I feel like I'm being wasteful and unproductive.

After many wonderful and heartening late-night conversations with roommates I found myself reading Matthew 25 one night, wherein the parable of the talents can be found.  I took a lot of encouragement from this parable.  If art was a talent that the Lord had given to me, then it was my duty to find ways to increase it and put it to good use.

For the time being, this satisfied me, but it came back to my mind the following semester when my teacher explained this creative project assignment.  I decided I wanted to study more deeply the parables of the New Testament and create illustrations for them.  I only ended up with time to do this one painting but the project and this class helped me better resolve this block I have between religion and art.

I started with studying the parable of the sower.  To be honest, I didn't get much further than this in my personal study, as the rest of my time I spent on the illustration.  But I did gain a lot more appreciation for the parables in the New Testament from studying this.  I had always been confused by why Christ taught in parables and in Sunday School classes they always seemed to make it sound like parables were more like tricky riddles that only really smart people could figure out, but I realized that wasn't the case.  Christ taught in parables because those who had a desire to understand would apply themselves and be able to understand the meanings, while those who chose to harden their hearts (and be like the stony ground) wouldn't allow the seed of faith to take root and grow.

Thus began the second part of my project.  I wanted to do these illustrations not just because I'm an art major and that's what art majors do, but because I wanted to see if I could actually make religious art.

Well, while I don't necessarily regard this painting as a failure, I didn't really have the same connection to it while working on it that I do with other works.  I still don't think religious art is for me.  However, over the course of the semester, many small insights and little verses here and there helped me realize that I can still be religious and have a firm faith in Christ and God while creating art that doesn't portray religious events or themes.  It's cliche, but one of those verses that helped was Matthew 5:16

"Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven."

Nowhere in the verse does it say that you can only let your light shine by doing a, b, and c.  I want my art to make people happy and to connect with them and I think that is a good work.

While I was feeling much better about my life choices at this point, I still also had this fear that this life would be the only time I had to create art, and such things would be obsolete in heaven.  However things were rounded off pretty nicely when we had a class discussion about the parable of the talents.  Most of the things we talked about were insights I'd heard before and things I'd found in my own studies, but one thing stood out to me.  When the lord returns and inquires what the servants have done with their talents, he gives to the "good and faithful" servants the money that they made.  I hadn't noticed before, but the servants were expected to return all the money to the lord.  This isn't doctrine or anything, but for me I felt like it was saying that my talents and the things I enjoy doing will continue with me after this life if I use them to help build the kingdom of God in this life.  It was a very comforting thought.

Anyways, I'm sorry if this all sounds corny and poorly-written.  I don't usually write about religious things, but as it is a big part of my life I really wanted to try.

I do believe in God and Jesus Christ.  I know that they love all of us and really do want us to be happy.

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I'm sorry for my month-long hiatus in December, but I'm ready to start this year off right and hope to continue with my three-posts-a-month plan.

In the meantime, my sister and I created our own vlog over on Youtube.  It's about books and stuff.  Check it out, like, subscribe, all that good stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC157ivjEm5HC_vDupNP0YVQ