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On Artistic Calling

Sandra Bowden: It is FinishedI spent time this evening on the CIVA website (Christians in the Visual Arts) and read Sandra Bowden’s fine article “The Call of the Artist” (April 10, 2014).[1]

She begins with some of the questions we’re that people often ask artists, including (my favorite): “Aren’t artists always on sabbatical?” Then she develops the concept of artistic vocation as both summons, which to me has connotations of a military command, and a strong inclination: “Ask yourself, is this something I can live without, that is essential within me?” Most evocative is her mandate drawn from Madeleine L’Engle and from Mary’s Magnificat to Christian disciple-artists to be “birth-givers.”

Madeleine L’Engle has said in Walking on Water that the creation of art. . . is an incarnational activity. The artist is a form-giver, one who gives birth to an idea. Giving birth involves conception (the  idea comes to the artist); gestation (the idea begins to take shape inside the mind of the artist); labor (the struggle of making it come together and the willingness to fail in that attempt); birth (the actual creation of the work and its completion) and care (rigors of framing, taking the photographs, writing about the piece, marketing, selling). Finally, Bowden challenges the artist to create art that not only illustrates but illuminates.

As a musician, I found it refreshing to think with a visual artist about art and consider my role as helping others to perceive what the physical eye [or ear?] without mediation could never discern. This perspective places a heavy spiritual responsibility on the artist as communicator or exegete of God’s character and biblical self-revelation.

“The artist’s mission is to help all of us see, in nature and human life, what the physical eye, unaided could never discern. The artist is an interpreter, and a teacher. Art is not mere illustration, but serves to illuminate.”  She concludes with six practical words of advice including: become a student of art history (to which as an historical musicologist, I add, “hear, hear”) and the obvious admonition to connect with groups of artists (“We were not meant to be ‘lone rangers.'”)

Finally she cautions artists against creating “a Christ like us, rather than letting Christ recreate through us,” and (using the poetic device of polyptoton) connects the theological concept of Christian transformation with the shaping of form in art: “As Christians and as artists we must let Christ be the ‘transforming’ and form-giving force in our lives, so that our art can be infused with spiritual insight. Our vocation is to translate a profound understanding of our faith and culture into works of integrity, quality and beauty.”

In the words of the Apostle Paul: “We are His poetry.” (Ephesians 2:10)  Bowden, a New-England based painter and printmaker, has works in collections including the Vatican Museum of Contemporary Religious Art and the Haifa Museum. She writes of her own artistic work and calling: “My Christian faith has been the driving force behind my art,” Bowden says. “I look at the making of a piece of art as a kind of doxology, a prayer or conversation with God. I don’t mean this in any mystical way, but my ideas come out of my theology and thoughts about God. I am somewhat of a theologian, but one who translates those interpretations into visual form.”


[1] http://civa.org/civablog/vocation-of-the-artist/. Accessed 4/12/2014, 2:38 a.m.

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