Art in Action [jana]

Last time I posted, all I came up with was a rushed explanation of how I had been invited to travel to California to paint during a church service focused on Daniel chapter 2. For putting up with that sort of cop-out, you at least deserve some pictures of the process. Reading, studying, and praying over Daniel 1 and 2, brought out some core ideas I wanted to focus on within the project.

1) Throughout scripture, God is working to reveal himself and his character. This revelation often takes different forms, but what is miraculous is not necessarily the (sometimes super-natural) form the revelation takes, but the loving and consistent character and passion for the salvation of humankind that is revealed; everything points to the resurrection and the everlasting kingdom of heaven, even Nebuchadnezzar’s crazy dream.

2) Daniel, under the king’s “Tell-me-my-dream-or-die” edict, has the dream and the interpretation revealed to him in a vision. He didn’t immediately jump up and run to the king’s chambers to save his skin by blurting out the dream, instead, he stopped and sang a hymn of thanks and praise to God first. This idea of “praise from the pit” is important…and comes in later in the book of Daniel as well. The timing of Daniel’s praise and thanksgiving is crucial. He is not praising God from the hindsight of standing on the top of Mt Everest, looking back down at the trials he’d already gone through; he was presenting an offering of Thanksgiving knowing that he could very well be executed within the next day.

These thoughts that came out of my initial meditations on the idea of visually presenting the scripture influenced the final products. I did not do a lot of planning, other than a few initial sketches. Each painting, I think, reflects some elements of the ideas above, even though they all worked out differently. The experience of painting in a limited time frame was unique…once I stepped out on the stage and had all my tools and a blank canvas at my fingertips, it was an experience in faith and action. I simply had to keep on making the choices that would shape what was happening on canvas…I had to be fully absorbed in what I was doing…and trust that at the end of the sermon, it was complete.

A few weeks later, my friend Andy used some of the paintings in a Prayer Room installation at the church. You can view the installation here. http://www.flickr.com/photos/andymadsen/sets/72157600470072330/

Listed below are the paintings, each accompanied with an artist’s statement.

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Daniel 2: Acrylic paint and Silver Leaf on Canvas.

In this painting, I was thinking about a sense of rain—as a darkness or a mist that pervades the atmosphere. This is a persuasive type of muddiness that can keep us bound by a sense of powerlessness to change.

Daniel and his friends were constantly surrounded by the mist of a dark environment. Their vision was constantly clouded by the necessities of surviving in their current position. Coexisting without compromising, they kept their focus on the constant they could not see…the blue sky that lay behind the darkness, trusting in God to reveal himself in his time through them.

Therefore show me the dream and its interpretation.

This time, I focused on Daniel’s hymn of salvation in verses 20-23. After God revealed the dream to Daniel in the vision, Daniel’s first response was first, before being assured of his salvation, to break into this song of praise to the God who reveals mysteries. Daniel’s song goes out after the dream is revealed but before the actual salvation, which is a foreshadowing of our own place…after the revealing of Christ, but before the final fulfillment of His kingdom. Again, the praise rises not from a clean, perfect, whole and safe place, but from the pit. Daniel has not been saved from death yet; praise from the pit in hope of deliverance must be desperately beautiful to Christ.

he reveals deep and hidden things;

he knows what is in the darkness,

and the light dwells with him

Similar elements to the first two paintings are present here. The constant elements are the clouds and darkness, and the blue sky hidden behind the silver leaf. The silver will tarnish, growing more transparent as it ages, gradually revealing what is behind it on the canvas.

there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries