The flame’s heat barely graces the surface of the plastic, and an image of what we could see in nature any given day bubbles into some otherworldly landscape of color, texture, and, somehow, emotion. The finished image hits our retinas, and our mind feebly attempts to sort the data, but all it has to work with are intersections of color, texture, and some sort of semblance of something that may look a little like something else.
Art has the power to defy other methods of communication by overriding boundaries and defense mechanisms in order to penetrate to knowings and understandings beyond language. Art becomes a keyhole through which we may glimpse truer pieces of ourselves, the world around us, and the God we worship. Through the lens of the creative process and the viewer’s experience of an artwork, in a small way, we may see the transformative power of the divine Artist and wonder at the greater transformative work he is doing in us and the world around us.
01. The Process Is Personal
When I create, there is a deep mystery of a sort of great opening. A great opening of my soul takes place from learning to see the magnitude of God’s work, love, and beauty in creation. The pointed intent of the Creator’s continual creation breaks across the screen of my mind, and I am able to see God’s specific transformation in my own little creative life.
My creative process centers on wondering. I wonder how I may see something through the eyes of the great Redeemer, the divine Artist. I attempt to witness the way he continues to create me through the gift of his transformative work, and then notice in nature how he is also completing a process of creation. I attempt, in my small way, to mimic the deformation, reformation, and transformation of the soul in my manipulation of the photographic object; this mimicry allows me to see. Through my process, I am able to see a bit better the true deconstruction and construction of my own soul at the hands of the divine Artist. By watching my color film melt, warp, and bubble under a flame, I am able to see how my own spirit is refined by the fire from something broken into something even more beautiful.
As I manipulate and warp this gift of existing matter, with borrowed inspiration, into something different, I am able to allow the meditation of God’s hands on my soul to rattle through my body, into my mind, and into a deeper knowing.
We don’t create from nothing, as the divine Artist did. We, as humans, are in the trade of borrowing: borrowing ideas, inspiration, and matter from the Divine. Therefore, art making becomes a practice of curiosity and discovery. In order to discover, we must learn to wonder, learn to be curious. In the process of being curious. . . . we learn to see. If you boiled down my profession into one phrase, it could be “learning to see.”
02. Learning to See
It is so easy to cruise through this life on what I think I know or how I believe things to be. What is most advantageous to my ripening into myself and my relationship with God, however, is wondering. Wonder allows us to challenge our preconceived thoughts, notions, and feelings. Wonder invites us to ask questions about the possibilities of how things could or might be.John O’Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005).
And so, every time I look through the viewfinder on my camera, or the giant eye of the scanner, or the framed work on the wall, I wonder at who God is as this divine Artist. Who is this God who allows me to use my small hands to speak of who he is as my great Creator?
God is, after all, the primal Artist—the first and only true Creator.
03. The Divine Artist
Our first introduction to God in Scripture is to the artist of creation.Genesis 1:1. The Creator takes the formless and void and gives it shape and meaning. Later, the psalmist praises the one who created the heavens, for weaving him together, and for fashioning his being.Psalm 139:15. The metaphor of God as the potter and the people his clay is present throughout Scripture.Isaiah 64:8; Jeremiah 18:1–6; Romans 9:20–23. Further, God continues to be Creator. The work of semper CreatorLatin phrase meaning “always creator.” appears in systems such as life cycle, reproduction, cellular growth, etc.Carin Huebner, “The Continual Creation Model: The Artist’s Creative Process as It Exemplifies the Christian Formational Journey” (MA thesis, Denver Seminary, 2015), 4–5.
04. God as Beauty
On what seems like a more simplistic level but gets harder to explain the deeper we dive in . . . art gives invitation to see God as beauty. Pseudo-Dionysius makes clear, in The Divine Names, that he believes God to be “the One, the Good, the Beautiful” who is “the Cause of the multitudes of the good and the beautiful” and the one from whom everything gets its being.Pseudo-Dionysius, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 77. Therefore, “That which has a share in beauty” is “call[ed] ‘beautiful’”Pseudo-Dionysius, 76. because it borrows from the one who is beauty.Huebner, “The Continual Creation Model,” 5–6.
The divine Artist’s continual creation in us through transformation is not only reconciling us to his goodness and holiness but to his beauty. Like the art object in process, we are continually becoming more beautiful in the way that the Maker is beautiful.
And so, as my tiny little hands attempt to gesture and hint at a greater process of the Creator’s transformation in this life, I can rest in assurance that the process is bringing me closer to the beauty, goodness, and holiness of the one who created first.
Carin Huebner is a Denver-based artist and spiritual director interested in the specific rhythms of the spiritual journey of the creative individual. Carin uses analog photographic methods to deconstruct and reconstruct the photograph to mirror God’s continual creative work in human lives through the process of redemption and transformation. Through spiritual direction, Carin is able to witness to God’s continual creative process in our lives.