Faith & Creativity

I have been giving a lot of thought lately to whether Christian art of any kind is Christian because it is obviously about God or Jesus as in Renaissance paintings or Handel’s Messiah or whether any creative act is Christian because the person creating the work is a Christian even if God & Jesus are not mentioned.

Madeleine L’Engle says in ‘Walking on Water’ ‘Not long ago a college senior asked if she could talk to me about being a Christian writer. ... I told her that if she is truly and deeply a Christian, what she writes is going to be Christian, whether she mentions Jesus or not. And if she is not, in the most profound sense, Christian, then what she writes is not going to be Christian, no matter how many times she invokes the name of the Lord.’

I decided to ask various artist friends to investigate this proposition themselves and for the invited authors to give their testimony of how God commissioned them to use their creative gift and how they have grown into their gifting and calling.

Four responded and so through June there will be weekly guest posts featuring Susan Mulder, Valerie Sjodin, Mary Brack and Debby Hudson. They will share their thoughts and their work.

I hope you will enjoy the series.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

Traverse update

I spent this weekend with the Traverse ladies.  We all did lots of work despite the heat!

I took this piece

and coated it with flour paste again.  When the flour paste was dry I crackled it and then painted it with brown paint.

When I washed it off it looked like this.  This looks better when you see it than in the photo!

 
I also played with my thermofax screens on paper and on calico.

Sorry you can't see the paper ones very well.

I tore these up into squares and rectangles and with a few pieces of other fabric put them together with wall paper paste!

I also played with some die cut canvas which I put onto calico with bondaweb

  and covered with a layer of scrim.

Jan taught me how to use my sewing machine with encouragement from Cath.  Still needs more practice!

The great thing about working with a group is that we all spark off each other so as if it weren't bad enough that I had so many ideas last week, I have come home with loads more.  Watch this space!

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

So many ideas

I have so many ideas going around in my head for textile and mixed media pieces.  And as ever I am over-thinking them rather than actually doing anything with the ideas.

I started on this piece of cloth when I was at Studio 11 for the mentoring days with Christine.

I had some Thermofax screens made of some drawings and marks I made of chains.  I used fabric paint through the screens.

The print on the bottom right of the fabric didn't work very well.  It was supposed to look like a pile of chains.

I decided to tear off the offending section!

With a small brush I wet the inks that are on the fabric and lightly moved them to fill in the whitish gaps in the calico.

Then using black and then brown ink I wrote on the fabric.  Firstly 'break the chains that bind' in black and then 'He has broken the chains' in brown.

I worked on it the way it is above because the lines looked like prison bars and the chains are dropping down on the right.   It looks like this the other way up.

And now I'm stuck.  The choices are to stitch side to side on the upward lines of blue/black, stitch around the chain links or stitch the writing. Or any combination of the 3 or all of them.

I also have in mind to make felt chain as a separate piece but now I'm wondering about making the felt chain links so they drop from the broken links on the right onto the floor where there are bits of chain.

Choices! Choices!

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice