The Artist Returns

When I stopped by church on Friday, my first day home from my road trip, friend Ellie was hanging her watercolors on the Gallery walls in the hall. My pictures had been there since October, and had been taken down for this new display. It was wonderful to see her work; she is quite accomplished, and I already own several of her paintings. But it was sad to see my own work removed from the hallway which connects the sanctuary and the socializing parts of the building. That I had a body of recent work large enough to fill the display wall continues to amaze and delight me.

Taking printmaking, book art and collage classes in the past year has been a source of integration and motivation for me. I have been an artist all my life. The visual world has always been the beginning of understanding the world for me, and my parents always gave me a ream of paper and a new box of pencils for Christmas. I studied art in high school and college, worked as a commercial artist when my children were teenagers. But I got diverted when I went into sales, which was always a satisfying creative enterprise for me. The last ten years have been dedicated to completing an undergraduate degree in psychology and my Master's of Divinity degree. My time was completely taken up with work and school, or school and work. In this time, every day was scripted from the beginning of the semester to it's end, and there was never even time for phone calls to friends, movies, or road trips. This last year of being without work, without a schedule, and with few demands on my time has often felt like I was a balloon, floating out there, ungrounded. Making art has been been an important anchor for me. Carving relief blocks, folding paper, making covers, assembling collage and creating handmade books has reintroduced me to the artist in myself who was buried in reading for information, writing papers, and doing fieldwork.

A friend suggested that my free-floating time was really time for recovery, to take a deep breath and let a less-directed part of myself re-emerge. Perhaps she is right, because I am suddenly full of ideas; a line of cards with block-print designs, new book and journal ideas, liturgical environments for worship in Lent, plus the fiber art and knitting that has filled my life with color for the last years. I collected meditations I had written over the years and bound them into a book of block prints of the coffee cups I use during my morning meditations and coffee cups I have shared with friends over the last few months. There are other "theological" works in my collection, an expression, I believe of the integration of the artist who has always been there with the pastoral theologian who is the newest part of me. As frustrating as this time of waiting for a place in a congregational community has been, I have come to understand it as a time of recovery and integration - a chance for the artist and the theologian to come together to enjoy a new view of the world. I am so grateful for a church home with a gallery wall that let me display this new view, to see and share this integration in my community. I am grateful, as well as for the constant evidence of God's Spirit at work to bring the new to life, and for this new blooming from old stock. Hallelujah!