Guest Post: Is Art Irrelevant?

I distinctly remember one of my art lessons at my school back in Poland. We were told to bring a mirror, a pencil and a piece of paper. “Draw yourself” was the activity, and so I did. I absolutely loved it. I don’t think the drawing was any good, but it was one of the first times that I realised that I was good at art. I could make my face look like me, and my teacher who often looked bored, suddenly looked excited and said that I was good and that I should keep drawing.

That felt nice, but even at the tender age of 11 I didn’t think being an artist was a good career choice. My artistic tendencies were inherited after my English ‘Nana’ and pursuing them felt like a hobby. I was in a highly academic school and it wasn’t until we moved to the UK that I realised how life-giving art can be.

I saw open sketchbooks, drawings, textiles, painting, all this equipment - a new world was opened to me! It felt amazing. I was dealing with a lot of teenage angst, anxiety and a major cultural shock and so the art department in my new school felt like an oasis. I was good at art and it made me feel excited. I decided to study it at degree level, but it wasn’t easy getting there.

For most people, art feels self-indulgent, expensive and a bit of a ticket to a low-paying and tiring lifestyle. If you’re a Christian, people are often baffled that you call yourself an artist - it doesn’t always fit in with the hierarchy of jobs in church! Surely you want to be a doctor and help people like Jesus did in the gospels, instead of sitting by yourself, drawing and being in your own thoughts?

As an art student I felt as though my friends from art school thought I was odd because I believed in something as irrelevant as a God and went to church, but equally some people in church didn’t quite know how to understand what I was doing most of the time on my course. I felt torn. 

In the past 5 years I’ve had the privilege of working as an Arts Christian Union Staff Worker in London with UCCF. One of the favourite parts of my job was organising monthly get-togethers called Interface for students interested in matters of faith and art, in order to help them figure out how to be a Christian in the Arts. I’ve been so influenced by Ally Gordon’s teaching over the years, as he taught Arts Relays on the UCCF Arts Elective programme, and as he spoke at Interface many times too. Whenever Ally speaks or writes, what he says is cross-centred and beautifully connects all the dots of what the Bible says about creativity. 

As I read Why Art Matters, it was such a joy to see a lot of what Ally’s has been thinking through and teaching us at Morphē Arts, formatted in a beautiful book form. The result is a Jesus-filled lens at creativity, connecting us as humans to the very truth of who we are: we matter and our creativity matters because we are made in the image of God.

Our God is the ultimate Creator with “a big C” and he made the world “ex nihilo” which means out of nothing. As we are made in His image,  we also create but with materials that  are already there and made by Him. Ally reminds us that “creativity is a mandate for all humans.” All of us are creative and it manifests in different ways. “Art matters because the way things look matter to God.” God didn’t have to make things beautiful, but it is within His nature to care about what things look like. His very Word is a piece of art, it’s “both breathed out by God and crafted by human hands… masterfully written, epic in its scope and beautiful in its rendering.”

In this book we’re also reminded that Christ and his cross show true beauty. It’s not surface-level. “The cross shows how God can take an ugly injustice and turn it to good, even making it beautiful as we see self-giving love revealed.” True beauty is often ugly and beautiful, it’s not binary, it shows us reality. After all, we will be able to see Christ’s wounds in his resurrection body. Ally says “we make art to care for our culture, punch holes in the darkness and show how all things are connected and redeemed through the Lordship of Christ.” And that is the power of art: to express desires, hopes and dreams that other things can’t. Art can point to the new creation, to help us long for heaven, or as Ally puts it that through art “we might peer through the windows and see the wonder inside.”

I could say many more things about this book. It was such a breath of fresh air and I found it life-giving after a year of isolation, uncertainty and dryness in my creativity as a result of the pandemic. Even though my own creativity was lacking, experiencing art has helped me through this year. Ally’s book is an invitation for those who are not interested in creativity,  to look at it from a new perspective and consider it biblically. It’s equally a refuge for those who are in the arts, and a nudge for us to keep going. Whether we make or experience art, Ally says:

“Art matters because art abides. Through the storms of history as well as in the calm, there has always been great art because there has always been human life. Art abides through it all. And even in this it reminds us of the very character of God. Art abides because God abides.”

The book finishes with a chapter on rest. The artist’s life can be relentless and it’s seasonal. As a Christian who happens to be an artist, I always need to remember that whatever is happening to me or however I’m feeling -  “through it all we are invited to rest in Jesus, our Rock, Refuge and Redeemer.”