Be a Great Artist < Make Great Art

You are always actively or passively communicating something. Maybe you're communicating through your words that you love someone... through your inaction that you are lazy... or through the way that you walk that you don't have a care in the world.

In Romans 1:19 it says, “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For His invisible attributes, namely, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” I think its amazing how much this says about how God communicates and actually tells us something about His standards of truth.

On top of this, the creation account in Genesis 1 and 5 says that mankind was made in God's image. The phrase being used, "imago dei", literally means image, shadow, or likeness.

It may be hard to wrap your mind around, but that means that when you steal, lie, lust, gossip, covet, etc. you are actually lying about God. In other words, when we act in a way contrary to God's character we are denying that we are made in His image.

Our lives are supposed to communicate about God's infinite and beautiful character when so often our lives are communicating the very opposite! It has given me a lot of conviction lately, in particular our example from John the Baptist who said, "I must decrease that he may increase."

What does this have to do with art? Well, speaking of conviction...

Take a look at this small clip from the movie, "F is For Fake" by Orson Welles. This rather odd documentary is supposed to be an essay on deception, forgery, and the unreliability of experts... For the most part, I think the point of the film is to show how the current (current then, anyway) market promotes an artist above the art they are creating. Instead of valuing good art for what it's communicating, they value art based on the opinions of society. I wouldn't recommend watching the whole movie, just this scene, which is a beautiful paragraph in an otherwise disjointed essay.

Even if you don't view yourself as creative or as a designer (I disagree if you don't, but that's beside the point), you do communicate about who God is every day.

Artists in this age take so much time and energy trying to make a name for themselves only to be forgotten 100 years down the road... what if we took that time and energy to communicate things greater than ourselves? What if we made godly virtue the focus of our life's work instead of our own name? What do you think that might communicate and how do you think it would effect the message of the art we produce?

It has all brought me to the conclusion that: Be a Great Artist < Make Great Art.