Painting as Prayer

Holden Village Vesper Service. Photo © Lisa Thompson

FROM OUR TRAVELS:

Painting as Prayer by 
Chuck Hoffman + Peg Carlson–Hoffman
Holden Village Vesper Service
Holden Village Voice 
24 August 2012

How many of you consider yourself an artist? Generally if I ask a Kindergarten class, “How many of you are artists?” nearly every hand waves enthusiastically in the air. By third grade, half the class and by sixth grade, maybe just a handful.

What happens to us? How do we lose our sense of creativity? Do we begin to dismiss our need for inspired expression as we dissolve into the mainstream of cultural needs? Could we awaken our imaginations and see new possibilities in what appears to be fixed and framed ways of doing things? How could the arts enable us to risk new ways of existing with one another in our world?

The arts can help till the soil of our hearts. By opening the door to our imaginations, art can help reveal, heal and renew our spirits, our churches, our communities and our world. We need to risk coming together in our diversity, and re–imagine issues that divide us; the health of our planet and the ability to see our neighbor in the image of our creator, God.

The arts can provide a new lens to explore our faith and an understanding of our place in creation.

In one of our classes at Holden, a painting was created and placed on the altar with a belief that creativity is a gift from God and using that gift is an offering back to God. The process itself is a form of prayer, where time seems suspended and our thoughts connect with our feelings. Color, shape and form become our language.

The process involves having our group around the table.
• Each person has a single color of tempera paint, the paint we all used in our beginning days as young artists.
• We paint to music, but there is no talking during the process to get at the contemplative and prayerful nature of painting in this way.
• When the bell rings paint moves to the left and we move to the right. That way you have a new color to work with and you are now interacting with your neighbors painting.
• We move around the table working with one another’s ideas.
• We do this until we have covered the entire paper.

We created this together as a group. We each brought our individual expression to the table. Coming alongside our neighbors, we shaped a collective visual language. We forged ideas that allowed individual perspectives that are still evident in the painting. But the painting became a work that none of us could have created alone. In creating–we must become transparent. In this vulnerability new revelations about ourselves and those around us can be revealed.

The imagination is like a lantern that illuminates the inner landscape of our life and helps us to discover our hidden riches. The claiming and reclaiming who we are as persons created in God’s image, growing in the likeness of Christ to serve a hurting world, comes as we intentionally open ourselves to the movement of the Holy Spirit. By pushing back the boundaries of the familiar and being guided into areas of the unknown, we experience that which we did not know was in us – surprised by God!