I take and take and click
and take and take
and have forgotten how to
give a picture.

Give it meaning and place and confidence
and strength -
give it to you, personally,
and not to the entire universe at once.

Face the picture book
and label one another’s failures
’til the tragic smear of inward spiraling community
sinks in.

Like dish soap on a hungry sponge,
I horde, I soak up pixels,
soak and squeeze,
distributing the dripping megapixels to my multitudes.

“Go back…
No …no …yeah, that one!”
And absorb for one more second
That which we’ve forgotten how to see.

All these instant stratifications
gratefully commemorate the winding down
of a universe that once was
flesh and blood.

Reminisce,
relive the memories that we have “lived”
a mere five second span of time ago,
transfixed in dead dead dead dead pixels

But can we resurrect, perhaps,
the honesty with which
a kiss, a hug, a laugh
conveyyed a memory?

Do not just invest in one another,
we are more than mere relational portfolios,
but give, and give and give,
and label nothing.

Despise the dust on dusty kodachrome collections,
immortalized and yellowed on a semi-acid-free cardstock
waited for in checkout lines
and bought with cash, and “Thank you” and a smile.

And create, if you must, more pictures.
But make the moment worth it,
make it worth immortalizing,
make it you.

And swim against this tide,
this flood of so-called individuality
with such conviction as to pull along the world
in your wake.

Make for me an image
that I must return to at least once or twice,
and ponder anew
what the Almighty will do.

Leave some negative
space in your photo albums,
rather than succumbing to the clutter,
and facilitate the apprehension of that positive grace.

Build something beautiful and strong,
Your Maker did when He made you:
the best that I can do is shout it out
in thankful song.

Having instilled in His creatures the same creative qualities whereby He Himself made them, God justly holds us, His image-bearers, accountable to mirror His greatness. Thus reflective, we inevitably discover surfaces (like watercolour paper) on which our own creative expression can in turn reflect our inner nature. In this process we discover, alongside the joys of service, also our fallenness and inadequacy. In contrast to the Creator’s brilliance, our oil-and-dirt-stained brushes indicate the darkness of our hearts. Our own creations exhibit a creativity that’s lowercase, mirroring some glimmer of His greater brilliance, but falling short of the capital Fullness of He whom our actions seek to worship.

Can a painting ask its creator for forgiveness? Perhaps its colours and unity speak as loud as prayerful words. But even if we’ve embedded “soul” into our work, the products of our hands themselves have no real hands and hearts with which to pray. Even robots and automatons, our supposed evolutionary offspring, are repulsive when we find out that they’re not “real”. The Creator though, in moulding you and I, did verily embed a real, and free, and human soul into our being. The creature rightly says of his Creator “Lord”, but our own mere creations lack the the capacity to say the same of us. Our attempts to play God serve only to show the cracks we’ve introduced into the clay that is our formerly-full (fallen) frame. And so it is that He, our Potter is allowed to hold accountable these pots for their cracking, but our own pots can remain our very own responsibility: the sum of their beligerent crackings manifest nought but our own inattention to the hotness of the kiln: and this is just. For unlike their lowercase creators (you and I), our paintings havent the capacity to choose.

The striking result is that no Christian art exists. If a painting can’t be saved, how could it possbily be [Christian]? And anyway, we aren’t here to “save” our creations. But in this world there are Christians, whose fallen natures do require redemption and renewal and regeneration to revive that wondrous mirroring of the Creator’s glory on which their creativity is meant to contemplate. It is I, and not my work, that needs a mediator to remove the stains of these idolatries in which I ceaselessly engage. And in Christ, even my miss-allocation of funds has been forgiven. As a creator without capital, I remain ever in debt to my Lord and Saviour.

This debt inspires (or provokes, in a good way) a thankful, exhuberant response. The reality that it is people and not paintings that are made in God’s image is a freeing reality, opening the door for us to create contemplative visual responses to the primacy of God’s Word: the image not illustrating but applying the text, the painting not replacing the divine revelation but worshipfully responding to it. Perhaps the Christian’s art points to the gospel, but it needn’t explicity: more than that it can just live out the gospel – reaching out, loving and caring for weary souls with the ointment of faithful imagination. And it can use the Bible as its source. Moving beyond the kitsch and heavy handedness of the bible-verse-on-a-sunset-photo aesthetic, we can represent the valley of the shadow of death as well as the quiet streams, as if to say, “yes Lord, we understand and acknowledge your full deep reality; Your complete saving plan for your covenant people.”

There was a moment, while Christ hung on the cross, that the temple curtain tore. It’s not that I’m representing that event, but more a web of imagery that comes to mind in connection with it. Animal sacrifice fulfilled in Christ is replaced by a new symbolism: the broken bread and wine that point back to the central event. A bronze snake… two fish… a visa card… I’m fascinated by what happens when we place these realities in the same frame.

The delicate collected remains of erased pencil marks, and the rubbery interior of crushed eraser, re-unified in a pile.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with painting on a whiteboard with dry-erase markers. Here’s a decaying tomato, begun as just such a painting, and then finished off with the embedded photographic textures of the reference.

The speaking-in-tongues that we find in Pentecost is a reconciliation of the divided linguistic reality under which humanity suffers: the sinful separation that we deserved. Through the Holy Spirit, though, we again understand each other, and by God’s grace are set apart to be people that together honour the Creator. Having forgiven his own, Christ paves the way for this resolution to the scattering of nations. Insofar as Babel was a scattering, Pentecost is a coming together. And now, like the Israel of old, we are led by pillars of fire, and speak once again the same speech: God’s.

This is the second image in the diptych “Babel and Pentecost”

In response to humanity’s proud attempt to build a tower to the heavens, the Lord confuses the speech of his fallen creation. Our own 20th & 21st century towers (or stairways, on Led Zeppelin’s account) represent no less of a monument to ourselves. Even the churches we build tend to serve the god of our own glory. And so even now, our inability to understand one another prevents us from reaching the divine heights where peace exists. The relationship between creature and Creator is shown to be in desperate need of a bridge: one which only Christ will later build.

Speaking of tounges, wordpress and flickr speak the same language: and that’s how I’m working with my images from now on.