Inspired Creativity: Inspired by the Art on my Walls

Thursday 4 January 2018

Inspired by the Art on my Walls

It's a new year and I have my goals in place. All my major projects from last year are finished so I can start planning new projects. I have been approached by someone in our church asking me whether I would like to display some of my art in the church building. It was an interesting request because, in the past, people looked down on displaying art in the church for some very good reasons. However, I think that reasoning is changing and Christians are seeing artistic talent as a gift given by God that we must use to honour Him. As artists who are Christian, we can bring our worldview to the world and our art can be a blessing to many.

I am not an artist who creates "religious" work as a rule. I have done paintings inspired by specific Bible passages that were meaningful to me but unless you read the title, you would not know what the paintings were based on. My work is not overtly religious.

I have a series that I painted of the six creation days as we find it written in Genesis. They are hanging in my studio so I see them all the time. The other day I looked more closely at them and wondered if I could recreate them as Art Quilts.

Today I sketched out the idea for the first day of creation in which God created light. The sketch is based on my painting but I may add some changes. As I sketched I decided that it would be very possible to recreate these paintings into Art Quilts. I will make them bigger (my paintings are 5 X 7 inches and framed with a wide mat that allowed me to write on it the verses that inspired the painting). It will be fun to search for fabric for these 6 Art Quilts. My goal this year is to make at least 2 Art Quilts so based on that, this may take me 3 years to complete.

Above is the last painting of the Creation Series, The Sixth Day. It shows how I have written the Bible verses around the painting on the mat. I don't think this will be something I'll include with the quilt. I might just add "Genesis" and the verse numbers.

Below are the paintings.