It gets weird, in my life, office and art.  The subject matter, medium, and direction I choose to work in means I am picking up strange items; a shipment in the mail recently included coyote teeth and claws, miniature dried seahorses, snake ribs, pieces from an original 1935 edition of Monopoly, a facsimile of a 1928 $2 bill, and dental x-rays films.  It was a good day, at least to me. My poor wife often shivers at my collections. Though she seems supportive of the ideas I pursue, she always seems a bit concerned about being in the same room with my supplies.

But as funny (or not) as those issues are, I have been reflecting on some of the decisions I make about my art’s content.  The above image is from a Tarot card. As a Christian, I see much of the classic Rider-Waite deck steeped in Old and New Testament imagery and symbols.  It’s largely unknown to the public that the tarot decks originated from French, Spanish, and Italian playing cards, and were only later reinterpreted into mystic and occultic tools for divination in the late 18th century.  And while the images best known from Tarot are the reinterpretations by mystic Arthur Edward Waite and artist Pamela Colman Smith, they reference biblical material, symbolism and passages.

So as a visual artist, whose main work process is to take old images and objects and compose them together to form new pieces that often point in different direction than the original materials might themselves, what am I to do with these images?  What can I do?  What am I allowed to do? What should I avoid, detest, embrace, repent of and pursue?

Harold Best in Unceasing Worship writes that a believer artist is free in Christ to create, explore and make art.  His incredibly insightful writing has informed and served as a back drop to how I think through this issue.  I will quote him at length, because I can’t improve how he said it…

Christian artists have true artistic freedom, not on the basis of something as simplistic as right, wrong and so called artistic license, but on the basis of intent and direction.  Here’s what I mean.  Christian artists first of all understand that making art is indistinguishable from worshiping Jesus. In this sense, their art joins up and is made common with everything else in their daily round for which they are responsible as continuous outpourers (the term Best developed to describe the idea of a living sacrifice).  Their art may be their specialty, and its quality may be—should be—of the highest, but it has no greater standing before God than an honestly prepared income tax return.

Furthermore, artistic intent and direction are fully known only to God through Christ, while content is known both to God and to people.  This does not mean that Christian artists must limit themselves to so-called Christian content, especially the all too prevalent kind that is little more than spiritualized gingerbread. It means that every aspect of life is open to aesthetic inquiry, both as to the sinfulness of sin and the grandeur of holy living. Thus, to the Christian artists there are no off-limits subjects even though there are off-limits intentions and directions…Thus, no person has a right to lay an accusing hand, even if it means that artists, along with Christ, may be accused of consorting with sinners, gluttons and winebibbers.

Artistic freedom, however, is not artistic license. There is a twofold danger in what I have said in the preceding paragraph. First unwise or giddy Christian artists will be tempted to take up the badge of artistic freedom in itself (a much flawed and idolatrous badge) instead of being thrust forward in the freedom that is in Christ alone.  Also the public, especially the theologically pinched-up kind, will confuse artistic content and the artist’s intent and arbitrarily accept or reject both art and artist on that ground. Ultimately the artist must stand before Christ and answer for every artistic action taken.

So, the uniformed public be damned, I can use the images I want to!  Right? Maybe, but what this passage sets before me is not just an affirmation of our liberty, but also the wise counsel to consider my heart attitudes, my intentions.

My intentions were easy to ascertain in this regard.  I concluded that my interest in a few of these pieces was simply aesthetic, but by and large I wanted to make some pieces I felt confident would sell, because the images have a certain currency in particular audiences. Maybe I should be more ashamed of that admission, but it is just a fact of my heart.

Also instructive to me was my own review of the New Testament passages regarding witchcraft or divination. Reading the book of Acts, it is Apostles “4″ Occult “0″.  Jesus in his ministry among the Jews in Palestine never really confronts the issue, but as his disciples fan out in to the larger Gentile world, idolatry and witchcraft are constantly encountered.  And of the four times it is encountered in the book of Acts, money and power are linked to it.  The other two mentions are that witchcraft is a work of the flesh and that outside the heavenly city are those who practice magic. Not the company I want to keep.

So here I was, intending to make pieces that included occultic related images for the sole purpose of making money.

And so rather than push through the growing conviction and do what I want because I am “free” I sought counsel from mature, fellow believer artists and creatives, to open my heart and life.  And while the safety of their advice confirmed my sense of conviction, I was also blessed and encouraged to continue, setting my sight less on the commercial opportunities I saw and more on developing at my art.

And that is how in this instance my faith, artistic liberty, scriptures and community work to inform, direct, counsel and set direction for my artmaking, and more importantly how I live all my life.

What can explain the hardships we face?

We often pass blame to our parents and grandparents gone before us.

We imagine our grandparents setting us up for failures or fortunes with the decisions they made in the early 20^th century. But a larger and older story is offered in the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, a far deeper source, much further back in our collective family tree; Adam and Eve’s sin in the garden, the curse they placed us under, and their expulsion from that paradise.   The series explores then how these two contrasting ideas would play out visually.

Another element was added as I studied curses or bad luck in folk and popular accounts, the notion of curses as shown through the lens of the African American Hoo Doo or Conjure tradition. Anthropologists describe Hoo Doo as a “sympathetic system of magic,” in which objects or actions represent reality in symbolic ways.  Running water can symbolize a river or drowning; a cross can represent crossroads and therefore decision-making.  It is a very rich palette for an assemblage artist to draw from, the use of odd numbers of objects, the botanical and zoological elements, the spices, charms, and small objects echo Hoo Doo “rootwork” but reflect imagery from Old Testament passages. Hoo Doo’s origin among slaves in America was itself an attempt to mitigate a harsh world, powerless and ineffectual as the fig leaves that were humanity’s first attempt to deal with their nakedness in the Genesis account.

Acknowledging that our attempts to alleviate the big problems and pressures in our lives often are ineffectual at best, and ruinous at worst, led to the second part of the series. Exploring the generations in the Book of Genesis after Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden, the narratives of Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel, Noah’s Drunkenness and others formed a close parallel to the Seven Deadly Sins tradition, conceptualized here as extensions of the fig leaves.

Adam and Eve, The Roaring 20’s and the Great Depression, Hoo Doo and Conjure; the pieces try to retell a family history, older than we often assume.

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Finished a piece recently that I had started quite a while back.  Things come up, obstacles are faced and sometimes you put aside a piece because your are interested in something else.  But with my old computer crashing recently I returned to work on some unfinished pieces, like this one, called Treasure.

It is  a small reflection on Christ’s teaching about what our heart values and highlights the fleeting nature of riches.  Often enough pieces I make come home to me in new ways as I struggle with my own life and decisions and continue  to walk this life as the sojourner and pilgrim that I am.  More than anyone I need to be reminded of my true home and the real treasures.

I’ve finished three pieces today derived from the Family Curse series, Adam’s Lament, I’m calling it.  It takes the elements of the curse upon the ground and our endeavors and works them into one piece. The character in the picture, Clay I have taken to calling him, is cut from a photograph by JohnVachon, 1941.  He is slumped over in despair or depression, and seems crushed. 

The elements from the curse, the earth, the thorns, thistles, sweat in work and our ultimate death form the background and the little bottle of graveyard dust reminds us that from dust we were formed and to dust we will return. 

Ironically making this piece and smaller collaged works has been a struggle for me as I stress about making art and making a living. Comically thinking about making the work, I reflected very little about my own struggles with work, not until I was finished with them and thinking about writing did I realize how much I chase after the perfect livelihood, that somehow I expect my faith to save me from living out this struggle myself among thorns and thistles.  My faith, the real faith, of course has bearings on my whole life, work included, but as I have been making art and blogging over  a year now, there has been constant questions about if/when I might perhaps make a living by art and the perennial, albeit oft forgotten, resolution to trust God where I am at, keep making work from my heart, get better at it and be thankful for the blessings I have and the grace I enjoy.

So it seems like this is a good place to start making art that I will begin to sell, maybe not make a living at it just yet but at least start funding my artmaking with my own art sells.

I had really expected that I was about done with the family curse series, a series exploring the fall of Adam and Eve in Genesis chapter three, through the lens of hoo doo curses and Great Depression images, playing on the idea that our struggles as individuals is somehow tied to a curse upon our family of origin, only it is a more ancient curse than we realize.

I have a few pieces in process that use the images of the family tree and family curse and ties it back to the tree of knowledge of good and evil that Adam and Eve partook of that brought sin in to the world.  I had hoped to finish finally with the cursed tree, where Christ became a curse for us and removed the curse of sin once and for all, but honestly those are hard images to imagine and execute.

Possibly as a stall, but also as it relates to the cursed roots of our family I am embarking on a series that explores the cursed fruit we see on our lives and the lives of those around us.  I have struggled between depicting the rest of Genesis after the fall and expulsion from the garden and the seven deadly sins, the resolution will reference both as this piece does.  The pride and rebellion of the Tower of Babel seems like a great parallel to pride in general working out in our own lives.

So here is the first piece of the next part of this series, trying to keep with Great Depression era images, I had to in this case reach back a bit further.  Pictured is the iceberg believed to have sunk the Titanic, the colossal of the White Star Line cruise ships. 

I enjoy that without being explained the image is abstract or looks at the Tower of Babel and Pride from a oblique angle, less literal and I like that, it’s joyful in a way I can’t describe.

Old photo of a worker picking cotton, a small vial of sweat and worn bandanna. 

The final piece in the series, though I am working on a few other related pieces.  Thought I would finish up posting these pieces as I am moving and will be sweating quite a bit today myself.

Thistles (or a thistle like species) springing up to frame and threaten the harvest being stacked in the old photo.

A famer plowing the field in a old photograph is surrounded by layers of thorns.

“we see the vivid juxtaposition of thorns surrounding a photograph of a farmer plowing behind a horse. Sharp thorns threaten the framer’s actions and seem to hem him in from all sides, alluding to the difficulty of working the earth.”

Old image of house and land from the Great Depression, Dust Bowl era, and parched earth picture cut and reassmebled on of a duplicate to get cracks in the piece.  Bottle full of graveyard dirt.  Part of the three that will be in a traveling show for CIVA.

The idea for these bottles predated the whole series, I had wanted to make little “message in a bottle” type pieces to give away and have been fascinated by the conept of the message in a bottle theme since hih school.  Being able to reproduce the jars and bottles to leave for people has been a motivation to finish this series.  The above is a collection of the seven objects represented in the whole series, snake skin/shed, small nation sack containing a man’s name written nine times, a dime and a single apple seed, a jar of tears, a bottle of dirt from a graveyard, a thorn, thistle and a piece of a bandanna. 

These bottles contain a vial of graveyard dust, a snake shed and ribs from a rattlesnake.

The ‘nation (domination) sack from the desire piece is reproduced here with the same same 9 elements, a 1930′s silver Mercury dime, an piece of parchment with a Man’s name written 9 times, a razor blade, a vial of honey, 7 apple seeds, a sprinkle of myrrh, a cinnamon stick, a snake rib, and a piece of a man’s bandanna.  The red top is the traditional red flannel used to make mojo hands.

 These last bottles contain the elements of the curse that relate to work, cursed earth in the form of a vial of graveyard dust, a thorn, a thistle and a vial of sweat.