what I learned today

Tonight at the artists small group we talked about the importance of practicing spiritual disciplines. Creatives perhaps even more than some need to be disciplined enough to slow down in order to even be creative! We talked about how difficult it is to say 'no' and stick to it.

Perhaps our favorite quote was this "inspiration is strained when hurried...this is because inspiration is a dialogue, and we must hear before we create." We must hear from our God! The other thing we all agreed on is the fact that the true artist is a worshiper! We then learned what the attributes of God were - focusing silently on this list for a few moments...this evoked worship!


After discussing the attributes of God , we each chose one as the focus of our "automatic drawing" exercise. We approached the paper in a 'fencing' stance - fully extending our arm to just touch the paper. Oh yeah, did I mention we used our left hand or whichever hand was our non-dominate hand? One of the artists informed us this would cause us to create new brain cells since we were not using our usual hand. (If that's all it takes to create new brain cells I think I just became left-handed!) We painted 5 minutes, then stepped away from the paper and looked at our painting then began again drawing inspiration from the attributes of our God. It was very challenging to not do 'good' paintings for the artists since they are each so talented, but, automatic drawing challenged us to respond to the Lord without trying to create anything specific. So fun! I enjoyed the night immensely drawing encouragement from being surrounded by artists who love the Lord!