art

Lots-o-Links 12.14.13

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Tim Challies - Evernote Owns Me - Here are his four key points. Go to his post for his explanation.

  1. I Take It Everywhere
  2. I Tell It Everything
  3. I Use It To Eliminate Paper
  4. I Use It To Collaborate

6 ways to serve your pastor's wife on Sunday by Ryan Huguley

Instead of enslaving the pastor's wife with expectations, we should seek every opportunity to love and serve her; this is especially necessary on Sunday mornings, as she doesn't have the help of her husband. So here are six simple ways you can serve your pastor's wife on Sundays when your church gathers for worship:

How to write a book review - see both Aaron Armstrong & Tim Challies posts

Ansel Adams and the art of framing

“Photography is really perception,” Adams once wrote. “As with all art, the objective of photography is not the duplication of visual reality, but an investigation of the outer world and its influence on the inner world.”

Best albums of 2013 lists are being gathered in one place - Metacritic

9 thoughts on writing from Madeleine L'Engle - Here's one of the nine...

7. Who should write? “In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think that we have done the job ourselves. If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there’s no danger that we will confuse God’s work with our own, or God’s glory with our own.”

Suburban Boredom Generates Dramatic Excitement

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...the pop-culture view that the suburbs are the place where the American Dream goes to die has an amusing flip side: That culture owes a huge amount of its inspirational vitality to hating the very place where many of its artists grew up and its audience lives. As both these movies and so many other novels, films, TV shows, music and plays over the years have proved, there’s nothing like suburban boredom to generate dramatic excitement.

From "How the Boredom of Suburbia Paves the Way to Creativity"

Jerram Barrs | Echoes of Eden

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Echoes eden barrs

Very excited about Jerram Barrs' new book, Echoes of Eden: Reflections on Christianity, Literature, and the Arts.

Been looking forward to it for a while, on an important topic that I think Barrs is well-equipped to tackle. Barrs was formerly involved for 18 yeas with Francis Schaeffer and L'Abri. Now he teaches at Covenant Theological Seminary and is Resident Scholar at the Francis A. Schaeffer Institute  

You can get Echoes of Eden now at Amazon (Kindle), WTS, and amazingly for $2 you can get the eBook from Crossway!

Mako Fujimura | Top 5 Books on Creativity

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Makoto-fujimura

I love Makoto Fujimura's art and reading his thoughts on art, in his book Refractions and elsewhere. Mako lists and gives some comment on his five favorite books on creativity at Christianity Today. Read his comments each book there, but here's his list...

Neil Gaiman on the Creative Life & Making Art

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Neil Gaiman (Twitter), author of Coraline and a bunch more, gave a graduation speech at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He says some great things about making art. You won't agree with everything, but it's well worth checking out if you are an artist or not. I'm going to watch and discuss this with my two oldest kids (my artists). [found via]

Art & The "Precious Puritans" Discussion

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Mona lisa fix

Now Dr. Joel Beeke has weighed in on the discussion on Propaganda's "Precious Puritans." It's a more critical take. And I LOVE Dr. Beeke and own several of his books on the Puritans, including his new, massive work A Puritan Theology. So while I want to respond here to his post, I want my readers to know I highly recommend his books and benefited greatly from hearing him at Desiring God Pastor's Conference on prayer.

Here's my response to critics who are receiving "Precious Puritans" as Dr. Beeke has: Critics are not hearing the song as art, and not discussing art and how it should be critiqued.

Critics are doing exposition of it as if it's a sermon or merely a message, but it's far more creative than that. Critics are discussing the emotional response to the beginning of the song, but not the all-important end! The beginning is designed creatively to get you to feel emotions about the Puritans as a judge and then to smack you down for being a hypocrite! It's a trick, and if you won't view it as art and allow yourself to be tricked, you miss the whole of it and you write blog posts to defend what you find precious, as if the first part of the song is merely propositional. 

Francis Schaeffer writes that one bad way to view art is to see art as "a vehicle for the propagation of a particular message." That view "reduces art to an intellectual statement and the work of art as a work of art disappears." I think critics of "Precious Puritans" are receiving it through that lens, and therefore aren't receiving it well. It isn't seen as art (even when the critics think they are seeing it that way!), and therefore the artist isn't given ground to point to truth creatively.

What I think is great is that so many have heard the song and just loved it, even when it has unsettled them. Art spoke to truth and it was well received. But when someone criticizes the song and misses the truth because they've missed the art as art, I think that says we need more discussion on how to view art.

Cheap Kindle Books 10.9.12

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Kindle

  • Practicing Affirmation by Sam Crabtree ($3.03)
  • The Enemy Within by Kris Lundgaard ($2.99)
  • Politics According to the Bible: A Comprehensive Resource for Understanding Modern Political Issues in Light of Scripture by Wayne Grudem ($4.99)
  • When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor...and Yourself by Fikkert and Corbett (forward by David Platt) ($2.99)
  • The Doctrines of Grace by Boyce & Ryken ($4.99)
  • With: A Practical Guide to Informal Mentoring by Alvin Reid ($3.99)
  • Create: Stop Making Excuses & Start Making Stuff ($2.99)
  • Amazing Grace: God's Pursuit, Our Response by Timothy George ($3.03)

Spoken Word in the Church

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Odd thomas

Joe Thorn is having Odd Thomas do a spoken word piece during worship gathering on Sunday. Some have raised the question of whether or not it's appropriate. Joe writes...

Though we have never done so before, Redeemer’s elders are excited to include spoken word in our worship gathering this Sunday. The main reason we are happy to include it is because spoken word, in this context, is an earnest appeal to look to Christ. Thomas will bring a theologically rich, compelling, confrontational, message to God’s people based on God’s word. And the fact that it is poetic in nature is not a hit against it, but a strength. God loves poetry and has given us much of his word in that very form.

It's a very comprehensive post on what spoken word is, how it conveys truth, he gives some video examples and more. Joe also answers these questions (questions I had too) in his post...

  • Isn’t this just entertainment? 
  • Isn’t this merely trying to attract people through an act? 
  • Isn’t this worldliness?

Go check out "Spoken Word in the Church" from Joe Thorn. Comment there with your thoughts and questions. Interesting topic.

4th Fridays | Starline Gallery | 4.27.12

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Parent-teacher conferences aren't just about grades. Last autumn my daughter's high school art teacher, during a parent-teacher conference concerning my daughter's art (which is wonderful, by the way), also told me about Starline Gallery in Harvard, IL. It sounded great: an old factory converted into art studios, a monthly gallery called "4th Fridays", etc. Every time one came up on the calendar, there was something else I couldn't miss. Last Friday we finally made one...and it was spectacular. 

We brought our four kiddos and they loved it too. Afterwards we all discussed our favorite piece(s). Here are some of mine...

4th Fridays - 4.27.12 - 6

4th Fridays - 4.27.12 - It Begins

4th Fridays - 4.27.12 - 1

4th Fridays - 4.27.12 - 2

4th Fridays - 4.27.12 - 3

 

4th Fridays - 4.27.12 - 4

 

4th Fridays - 4.27.12 - 5

Bad Art & the Tortured Beauty of the Cross

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Wonderful, thoughtful discussion between Scotty Smith (Pastor, Christ Community Church, blog), Greg Thornbury (Union University), and Mike Cosper (Sojourn Music) on good art and bad art. I've been thinking through some of themes they discuss as they relate to some music I've been listening to this year. I'm working on a post on one singer/artist in particular who I think many Christians would hate, but for all the wrong reasons.

Anyway, that post is for another day. Watch this great discussion (via). And by the way, this is the best video thumbnail of my friend Greg Thornbury EVER.

Curator | Excellence in the Arts

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Curator Magazine has this excerpt from Franklin Einspruch on excellence in the arts & middlebrow taste...

So I have worked out a pragmatic answer: Excellence is art’s reproductive drive. Excellent traits in art trigger the feelings, emotions, and attentions of the viewer. Thus aroused, an artist sets out to reproduce those traits in a new arrangement of materials. Thus the cycle begins anew. It’s not subjective or objective because it’s dynamic……

We don’t use the term “middle art,” and in my opinion there is no middle art. There doesn’t have to be, with so much overlap between high and low. There is, however, middlebrow taste. Middlebrow taste is a kind of chickening out of taste, in which you settle for familiarity instead of demanding excellence……

Go high, go low, but demand it. Whatever you do, don’t chicken out.

Read the rest: High and Low: What is Excellence in the Arts?