MMVIII

This is the last thing I painted for my MFA show in the spring of 1986: a Madonna. It is my personal icon - the one thing I've painted that I treat as an icon, a window onto the spiritual. Currently it is hanging in the hallway of our house in Decatur. I shall carry it up to Durham soon. I remembered when I painted it, in oil, that I gouged the surface with a knife, regessoing some spots, in the hopes of creating something that had the ambiance of Paul Klee's paintings. Klee is a particularly important painter for me. It took me some time to enjoy his work: he disdains traditional imagery and paints in a way that might seem childish. But when you live with Klee, each one of his small works (and none of them are much bigger than 16 x 20 inches, certainly not the size of the abstract expressionists, who I also admire and learned from) grows on you, gets into your soul. They did with me.
This year I'm taking more seriously what I do well: paint and draw. I don't know how this will play out in terms of my call - which I will continue to pursue in terms of ministry as a pastor or chaplain. One difficulty with being an artist is that the lack of seriousness the Church attaches to art can effect the artist. When I say that the Church in general and in particular doesn't take at seriously, I mean just that: that the Church could pay a million dollars for art - but that expenditure in no way would indicate taking art seriously. Or I could say that the Church takes banners and stained glass seriously. But the art, in the person of the artist and what the artist struggles with and where the artist's expertise is, is dismissed.
And so I say that it is difficult to be in an environment where what I do isn't taken seriously - where I must take what I do seriously.
Is there any discussion on this?
Does anyone have a sense of how art and spirituality are joined?
It is this kind of discussion: where art as a spiritual discipline can take the Church.