I haven't had much to say on FB lately. Social media seems less inspiring to me these days so I have decided to launch a new website to promote my woodturning art in order to share the inspiration I have found in God's amazing creation. This is my first blog post on www.creationcollaboration.com and while I expect to opine from time to time on religion, politics, and other taboos, for now, my focus will be on revealing the splendid handiwork of the Creator that can be found in a simple piece of wood.
My artistic journey is dedicated to the greatest of all artists; to the one who flings glorious sunsets across the sky – the designer and builder of worlds.
Before I am an artist, I am a member of the human race. My humanity shapes everything in my life, especially my art. For example, my core being tells me that I am wonderfully and mysteriously made. I could not possibly be the result of eons of random acts spawned from nothingness and formed without consciousness, plan, or design.
Human consciousness requires us to form opinions and beliefs about our existence and purpose in life. We often ask, “Why am I here?” Art is a big part of the answer to that question. We have been created to create and are all artists in some form or another. Paintings and sculptures, notwithstanding, for humanity there is no greater creation than love and family.
Life could not exist independent of artistic expression. The greatest art is to be found in the work of the Creator - a conscious being aware of his own existence and intimately involved in the affairs of His creation. Most importantly, our Creator can be known and has chosen to reveal Himself – in part, through His creation. While this revelation remains ongoing at this time, it is sufficient to support and sustain the need for a personal relationship between God and the human life He has created. Among all the religions of the world, this concept is unique to Christianity and is the very basis for my art, my collaboration, and my admiration of the Creator in whose image I have been created. I hope to have much more to say about this in the days ahead.
The wood that I carve, burn, paint, and turn is as splendid and beautiful as images of Hubble's galaxies or data from the Hadron collider. You cannot see it and think it the result of some cosmic accident any more than you could think a fully operational Boeing 747 found on the back side of the moon could have gotten there by any means other than an intelligent Creator who designed and built it, regardless of how many eons it may have had to acquire shape and function on its own from the lunar dust.
During the process of this divine collaboration I take dead wood, cut off from its roots, separated from its source of life and carve it away to reveal the awesome beauty in it that was always hidden until finally revealed through death; it is a metaphor of what Christ has done for humanity.