Tag: process

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Arts in the age of Coronavirus: we’re here to help

Please note: Our Saturday Hub meet-up has moved from YouTube to Zoom. We’re sorry for any confusion. Go here to join.

Not much makes sense at the moment.

Most of us are allowed one excursion outside a day for exercise. Supermarkets are pretty much the only shops still open. Loo roll and pasta have become our most prized commodities.

And it’s happening across the entire planet.

And it’s all been caused by a variant of the common cold.

It’s part dystopian fiction and part Jonathan Swift-esque social satire.

In the flux and confusion though, one of the things that I’m sure of is this: art is more important now than ever. And that means artists are more important now than ever.

You may not be on the government’s list of key workers, but if you’re an artist, you have a unique opportunity to serve our society at this time. You also, I imagine, have some pretty significant challenges too.

Therefore, amidst all this craziness, we at Sputnik want to do our best to encourage you to take this opportunity to use your gifts meaningfully, while also helping you in the specific challenges that you may well be facing.

In a sense, despite all the changes, it’s business as usual. You see, Sputnik supports Christian artists by profiling, funding and connecting them. That’s what we’ve always done and that’s what we’re going to keep on doing. We’re just going to do it a bit different. Here’s the plan…

1. ‘In the Rough’ Art Project

intherough.sptnk.co.uk

Such unusual and testing times as these provide profound artistic stimuli. Combine that with the fact that, for some of us, we may have more time on our hands than we normally would. Combine that with the fact that many of us are feeling the pressure to curl up into a ball and give in to a crushing sense of purposelessness. Combine that with the fact that we, as artists, are uniquely skilled to give everyone else perspective on the present pandemic.

In short, it’s the perfect time to get you involved in an art project. Once the Coronavirus has done its worst, we’re going to put together an exhibition/installation (in some form) of work created by artists in and around our network that was created in/around the time of the virus.

In the meantime, we are going to provide a platform to showcase this work in its various degrees of completion. We have put together a simple Tumblr gallery and we want you to submit work to it that you are making at the moment.

Go to intherough.sptnk.co.uk to see more

We’re not expecting high production values. We don’t all have a multitrack studio in our loft and we may be struggling to keep our palettes stocked up with our favourite shades of paint. It might be rough, and not all of the work may even be finished, but we’re looking for work that authentically captures how you’re doing and what you’re feeling and how you’re responding to this unprecedented moment in our human experience.

Then, as work accumulates on this page, we’re going to be highlighting pieces that particularly resonate with us through our social media.

You may have lost your normal platforms to showcase your work. The exhibitions, theatres and performances may be called off, but we want to present you with a new way to profile your skills. Just make stuff, go to intherough.sptnk.co.uk and submit work.

We’re looking forward to seeing what you all come up with.

2. Sputnik Emergency Artist Fund

gofundme.com/f/sputnik-artists-coronavirus-impact-fund

Professional artists are surely one of the groups that have been hit hardest by the recent turn of events. For some, your sources of income may well have disappeared almost overnight.

This is huge, and we’re really praying for you and would love to connect with you if you need someone to reach out to. However, we also want to help financially.

Sadly, we don’t have the resources to help all of you, but we definitely want to do what we can, and also gather anyone else with a similar sense of concern for the well being of artists. Therefore, we’re re-routing the money that we’d allocated to artist grants for this term and sending out the SOS wider through a crowdfunding campaign.

For some of you, your sources of income may well have disappeared overnight.

Our goal is to raise £4,000 that we can then distribute to artists in need across the Sputnik network. We would be looking to typically distribute these funds in small gifts of around £200 each, although each case will be considered individually.

So, if you’ve got a bit extra at the moment, why not contribute to the Fund? And if you’re in need, get hold of us and we’ll see what we can do. All the info is here on GoFundMe.

3. Online Meet-Ups

PLEASE NOTE: Due to tech issues with old laptops and folks self-isolating (it’s complicated) we’ve decided to move the Saturday afternoon meet-up to a Zoom conference.

You’ll be able to find the meeting here.

Finally, whether we’re struggling to pay the bills, battling to keep our heads above water or buzzing with creative energy at the moment, we all still need artistic connections.

Usually, we do these in our hubs in Birimingham, Edinburgh, Falmouth and SE London. This term, we were also looking to gather artists in Bournemouth and Bristol and even more widely through our national Gathering.

It looks like we won’t be able to do those things anymore, but we’re not giving up. We’re going online.

On Saturday 28th March, we’re hosting our first online event and we’re already actively exploring how to multiply these in the future as well as hosting more interactive artist meet ups and workshops.

Even if you’re in total lockdown, you don’t need to be alone. We want you to keep connecting with comrades, collaborators and co-conspirators.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-zY1Ag6yj4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ASea_Jowts&feature=youtu.be

So, that’s the plan. We hope there’s something there that serves you. If you’re up for it, let’s overcome the present obstacles and seize hold of the present opportunities together in the coming weeks and months.

May God protect you and do you good.

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A tribute to Huw Evans, one of Sputnik’s founding artists

Huw Evans in 2017

While 2019 has been a great year for Sputnik, like 2018 before it, it was tinged with deep sadness at the loss of one of our founding artists, Huw Evans.

I became friends with Huw Evans in a rather strange way.

In 2014, I had the bright idea of compiling an anthology of writing from people in the Catalyst network of churches. It was an open submission project, and after getting word out, submissions started to come in. It was only then that I realised that I had a problem: I didn’t really know anything about poems or short stories. How on earth was I going to work out which ones should go in and which ones shouldn’t?

While thinking this through, I received a series of poems that even I could tell were of a particularly high calibre. I decided to take the plunge. I replied to the poet to congratulate him that we would love to feature his poems in the anthology, but also to ask him whether he’d kindly be the editor for the entire project. Amazingly, he agreed!

That poet was Huw Evans.

From that point, Huw became Sputnik’s writing guy. He edited another anthology the following year, and featured in a number of other Sputnik events and publications. He also provided valuable informal feedback to writers across the network as well as coaching both of our Sputnik interns, Tanya and Jess. On top of all of this, Huw became my friend.

In late 2017, Huw was diagnosed with terminal cancer and in March 2019, he died. He is sorely missed.

Huw had much wisdom to share, but the piece that has shaped me the most was maybe the simplest. Just turn up.

We can get ourselves in such a fuss about how to create, different techniques and methods, but so often the thing that stops us doing anything is that we don’t do anything. If you ever asked Huw how you could get better at whatever art form you were practising in, his response would be the same: just turn up. Just put in the hours. Just write. Just draw. Just paint. Just perform. Just keep doing it over and over again, until you start to get good.

Huw had much wisdom to share, but the piece that has shaped me the most is the simplest: just turn up.

He lived this out. As a young man with a desire to write poetry but not a lot of spare time, he decided to set aside 2 hours every Saturday, from 11-1, to write. It didn’t matter if he felt like it or not, if he felt inspired or not- he would close himself in his room, so he told me, and write.

When his four kids got a bit older and he had a bit more breathing space, he did a creative writing Masters, but it was the disciplined ‘just turning up’ that had kept the candle burning, so that he could really hone his craft with more concentrated focus when the time came.

Huw Evans Minor Monuments Poetry Sputnik Faith Art
Huw Evans’ Minor Monuments

And like an experienced runner, when he knew that his race was coming to an end, he put all those years of ‘just turning up’ into practice and ended with a sprint regarding his creative output. Since his diagnosis, he published a poetry anthology (Minor Monuments) and a children’s novel (The Goblin of the East Hill) with other works still likely to surface.

The psalmist writes in Psalm 139:16 ‘All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.’

I really wish God had given him a few more, but Huw was a man who used those days very, very well. He loved Jesus, loved his natural family and was faithfully committed to serving his church family and he has left behind a body of work and a body of wisdom that will go on for many more days yet.

In a sense, he has passed the baton on to us.

Huw Evans performing Not Long Now

Thank you, Huw, for the inspiration and encouragement, and for introducing me to RG Collingwood, and for being the only over 50 year old I could have a meaningful conversation with about Aesop Rock and Homeboy Sandman, and for being the first person to perform a sex poem at the Catalyst Festival, and for ‘just turning up’ both to your writing desk and to your church when almost everyone else in our family of churches was choosing one or the other.

Alongside the poetry and novels, in Huw’s creative purple patch of his last years, he also wrote and staged a one man show, Not Long Now, which was his response to his cancer diagnosis and the drastic shortening of his life expectancy that came with it.

I saw a preview of the show at the Catalyst Festival 2018, but after that, Huw honed the show further, and officially premiered it at Shilbottle Community Hall in November 2018. Fortunately for us, he produced a video of this performance, and whether you knew Huw or not, I’d thoroughly recommend putting aside an hour and giving it a watch. It will do you good.

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Sputnik founder Jonny Mellor lists his 2019 highlights

I appreciate the end of a year.

I like calendar markers: opportunities to reflect on what’s been and gone and what could be round the corner. When years seem to routinely pass in a flash, I find it encouraging to take stock of what’s happened in that flash and remember that it’s not been wasted.

I haven’t yet got my head round the ‘end of the decade’ factor, but as years go, in terms of Sputnik at least, it’s been a very exciting and potentially game-changing twelve months.

So, highlights? I thought I’d round up a few. In no particular order…

Mantis launched his new album, ‘The Legend of One’

Pythagoras the Praying Mantis is a force of nature. A Birmingham rap veteran and a longstanding Sputnik favourite, this year he released possibly his best album yet, The Legend of One, and we had the great pleasure of helping him put on the album launch party, through the Sputnik Patrons scheme.

Pythagoras the Praying Mantis performing ‘Steelwire Technique‘

The event was fantastic: Mantis was ably supported by an excellent house band and a whole host of vocal support, but he took hold of the stage and made it his own. Stage presence. Authority. Vocal precision. Good audience banter. Ticks all round.

The Sputnik Team kept growing

For years, Sputnik was essentially me, sat at a desk a couple of days a week, scheming, blogging and putting on the occasional event. Things have certainly changed.

Firstly, it was wonderful working with Jess Wood as she completed her internship in the first half of the year. Since then, the office team has been transformed by the brilliant Wumi Donald coming on board. Chris Donald, Wumi’s other half, continues to make the website shine and was responsible for our best publication yet – the second volume of our Anthology, a giveaway for our growing roster of art Patrons.

Edinburgh Hub’s Hannah Kelly

Outside of Birmingham, the team is expanding further. There’s Joanna, Luke and Hannah in Edinburgh; Dez, Alex and Christine down in London, and my old friend Jem Bunce in Cornwall. In September, we had our first Sputnik Hub leaders get together, and I’m so thankful for all the fantastic people that God has added to the gang. Go Team Sputnik go!

We found friends across the pond

After many years of searching, we’ve finally found another organisation with some Sputnik DNA!

There are loads of excellent groups doing excellent things in the intersection between Christianity and art, but we’ve always felt a bit like an odd one out.

Are you into worship art? Not really. So art as a vehicle for the gospel then? Nope. So, you just want Christians to be more creative? Ummm…

Well, this year, we found some other weirdos who seem to be on the same page. Renew The Arts is a US-based Christian arts organization that supports and funds Christian artists (like we do) and aims to encourage and challenge the church at large to carefully think through their relationship with the arts (like we do).

Their blog is definitely one of my favourite things of 2019, and I’d thoroughly recommend everyone clocking in. My route in would be this introductory episode, then this review of incarnation and Platonism in the church. Throw in this exploration of the difficulties of redemption stories and you’ll be hooked.

Kanye… no, really

I know that I’ve already shared more than my 20 pence already on Mr West, including why Jesus is King should not be seen as blueprint for Christian art.

Nonetheless, one of the world’s biggest celebrities claiming to have come to faith in Jesus, making a chart-topping album all about Jesus and then talking about nothing but Jesus for months on end – is still kind of a big deal! I’m on side: I think we should be thankful for Kanye, and I also think we should pray hard for Kanye. He’s going to need it.

Photo by Kenny Sun

One last anecdote won’t kill you.

I was talking to a friend the other day – a Christian student. He was listening to Jesus is King in his room, and on turning it off, was surprised to hear that it was still playing down the corridor, in not just one but two of his friends’ rooms.

A bit later, his housemates grabbed him, asking for some help. They’d been enjoying the new Kanye West album, they explained, but were struggling to understand what was going on. First of all, could he explain to them the symbolism of water in Christianity?!

The Generate(ion) Film weekend

In October, Sputnik teamed up with One Small Barking Dog to put on Generate(ion), a youth filmmaking weekend in Birmingham.

On the Friday night, we hosted a bunch of creative workshops for 30-40 young people – featuring artists from the Brum Sputnik Hub – then on Saturday, Pip Piper and his team put on a more focused film workshop.

The Generate(ion) Film weekend

Pip is the kind of guy who always does my soul good. Therefore, to simply stick him in the same room as a group of young people would have been time well spent.

However, to see him training and coaching them to develop their skills in film, and to think about using the medium effectively, was truly a thing of beauty. We’re very much looking forward to taking Generate(ion) out of Brum to other cities in 2020 and beyond.

Jemma Mellor showed how it’s done

She’ll probably hate me for this, but my wife, Jem, definitely makes the list of 2019 Sputnik highlights.

Technically, she’d always feature on the list (awwww!) but this year particularly so, as she is increasingly embodying everything that we’re about. Since completing her degree about 15 years ago, her art practice has been on the back burner, as she’s focused on being a super mum. However, she’s kept the flame burning, steadily producing work when she could, and using her skills to great effect in different part time jobs.

Then, this September, with the kids now all at school, she started an ‘Interdisciplinary Art and Design’ Masters at BCU, and has well and truly got back on the horse.

I imagine there are some artists out there who get skilled-up at a young age, and then seamlessly move into a life of non-stop creation and success, before dying at a ripe old age, content and satisfied. However, I’ve yet to meet any of them.

For most of us, we find time where we can, we have a few years of action and progress and then a few more of frustration. We want to create, but life gets in the way. Things happen. We get disappointed. We doubt ourselves. We wonder why we bother and we feel like giving up.

Jem hasn’t given up. She’s kept going and now she’s producing some of her best work yet. And it’s just going to get better. Not to mention the fact that we now get to discuss Martin Heidegger at dinner times. Result!

Next year…

Yes, I know that this is a bit of a cheat, as this is a review of 2019, but I think it’s fair to say that next year is shaping up to be pretty tasty in Sputnik-ville.

Faith and Arts days are happening in Bournemouth, Bristol and London next term, with more pencilled in for later in the year. However, the big news is that we’re going to be hosting our first ever residential: the ‘Sputnik Gathering’ in the West Midlands on 24th and 25th May.

So once you’ve had enough of turkey and mince pies and you’ve put your Santa onesies back in the wardrobe, come back in the New Year, and we look forward to telling you more.

From everyone at Sputnik HQ, Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year.

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Perspective is the Key to Survival for Career Artists

Perspective Marlita Hill Sputnik Faith Arts

I remember a day not long after God had told me to quit my job: I was driving home, and I felt like my chest was going to cave in. It felt like I had on a corset that was too tight. It was the pressure of feeling like I had no possible way of making it through this. As far as I could see, there was no way that I could do what God had told me to leave my job to do.

In that moment, I lacked perspective – and that’s a crucial requirement for any career artist. As you’re walking out God’s promise to you for your career life, it’s important for you to check yourself at each juncture about how you’re seeing what you see. What is your perspective on the things you’re watching unfold in front of you?

We Looked Like Grasshoppers

In the book of Numbers, a group of men get challenged in this very area. In this account, God tells Moses to send some men to scout the land God had promised would belong to Israel.

Moses says to them, “Go up to the mountains, and see what the land is like: whether the people who dwell in it are strong or weak, few or many; whether the land they dwell in is good or bad; whether the cities they inhabit are like camps or strongholds; whether the land is rich or poor; and whether there are forests there or not. Be of good courage. And bring some of the fruit of the land.”

The men go out. They spy out the land and they collect fruit. They report back to Israel: “We went to the land where you sent us. It truly flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. Nevertheless, the people who dwell in the land are strong; the cities are fortified and very large.” They recount all the different tribes there, and they say: we seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them!

Basically, ain’t no way we getting in this land.

Perspective is not just about what you see. It’s about how you see what you see. Remember, they’re in the process of being brought into their promised land. They were not sent to find out if they could get in; that was already settled. They were only sent to find out what was there. But they lost sight of that, and instead made conclusions about their situation from the way they saw it. They reported from the wrong perspective.

They talked themselves out of God’s promise, because of their own perspective on it.

It wasn’t the fact that they reported these difficulties. The difficulties were there, and they were real. It was that they lost sight of why they were sent there, and of what to do with the difficulties they saw. They didn’t come back and say here’s what’s going on. Let’s seek God about how to deal with this. That’s not how they saw the situation. Instead, they talked themselves out of God’s promise because of their own perspective on it.

“Then Caleb quieted the people before Moses, and said, “Let us go up at once and take possession, for we are well able to overcome it.” But the men who had gone up with him said, “We are not able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we.”

I just think this is so funny because these men are like no, y’all didn’t hear what I said. I said the Canaanites are here the Jebusites are there, these people are here, you got these giants over here. We can’t do this! There are times when you’re walking out God’s promise where no matter how you look at it, it seems there’s no possible way you’re going to be able to do this.

Getting Nostalgic for the Past

Because of the report these men brought back, “all the congregation lifted up their voices and cried, and the people wept that night. And all the children of Israel complained against Moses and Aaron, and the whole congregation said to them, “If only we had died in the land of Egypt! Or if only we had died in this wilderness!”

It makes me laugh, because this is the insane talk that truly happens at some point when you step out to believe God. Now let’s remember what was happening in Egypt. They were enslaved. They had no freedom – the Egyptians treated them horrifically. The whole reason God tapped Moses on the shoulder was because they cried out to Him about how horrible Egypt was and how they were being so mistreated. They were in the position that they’re in in Numbers 13 because God answered their cry.

That’s important to remember. Sometimes, in the midst of God answering us, our perspective goes awry. You are in the position you’re in now because of God’s faithfulness to you. Remember how miserable you were behind that desk job? Remember how much you prayed that God would make a way for you to leave Kansas and get to New York? Remember how hollow and depressed you were not being able to do anything with your art?

Without the proper perspective, we start to devise steps and solutions of our own making.

Instead of looking at their current situation, remembering they were there because God was in the middle of fulfilling His promise to them; instead of seeing this as the next step into that promise; their perspective became that God had brought them there to die, on a mission that was guaranteed to fail.

Their perspective was so bleak that they planned to select a leader who would take them back to Egypt – the place of their oppression. This is another way we get it wrong: without the proper perspective, we start to have crazy conversations, and we start to devise steps and solutions of our own making. And they are always stupid ideas that make the situation much worse if we actually go through with them.

Being Blessed with ‘Enough’

I quit my job in June 2016 at God’s asking. After an amazing experience in Spain over the summer, I came home to begin the next season; and things were dead quiet. I went from 7 years of being busy with plans and phone calls and projects… to silence. And I’m the kind of person who’s able to find plenty of peace and enjoyment in long periods of solitude and silence. But in this particular season, the silence was deafening and hard to deal with.

I felt anxious; it was hard to sit still, and the overwhelming presence of inactivity was very hard. Not only was I broke, but I was broke and inactive. My phone wasn’t ringing, no emails were coming in. I just felt stuck in limbo, like no progress was being made. All I could think about was the gnawing feeling that I left my job for nothing.

And then one day while I was cleaning the house, the Lord checked me and he checked me hard – by reminding me of the previous four years. Over those years, I wanted to write, but I was working full-time; I would get up early in the morning to write, or I would stay up late at night to write. I would write on my lunch breaks. I would take my stuff with me everywhere I went, so that any available time I had I would squeeze in time to write these books that He told me to write. And because I was faithful when it was difficult, he had brought me into a time where all I had to do now was write, a time where I had the freedom to do nothing else but write. He had brought me into a time of blessing, a time where he was rewarding me and honouring me: a season where I didn’t have to juggle my life to follow him anymore.

I’ve had conversations like the children of Israel, where I felt nostalgic for the times I didn’t have to worry about paying my rent, even though there was no doubt it was time for me to leave my job. Whenever I would substitute teach, or try to stick my toe in to go back, as much as I’d remember very quickly why I’d left, there was the very real temptation that “at least I didn’t have to worry about this” or “at least I had that”.

In those “at least” times, when the day-to-day-ness of walking this out seems overwhelming, when the bill collectors are the people who check on me the most, I remember God’s faithfulness to the children of Israel even in the Manna season. Yes, during that season every day was about just having enough. But for forty years in that wilderness, they always had enough to eat. Was it what they wanted? No. Was it what they needed in that season? Absolutely. And I’ve seen that same faithfulness in my own life. Even in a very, very slim financial season, my rent’s been paid every month, I’ve never gone hungry, my lights haven’t been turned off. When I get my eyes on the right things, I can see God beautifully bringing me into the very thing He promised me. I can see His hand at work all around me.

So I challenge you to take some time and assess how you’re seeing what you see, right here in the moment you’re in. I challenge you to see God who has been faithful in taking care of you; and I challenge you to acknowledge all the signs of forward progress He has allowed you to see and experience along the way.

This article has been adapted with permission from Marlita Hill’s podcast, The Kingdom Art Life.

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What About the Art That Never Gets Made?

Jess Wood Art That Never Gets Made Sputnik Faith Arts

I think that the scariest of all unseen art is art that never gets made in the first place. 

Can you imagine a world where all the greats never had time to give to their practice, and so it just never developed? 

There are so many factors that can contribute to a lack of undisturbed creative time. It can be self-inflicted: I’m sure many of us have heard the argument that technology’s great capacity for connecting people comes hand in hand with its ability to stop us from connecting with those right in front of us. By keeping everyone insanely busy, it’s become dubbed as a thief of time. And although big tech companies have created screen-time apps – knowing that their users are becoming increasingly concerned with their internet usage – it can still be hard to strike the balance between time spent online, promoting, marketing, researching your work (or, you know, just scrolling) – and actually making the stuff.

Or it can be externally imposed lack of time; the business of work and family life, the responsibilities in and outside of the home. For women there is an added pressure, as this article by Brigid Schulte shows. Historically speaking, it is because of the work of women, acting as gatekeepers of time for the men they served, that men have been able to pursue their artistic careers. For parents – I can only imagine that navigating the 24/7 job-and-joy of a child, alongside the 9-to-5, makes it near impossible to carve out time for yourself, let alone time for yourself and a pen, an instrument, a paintbrush etc. 

It needs to be asked then: how do we do it? How do we continue to create, to push ourselves, to grow in our craft and know that we’ve given everything we possibly could to it and that we haven’t left anything unseen that we’ve wanted to be seen? 

Some personal reflections on time…

As I enter the working world, or at least desperately attempt to, I’m constantly told to enjoy this unfettered time for my creativity and enjoyment. The freedom to indulge in reading and writing. It’s definitely easier said than done, and I know that everyone who encourages me in this says so from the distinct lack of time that the working week allows for these pursuits. 

So aside from spending my time raving about the ideal utopia I have in mind of a four-day working week for the benefit of our creativity and the planet, here are a few things I’ve learned.

1. Get yourself a group of dedicated supporters. 

Sputnik has several Hub groups you can join to be continually inspired and challenged in your creative endeavours. It’s always an encouragement to attend them, because they remind you of the wider art world in which we’re working, where everyone is dealing with similar issues. Beyond this though, they’re great opportunities for networking and creating. It’s inspiring to hear from artists in disciplines as far-flung as fashion design and writing, or filmmaking and lino printing. I challenge you to attend one and not leave feeling inspired and energised. 

2. Make a routine.

This is very easy for the unemployed gal to write, but yet I still always find myself too busy to write, read, and market myself. If this means waking up a little early to write every day – or if that’s too daunting, then even once a week – this will help create a muscle and a rhythm that makes your art a continual practice rather than an overwhelmingly daunting task when you finally have free time to commit to it. 

3. Keep it sacred and safe. 

By this I mean treat your art with a level of seriousness and importance that you would any other act of service. As much as art is, hopefully, a joy, it’s also a duty and a service to translate and make sense of the world around us through what we create.

So I leave you with the question. What haven’t you made yet? What ways have you not challenged yourself? What’s that piece you keep meaning to create or the poem that you’re afraid of writing? 

And what would it mean if you never got round to making it, what if it goes forever unseen?

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The Repentant Completionist: When Outtakes and Demos Become Too Much

Completionism: that’s a word, isn’t it? Yes. Yes, it is. It’s the desire, the need to complete the set of whatever you’re collecting or the drive to finish every level in a game. I gave up on collecting every record by bands I liked a long time ago. I was too broke to be a proper completionist. I was getting there with De La Soul albums on vinyl, but then my brother nicked the records and sold them or lost them somewhere in California. No biggie.

The one band who’ve most tempted me back to completionism is Radiohead. I own all the studio albums, the I Might Be Wrong live album, Com Lag and the bootleg Oxford’s Angels, which includes early stuff including the Drill EP songs, the B-sides, the Record Store Day exclusives, that rejected Bond Spectre theme song and then there’s the special edition of… oh, shut up, Joel. Either you’re a Radiohead fan and there are fond tears welling up in your eyes or you’ve glazing over and are very close to skipping to the last paragraph, so let’s just get to the point.

That Radiohead leak

In June 2019, someone leaked over 16 hours of Minidisc recordings of Radiohead demos, rehearsals, soundchecks, song sketches on tinternet. These recordings from the late 90’s weren’t ever meant to be made public. In wake of the leak, the band begrudgingly decided to officially release all this material on Bandcamp for a limited time: the deal was you had 18 days to download the whole lot for £18. The profits would go to the environmental group Extinction Rebellion. The band, bless ‘em, tried to make something positive out of a genuinely frustrating situation. The unabridged and quite fascinating story of the stolen and leaked material is in this super nerdy Reddit thread.

Naturally, I, like thousands of other fans, was curious to hear these recordings. Allegedly there were hidden gems and full songs amongst the half-baked ideas, false starts and melodic vocal place-holders.

So, to Bandcamp. I’m at work sorting through and editing photos. Perfect time to listen to this unexpected mammoth audio treat.

The first minidisc ‘MD111’ is 70 minutes of material. Unsurprisingly, by the time I’m listening the hardcore fans have already provided tracklists and notes, for those who can’t quite read the scrawled tracklists in the artwork. And sure enough it does feature a rarity, an early version of True Love Waits, but it’s mainly songs I know and love being soundchecked or in various stages of not-yet-dressed.

Radiohead circa 1997, from ‘Meeting People is Easy’

Importantly ‘MD111’ also features Thom Yorke’s wails and murmurs as he attempts to get those initial song ideas out of his head. Onto the next minidisc, and the next one. More gems and more curiosities and more raw song sketches. It’s fun…for a while.

Five hours later it feels like I’m treading on sacred territory; sacred and to be honest, not that enjoyable. A voice is saying, ‘Leave Thom alone, let him bloody finish writing the song before you listen to it.’

I don’t edit photos very often at work. In fact, there aren’t spare hours throughout the day to meaningfully do this minidisc marathon. I persevere. 15 minutes here, a couple more tracks there, but I’m lagging. Despite the seams of sonic gold, I’m increasingly less motivated to listen to songs that Radiohead, given the chance, would’ve hidden away forever.

Thom writes on the Bandcamp site about the leaked collection, ‘it’s not v interesting’. He’s looking forward to the moment when ‘we all get bored and move on’. Sure enough, most casual listeners and culture vultures do get bored and move on. Some fans will continue to cherish these recording as part of their complete Radiohead archive. Me? I’m in neither camp. I didn’t get bored. I got uncomfortable.

The need for hidden processes

I never made it to ‘MD128’. The Bandcamp download deadline passed without me downloading it and I decided not to ask other fans for a cheeky zip file. And I’m content.

As someone lamented after the publication of Kurt Cobain’s journals: ‘Private thoughts should remain private thoughts’. Unpublished sketches have a purpose within the creative process. They exist as a reference often for an audience of one. As a society we’ve developed a weird gluttony for the unheard, the unseen, the unpublished, the unfinished, the alternate version, the leaked edit, the ill-advised DVD bonus feature and in doing so, we’ve trampled on delicate artistry and diminished its ineffable glow.

Unpublished sketches have a purpose within the creative process. They exist as a reference often for an audience of one.

I get it. We’re human. We’re stubbornly curious creatures. The creative process can be interesting. We somehow hope that some of that magic will rub off on us, or that we’ll discover some brilliant, otherworldly technique or that we’ll find a distilled form of the creative elixir the artist draws from before offering it to the public.

We want to feel like insiders. We sense that the creative process is what many artists most love, therefore we want to get a glimpse or him/her/them mid-composition. Ironically for many of us this isn’t about completionism, it’s about feeling an ephemeral moment of intimacy with an artist we’re drawn to.

PJ Harvey Dog Called Money Seamus Murphy Sputnik Faith Arts
PJ Harvey recording. From Seamus Murphy’s ‘A Dog Called Money’

PJ Harvey recorded her 9th album in a recording studio with one-way glazing, allowing visitors to watch Harvey, her band, producers and engineers make the song. Most musicians would find this terribly distracting. If in 1995 I’d been sitting there next to Thom Yorke as he stumbled through his new song No Surprises, he’d never have finished it.

I feel like I’ve dodged a bullet. For me the mystique of this band is still intact. Their ability to create transcendent moments and lyrics that speak my own thoughts is wonderful and baffling. During the Minidisc bonanza, we were just a few days away from the release of Anima, Yorke’s new solo album, a fully realized work he actually wanted people to hear. Right now I’m listening to the song Not the News and my whole body is tingling. Woah.

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Don’t Forget, Your Collaborators are as Important as Your Audience

Kingdom Artist Initiative Sputnik Faith Art

Art only works if it has an audience. It is necessarily public. People can creatively express themselves in private, but for that creative expression to be a genuine artwork, it must communicate, which means that it must be read, watched, heard or seen. Therefore, it is no surprise that in our art practice, our focus is on the public face: the stage, the page, the exhibition, the release.

However, in all of this there is a danger. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warns against giving to the needy, fasting and praying in a very public way and to be admired by others, but instead to do these things ‘…in private. And your Father, who sees everything, will reward you.’ (Mt 6:4,6 and 18).

Of course the context is very different, but the warning still carries some force for artists. If our attention is overly drawn to the public we may well miss the things behind closed doors, that God may well view as most important. Lying beneath and behind our artwork are all sorts of private things that God not only sees, but rewards, and I sometimes wonder whether it is in these secret, unseen interactions and practices that God often does his most long lasting work in us and, even through us.

One of these private things is the relationships we make through our work.

Loving others throughout the artistic life

When we make a piece of work, we endeavour to establish a relationship with an audience, but there are plenty of relationships that go into the production of the work itself. This may involve the collaborative relationships that help bring the work to life, or possibly the relationships with those you work with along the way (with the event promoter, the publisher, the person behind the sound desk, etc).

My conviction is that our primary calling in our art is the same as our primary calling in our lives in general: to love others.

Roger Scruton, the aesthetic philosopher, put this excellently regarding our artistic output:

‘It is certainly a failing of a work of art that it should be more concerned to convey a message than to delight its audience.’

I don’t think that all work should aim to ‘delight’ people in the short term (work could be concerned with immediately provoking, warning, shocking or consoling its audience) – however if we take his general point to mean that our work should be made with a desire for the increased well-being of our audience, then I fully agree. In other words, our work should be done in a spirit of love and kindness.

Perhaps, though, it is even more important to live this calling out behind the scenes of our work.

I had direct experience of this in a band I used to be part of. We recently released a remastered version of our debut album, to mark its 20th birthday. I’d not listened to the album much in the last decade, and spending some time with it again caused many unexpected reactions.

It was strange hearing the voice of my 20 year old self again, and to reflect on ways in which I’ve changed or stayed the same. It brought back to mind the events that surrounded the recording and release of the album (the feeling of total joy to find out that DJ Pelt was willing to work with us, overloading on Tetris during recording sessions, arguing about which vocal takes to include… that sort of thing). It also compelled me to think about the value of the work. What did it matter? Was it time well spent, writing, recording, releasing and gigging this album?

I wonder if one of the most important parts of our legacy happened away from the stage or the recording sessions.

I loved being part of Michaelis Constant. It is genuinely one of the highlights of my life, and I thought we did a pretty good job. Our music got reviewed well in the hiphop magazines I grew up reading, we got to play live with most of the bands I most enjoyed listening to and I was pleased, listening back to the album, that I still like listening to it, and I know there were other people who did too. However, I wonder whether one of the most important parts of our legacy happened away from the stage or the recording sessions.

When we started the band, my friend Rich, who was a producer and rapper in the group, wasn’t a follower of Jesus. By the time we broke up, he was. I still remember the time we were praying together during a band practice and Rich, I think for the first time, chipped in by praying himself. ‘God, thank you that I can thank you,’ he said. It was a simple but deeply profound prayer.

If all Michaelis Constant ever achieved was that prayer, I think it would have been enough.

Achieving the Unexpected

I saw something similar to this recently while watching a live video of Kanye West’s Use this Gospel. I’m sure you’ll know the headlines by now: Kanye West releases gospel album, talks to anyone who’ll listen about his conversion to Christianity, sends critics scurrying to admire or decry his new direction. It’s all very brash, very public, very Kanye.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNNEkPfiQec

But there are unseen stories going on behind the hype, and in this video you get a tiny glimpse of one of them. This song is notable because it is the first song that the lauded hip-hop group Clipse have appeared on since 2009. Clipse is/was comprised of two brothers, Pusha T and Malice, but after the release of their third album, Malice became a Christian (soon after, changing his name to No Malice) and the band broke up. No Malice and Push continued to release music, but they were clearly no longer on the same page, with No Malice wearing his newfound Christianity on his sleeve, and Pusha T’s content continuing to be unrepentantly ‘street’, often revolved around drug dealing.

Since the group broke up, Push has worked extensively with Kanye West. In 2015, he was made president of G.O.O.D Music, the label that Kanye had founded.

Fast forward to now. Kanye has become a Christian himself and is releasing gospel music. It is the perfect opportunity to unite the two brothers and bring Clipse back together. Thus: Use this Gospel.

So, you up to speed? Good. With all this in mind then check out the video. Kenny G does his sax thing then the music kicks in, and it’s all pretty immense and spectacular. Push fumbles his verse and there are some mic problems and then No Malice steps up and raps, with Push vibing along and providing the overdubs. Then at 3:53, No Malice puts his arm around his brother and closes with the line “hold on to your brother when his faith’s lost”.

Maybe it’s in these unseen interactions, conversations and friendships that God really wants to work.

I’ve got to be honest, that’s a tears-in-the-eye moment right there. For all the Megachurch performances, Apple Music interviews, over 200 million streams, worldwide number 1s, there is an almost unseen story of two brothers who have found a way to reconnect and make music again together. If that’s not enough, one of them can use this new platform for collaboration to tell his bro about his affection for him and his desire to see him come to faith in Jesus.

Please, don’t forget the relationships behind your work. Don’t get so focussed on the audience that are out there, that you forget to love those around you in the process of making. Maybe it’s in these unseen interactions, conversations and friendships that God really wants to work.

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Matt Tuckey creates immersive soundscapes

Through our Patrons Scheme, we support Christians who are making engaging, powerful art or who are using their skills to serve their local communities. This term, one of our grants has gone to Matt Tuckey, a sound designer from Newcastle. Jonny caught up with Matt to find out about his practice and his latest project.

JM: Hi Matt, who are you and what do you do?   

MT: So, my name is Matthew Tuckey, I am a sound designer and sound artist. I live in Newcastle upon Tyne with my wife Molly, and I spend a lot of time pointing microphones at things/people/places.

JM: Most of us would be familiar with graphic designers, or fashion designers, but a sound designer seems a bit more abstract. What exactly is the role of a sound designer?

MT: Good question. It’s hard to pin it down as it’s a term used across multiple platforms, industries and artforms. The best ‘job description’ I can offer is: to plan, through a collaborative creative process, the creation and playback of all sonic content in a live environment, digital media, or tangible product.

So whether that’s in theatre, video, music, or UI (I have done elements of all), I am constantly collaborating. My practice is mostly based in theatre sound design and this is the most collaborative artform I work in – I am often approached by a director, who then introduces me to a writer (or their words) and puts me in a creative team with a set designer and/or lighting designer. My approach is often to problem solve – what aspects of the story can be and need to be clearer by the creative manipulation of sounds? This normally involves, for me at least, finding an interesting or thematically relevant source material (recording an ambience, creating sound effects, working with music/composer) and creatively manipulating and playing those sounds as part of the dramatic narrative.

I also design the playback system for the theatre performances whether touring or running in one location. I like to call this a holistic sound design – working from creative storytelling all the way to technical innovation. This often sees me collaborating with another set of people – the technical or production team, and on larger productions (such as musicals) a whole sound department team.

JM: Sputnik is proud to be supporting your latest project through our Patrons Scheme. Could you talk us through it?

MT: I am very grateful to Sputnik for running this Patronage Scheme, my work is extremely technical, and these funds are crucial to its success.

I am creating an abstract piece of soundscape inspired by the poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Through a recent connection with Newcastle Universities Oral History Unit and Collective I am now hoping to incorporate elements of oral history from Newcastle’s disappearing shipyard heritage.

I am using immersive and multi-channel audio and my hope is to complete research and development by early 2020. Then to move into final production and initial preview run mid 2020, and prepare for a rural coastal tour of the piece starting early 2021.

JM: As a freelance artist who has to raise your own funds for projects, what advice would you give others regarding fund raising?

MT: These past nine months have taught me a lot about this. I’ve learnt a lot as I’ve gone along and have had to ride some disappointing rejection.

I constantly keep thinking “this is too complicated, I can’t do this” – but this brings me to something that Ed Catmull (founder of Pixar) says – “get smarter”. Having worked in theatre so much, I know the value of a team. I knew nothing about funding applications until I asked someone who did!

The match funding, bursaries, and team have been huge victories for the project. First contacts and drafting applications is really scary, but we have a saying in Newcastle “Shy bairns get nowt!”. I also would have not put in the Sputnik application, or any of the subsequent bids without listening to the words of the late Huw Evans – “just turn up”. 

Thanks Matt. To keep updated on this project or to help support similar projects like this in the future, sign up for our patrons scheme.

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Watch a new posthumous film of uncut Huw Evans wisdom

Back in 2017, when we first launched our Sputnik Patrons scheme, we commissioned a small handful of projects by Sputnik friends. One of these was a book of poetry by long-time Sputnik legend Huw Evans, our resident writing and poetry mentor.

At that time, Birmingham filmmaker Joel Wilson headed out to talk with Huw about the poetry project. It turned into a wide-reaching conversation about Huw’s practice, his influences, and the artistic process at large.

Huw had already received a terminal cancer diagnosis at this point, and sadly, he passed away in 2019. We already shared our tribute to him, here – but a year on from his death, with this footage dormant in the cupboard, Joel took it on himself to finish a cut of the interview and share the various gems within.

We’re hugely grateful to Joel for his work – and whether you’re a writer, poet, or another kind of artist entirely – you’ll find plenty to relate to and dwell on in Huw’s thoughts.

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Which Artists Did Sputnik Fund in 2018?

Sputnik Faith Arts Funded in 2018

When we started Sputnik, I decided to ask as many artists as I could what the church could do to support them more effectively. The top answer was always the same. Money!

The first time I heard this, I thought they were joking (I mean, what about all of the important pastoral care and encouragement churches could give instead?)  The second time I still thought this was a bit basic (wouldn’t you prefer the occasional chance to have your work profiled in a church meeting or your church leader coming to one of your performances?) By the third time, I began to think through how we might be able to help.

Thus, the Sputnik Patrons scheme was born.

2018 has been our tester year, both in terms of working out what kind of projects we should fund and also how we can start recruiting patrons. And we’re getting there. We now have a small but trusty base of patrons and we managed to help fund 4 exciting projects this year…

Minor Monuments (Huw Evans’ first poetry collection)

Huw Evans is part of City Church, Newcastle and has been honing his craft as a poet, novelist and playwright for many years. Over the last 12 months, there has been a particular explosion in his creative productivity and we had the pleasure of helping him to publish his debut poetry collection in May. The money from Sputnik Patrons has gone towards the art direction and printing of the publication, featuring original illustrations from Brum based printmaker Luke Sewell.

It is a fantastic collection split into four sections, my favourite of which is called Discourses of The Severed Head. It features the reflections of the severed head of an ancient mythological British king which gets dug up in modern times and shares its wisdom on, among other things, Walt Disney, Tabloid journalists and the British political system. Hopefully that whets your appetite to investigate further…

Huw Evans Poetry Minor Monuments Sputnik Patrons

Strange Ghost (Neo-soul group from Birmingham)

Strange Ghost had an excellent 2018. The Birmingham based neo-soul outfit, pulled together by Chris Donald and fronted by his wife, Wumi (both members of Churchcentral, Birmingham) released their debut EP, Stagger in 2017. They started gigging in February 2018 on the Brum local gig circuit (in which they were billed 3rd on a cold Tuesday night) and were immediately snapped up to headline at The Hare and Hounds, one of South Birmingham’s premier venues, a few weeks later. As if this wasn’t good enough, they ended up supporting renowned Scandinavian pop act MØ at the Birmingham Academy that same week.

What was behind this sudden burst of exposure? Strange Ghost’s ridiculous skills, obviously. God’s favour too, I imagine. But, also a fund injection from Sputnik Patrons to help them get their name out there more effectively. It really worked.

Our original intention was to continue this support to help them book some spots at key summer music festivals, but a creative side project derailed that scheme (the birth of Erin Donald in July!) Do not fear though, Strange Ghost will be back, and you never know Erin may get on BVs!

Strange Ghost Birm Acad

StageWrite (New writing festival, Bedford)

StageWrite is LifeBox Theatre’s annual new writing festival based in Bedford. It is a platform for emerging and published writers to see their work up on its feet, in front of an audience and performed script-in-hand by professional actors  It has been running since 2013, and this year was its biggest year yet. They received 63 scripts, and put on 4 of them at The Place Theatre, Bedford over 2 nights in May, with each performance followed by a Q&A session with the director, actors and writer.

The money from the patronage scheme allowed LifeBox to pay the actors involved in StageWrite for the first time and enabled one of the plays 42 Times around the Sun to be taken to a scratch night at OSO Arts Centre in London where the piece was performed in full production.

Life Box Theatre is run by Phil and Harri Mardlin, who are part of Kings Arms Church, Bedford and help lead our MK/Bedford hub. As well as funding new art to be produced by Christians, we also want to encourage Christians to serve the artistic communities in their local areas, and StageWrite is a fantastic example of how to do this.

To find out more about this project, check out Phil’s reflections on the blog.

Stagewrite18a

By The Lovely Shores (EP by Brum singer songwriter, Joanna Karselis)

Joanna Karselis, of Oasis Church, Birmingham, is a film composer and singer songwriter. Her latest release, By the Lovely Shores is an intimate EP documenting the journey of watching a loved one struggle with dementia. Though often heart wrenching in its honesty and passion, it’s also a vibrant and hopeful collection of songs and it’s been a Sputnik favourite for months.

While our Patronage Scheme provides funding for projects, we also provide practical help as well, and on this project, through the support of our patrons, we were able to contribute the artwork for the EP and provide assistance with print production.

Joanna Karselis By the Lovely Shores Sputnik Faith Art

For those of you who are wondering what happened to Benjamin Harris’ exhibition that we promised you in our Patrons Scheme video, well that has been moved back to April 2019, and will be one of several new projects that we’re hoping to fund in the coming year.

We’re so pleased to be able to support Christian artists who are looking to create powerful art and serve their local communities, but this is just the beginning. We are receiving some very exciting new applications for funding and we’d love to be able to assist these artists even more, but this will only be possible with your help.

Why not become a patron of Christian artists through the Sputnik Patrons Scheme in 2019? You can sign up for as little as £5 a month and, as well as helping Christians’ artistic projects, you’ll receive a bi-annual anthology of art from the network, and more besides. Sign up here and let’s support Christians in the arts together.

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When good intentions create bad art

A while ago, I hosted a retreat with a group of Christian art students. I taught at a number of sessions, showed them some art I liked, and we spent lots of time discussing questions we had about our faith and our art practice. One of the most common of these revolved around why we make art.

Sometimes this was asked directly, but more often it came out in explanations of the intentions behind individual pieces of work or certain areas of practice. The assumption that several of the students had was that the primary purpose of their work was to communicate the gospel.

This was mostly due to a creditable evangelistic zeal, which I in no way wanted to dampen, but when one student shared her feelings in a time of open Q&A, I couldn’t help myself. This student expressed her frustration that her tutors kept telling her to stop making art about Jesus and asked me what she should do.

Now, please understand that my response didn’t come with a completely clear conscience and I’m sure I could have phrased it better, but whatever my internal wranglings, what I said probably wasn’t what the room expected.

My answer: Perhaps you should stop making art about Jesus.

I have reflected on this answer at length since then, and this post in a way is an attempt to flesh out this answer a bit more helpfully than I did at that event.
You see, while I should have said more, I broadly stand by this answer, and would encourage more Christian artists to get hold of the sentiment behind it.

I’m of the opinion that it’s exactly the kind of good intentions that those students had that hamstrings so much artistic output by Christians.

Why do we make art?

So, let’s zoom out a bit: Why do we, as Christians, make art?

No, that won’t do, let’s go a bit further: Why, as Christians, do we do anything?

Followers of Jesus have a worldview that provides a foundational answer to our ‘why?’ questions. In our cultural setting, this is both one of Christianity’s most attractive features and its most controversial claims. Jesus leads us to believe that our lives have a fundamental and objective purpose and we can know what that is.

So what is our purpose? Now, the phrasing may be slightly different for different Christians, but ‘for the glory of God’ will probably cover most angles (Ephesians 1 seems to be quite a handy touchstone here, particularly verses 6 and 12).

Okay then, we’re alive to delight God, to enhance his reputation, to glorify him. But what does this look like in practice?

Well, this is a little more contentious, but for many of us, I guess we’d say that an important reason we’re alive is to help people follow Jesus more closely and particularly help people who don’t know Jesus to become his disciples (Matthew 28:19-20). This is certainly where the students I mentioned earlier were coming from.

Now, I reckon that this, while possibly a tad reductionist, is a pretty decent reference point when it comes to purpose. I wholeheartedly believe that a life lived purposefully and deliberately to lead more people to become disciples of Jesus is a very good life, very much in line with what we were created to do.

So, if you agree with me, have we answered our question then?

Why do we, as Christians, make art? To encourage people to become Christians.

Well, in a sense ‘yes’ and in a sense ‘no’, and which way I’d lean at a given time will probably depend on how quickly we move from this ‘why?’ to the all-important ‘how?’

The Purpose Driven Life

To see what I mean, consider the difference between someone who has a purpose and someone who has an agenda.

A purposeful person is motivated, enthusiastic and makes good use of their time. A person with an agenda is often seen as sneaky, driven and calculated.

We, as Christians, should relish our purpose and the meaning and direction that God fills our lives with. However, I don’t think we should therefore become coldly utilitarian and robotic in how we live out our purpose.

Salt and light have a purpose, but they couldn’t be described as having an agenda.

This is, I think, why the New Testament’s teaching on evangelism is not just about how we speak, but also about how we live.

Jesus told his disciples to ‘preach the kingdom of God’ (Luke 9:2) but he also said that they were the ‘salt of the earth’ and ‘the light of the world’. Salt and light have a purpose, but they couldn’t be described as having an agenda. Peter puts it slightly differently in his first letter:

‘Live such good lives among the pagans that, although they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.’

1 Peter 2:10

Being salt and light

When I was a secondary school teacher, I found out pretty quickly that while your typical good deeds (honesty, kindness, patience, etc) were important here, another one was simply taking my job seriously and working hard at it. In fact, if I’d chosen to intentionally shoehorn the gospel into my lessons or pastoral care in a way that was to the detriment of me being a good teacher, I would have lost the respect of my colleagues and probably caused very few people to glorify God.

This is generally understood when it comes to most professions and disciplines. To use another example, a plumber could live out their evangelistic purpose in their job without carving Bible verses on every U-bend they fit. By doing a consistently good job, probably unthinkingly most of the time, they are potentially speaking volumes about Jesus’ ability to cause his followers lives to flourish.

If I chose to shoehorn the gospel into my lessons to the detriment of being a good teacher, I would cause very few people to glorify God.

But when it comes to art, we seem to get this all muddled up. I am living proof of this. Time and time again, I have overthought artistic projects and dwelt for so long on ‘why I should be doing this?’ or ‘how should this song communicate the gospel’ or ‘how can this story glorify God?’ that I’ve created work that didn’t communicate anything and only glorified God to those who were willing to overlook the clear inadequacies of the work (ie., Christians).

Purpose driven lives are to be commended. Purpose driven art doesn’t work.

Making art should be like making friends

It sounds kind of twee, but I think that making art should be like making friends. I’d imagine that most of us are friendlier people because we are Christians, and at least part of this is because we believe that we have something good to offer other people. Our friendliness is purposeful. However, friendliness that has an agenda is a totally different thing. If we set out to make friends purely to convert people, it would quickly become something quite ugly. Our ‘friendships’ would be conditional, one sided and somewhat inhuman.

If you recoil from the idea of such an approach to friendship, consider the similarities with our role as artists. Hopefully, in both cases, we’ll have opportunities to explain ‘the reason for the hope that we have’ (1 Peter 3:15), but both as friends and as artists, our default position is to show people love and serve them the best we can. As artists, we do this by creating the best work we can, not by advertising our worldview to them.

Stop making art about Jesus?

So maybe if I’d had more time, I’d have put it a bit more like that on that student retreat.

I definitely don’t think we should all stop making art about Jesus. I’d hope he is the subject who fascinates, excites and invigorates us most, and if so, we won’t be able to keep him out of our work. Nor should we.

But for anyone who is overthinking their work and finding that their good evangelistic intentions are stopping them from creating work that is authentic, generous spirited and full of life, it might be a good place to start.

Let’s glorify God together in every way we can, and my prayer for many people reading this would be that one of the ways we’d live out our God given purpose is by creating the very best artwork that we possibly can.

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Our new Sputnik intern: poet Jess Wood

Jess Wood Poetry Poet Sputnik Faith Arts

We’re excited to welcome Jess Wood into the Sputnik team, on our second year offering an internship programme to aspiring artists.We asked Jess a few questions to introduce herself to our readers, and she performed her poem ‘Precariat’ for us, which you can watch below.

Describe yourself in five words:

Compassionate conviction (that) laughs out loud.

Who are your creative inspirations?

I’m inspired by anyone who can use words well to make me really think about things I usually experience without consequence. Whether it be a good preach, a podcast (Krista Tippet anyone?) or a gorgeous piece of poetry. In terms of poets, I’m inspired by Kei Miller, Warsan Shire and Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze.

Why are you interning for Sputnik?

Art can most often be placed on the back burner, and I figure that I’ll never have more freedom to explore, develop and get good at it than now!

I’m at the awkward post-grad state of not knowing what I want to do with my life, so during this year I will be exploring what it could look like for me to make a living as a poet, working within the arts sector and hosting workshops. I decided to intern with Sputnik specifically because of the way they intertwine faith and art which are two incredibly important aspects of my life. I know that the support I’ll receive, both as a Christian and as an artist will set me up well for the future.

What are you looking forward to?

I’m so thankful that I have a team of people behind me who are passionate about seeing me produce new work, and who will – if necessary – go the lengths of locking me in a room with only paper and pen to see it come about! I’m so aware of what a privilege it is to have a year dedicated to my art practice and having the flexibility of working my schedule around something I’m so passionate about.

Within the first month, it’s been inspiring to be surrounded by Christians who take art seriously and want to deeply engage with the issues we face in the world, and I’m so excited to learn more from them. Alongside all my artistic developments, the theology training from Impact was incredibly helpful and released me from a lot of anxieties and uncertainties I had about what a relationship with God can look like. I’m really looking forward to what we’ll learn in the next training block and how it will continue to develop my relationship with God.

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Removing unnecessary obstacles with Marlita Hill

Marlita Hill Faith Art Career Sputnik

Two weeks ago, we spoke to Los Angeles-based choreographer and teacher Marlita Hill about gracefully dismantling the expectations facing artists in churches. In part two of our interview, Marlita explains in more detail the groundwork that she works through when tutoring artists.

You can read the first part of this interview here.

Jonny Mellor: You talk about the importance of an artist’s whole art-life, rather than just the work they produce, could you explore this topic with us?

Marlita Hill: In the Kingdom Artist Initiative (KAI), one major question we answer is how do you serve God and build His kingdom working “out there” making “that kind” of art with “those people”? There is still a very present belief that Christians should only make art in church, for church, about God, and for worship. Any activity outside of that should be focused on evangelism; and the only reason to associate with non-Christians is to get them saved.

Well, I don’t share that belief. Church is wherever the people of God are. The Kingdom of God is bigger than a building and consists of so much more than evangelism. And, worship is practiced and offered up by what we do, as much as it is by what we say.

As an artist in Christ, you have a life in art, not just a message in art. Your life in art is a valid, God-honoring way that you participate in Kingdom citizenship and Christian community. In KAI, I teach about this life in art as three parts: Person, Process, and Product.

Person.

Person is who you are. The Bible says that you are the light of the world (Mt. 5:14). You are the salt of the earth (Mt. 5:14). You are the way that God diffuses His fragrance throughout the earth (2 Cor. 2:14). And you are an exhibitor and dispenser of His love. Before you ever do anything, and regardless of what your art talks about, this is who you are. This is how you show up in every space you enter in your art career. You are the representative and ambassador of the living God and of His Kingdom in the earth. You don’t have to do anything extra to accomplish that.

Process.

Process is how you do things: how you go about creating your art, how you make career decisions, and how you interact with the people around you. You honor God, make Him known, and demonstrate the Kingdom at work by the way you go about making these decisions, by your disposition in executing them, and by what leads and influences you in making them.

Product.

Product is the actual art work. A lot of us struggle trying to figure out what we can make art about. And we shouldn’t. Psalm 24 says, “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it. The world and all its people belong to Him.” 2 Peter tells us that God has “given us everything that pertains to life and godliness.” If this is true, what could there possibly be that we cannot talk about? Nothing! It’s all fair game. It doesn’t matter what you talk about in your art. What matters is the perspective you present on what you talk about.

Marlita Hill Class Combo Dance Sputnik Faith Art
Screenshot from Marlita’s Int/Adv Modern Class at Cortines High School

JM: But surely any Christian in any profession would share the first two of these in one respect. Focusing in on the product then, do you think that an artwork has any special value, beyond, say, a fruitful business deal, a well engineered bridge or a successful operation?

MH: As far as what art can uniquely do, I believe its singularity lies in its qualities of being stealth and efficient. Art operates on a frequency that cuts right to the essence of things. It communicates so deeply, so intimately, and so quickly, that people find themselves impacted before they’ve found the words to articulate what just happened to them. We can react to art once we’ve reoriented ourselves back in our intellectual fortresses; but we cannot deny that something got in. Art cuts right to places we would have to ask permission to enter through any other means.

We talk about salvation, but the salvation experience is an unrealistic to our actual faith lives as romantic movies are to real relationships. Where’s our mundane Tuesdays?

This is what’s so powerful about Christians being present and active in our art careers. As Kingdom citizens in the world, we have the opportunity to contribute the Kingdom perspective to cultural dialogue. We’re always told to focus on the salvation experience. But this is as unrealistic to our actual faith lives as romantic movies are to real relationships. The whole movie only goes up to the point of two people getting together, but we never see the reality of their mundane Tuesday. We talk about salvation, but what does life look like as a Christian once you’ve gotten saved? Where’s our mundane Tuesday?

Even though we’re Christians, we’re still sexual beings, we still have feelings, we still deal with loss and grief, have awe, fall in love, make mistakes, feel confused. We still engage in the human experience. So, what does that human experience look like from a Kingdom perspective? How do you address, confront, and look at being human and living in this earth in all its messiness from the other side of being saved?

Sputnik Faith Art Marlita Hill

JM: You specifically serve artists who have careers in the arts. What do you think are the key challenges that Christians who are professional artists face, and what advice would you give them to overcome these challenges?

MH: Three things artists of faith struggle with are liberty, identity, and fragmentation. I believe every artist struggles with these in some way but they manifest uniquely in the faith community. As the arts are slowly being accepted back into the church, artists of faith working in secular culture still have so few champions to tell them that all parts of who they are (as Christian, creative, and cultural participant) are from God, to assure them that they (right where they are, doing what they’re doing) are a needed and contributing part of the body of Christ, and to show them how to victoriously navigate their art life in God’s purpose. Without this, they’re left constantly struggling for permission and validation, constantly struggling with who they are and how they want to be seen and known, constantly feeling like they have to make the impossible choice about which part of themselves gets their attention. But none of these struggles are necessary.

This is why KAI focuses on the artist’s relationship with God, and between their faith, art, and career. To deal with these struggles we have to do three things:

One: We have to remember that we cannot necessarily equate our experiences with the church as being how God sees and feels about us. We have to go to Him for ourselves to find out how He actually sees us. That’s where true, unshakeable identity comes from.

Two: We have to forgive the church and other Christians for not knowing how to tell us who we are and where we fit. We just have to.

Three: We have to release the internal divide we’ve perpetuated, which most likely exists for good reason. Still, we have to allow them to coexist and thrive together in the same space because God never intended our faith, art, and career to be fragmented within us.

Read more about Marlita Hill’s work at marlitahill.com.

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Marlita Hill helps artists to flourish

Marlita Hill is a dancer, teacher, choreographer, author – and much more – based in Los Angeles. We had the pleasure of talking to her about some foundational questions around her practice and approach to the worlds of faith and the arts.

Jonny Mellor: Hi Marlita. Could you introduce yourself to Sputnik’s illustrious readers?

Marlita Hill: Hello Sputnik! Thank you for having me. My name is Marlita Hill and I am a choreographer and author. I have a program called the Kingdom Artist Initiative that mentors professional artists of faith in building a healthy, undivided relationship between their faith and art career. I also produce a podcast called The Kingdom Art Life and in January, I published my third book, Defying Discord: Ending the divide between your faith and “secular” art career.

JM: There is an ongoing conversation about faith and art in the church at the moment, and in the UK at least it seems to be gaining some momentum. While this is good, I sometimes find that people are missing each other in this conversation and it can lead to churches supporting some forms of creativity, but at the same time actually alienating artists. I’ve found it helpful the way you frame this conversation to bring clarity to the different aspects of faith and art – could you share some of your thoughts on this?

MH: In the faith and art conversation, I believe it is important for us to recognize that when we say ‘artist,’ we are speaking to a remarkably diverse group of people – who are involved in different forms of art, who function in different contexts, who make art for different reasons and different audiences, who are in different seasons in their art life and have different needs. The artists in our churches have different experience levels, different expectations, and different ways they desire to be cared for and supported.

When we don’t acknowledge all this difference, we end up alienating artists. And while it is impossible for any one organization to serve all the needs of such a diverse group of people, acknowledging this diversity can help us approach the infrastructures we build to serve and support artists through a more inclusive lens.

Kingdom Artist Initiative Sputnik Faith Art
Kingdom Artist Initiative

JM: Not only are the arts often misunderstood in churches though, they are often simply not valued. Why do you think this is?

MH: I believe that the undervaluing of the arts in the church is due to several factors: value and usefulness, personal conviction and comfort level, and capacity.

Usefulness.

In the local church, there’s generally a three-pronged focus: worship, evangelism, and doctrine. The church readily embraces activities and expressions that directly serve these three areas.  Because they are where the focus lies, most everything that is done in church is a means to these three ends. And with that, usefulness becomes the measurement for value.  So, if your activity is not a clear means to those three ends, the church struggles to find them useful. In struggling to find them useful, they struggle to find them valuable. If they have no usefulness and therefore no value, then the question becomes why should we engage with it?

Most everything that is done in church is a means to worship, evangelism, and doctrine.

This raises a question; because some artists of faith engage in their art in ways that do directly serve those three areas. They want to partner with the church in serving the congregation, using their art to lead and engage people in worship, to help illuminate Scripture, and to share the Gospel and make Christ known. Why, then, doesn’t the church embrace them? That, I believe, is where we get into the other two factors.

Personal conviction and comfort level.

Despite the presence of creativity and artistry in the Bible, and despite there being evidence that God communes with His people in and through the arts, there are those church leaders that simply don’t agree and don’t see the arts as a suitable activity for the church. They don’t see the arts as a credible medium for facilitating or engaging in the worship experience and spiritual growth.

Or, they only see certain artforms as credible mediums. Dancers face this a lot. Where pastors are comfortable having musicians and visual artists active in their churches, they are not comfortable with a dancer. Actors are only acceptable for Easter and Christmas plays. Even with musicians, only certain instruments, musical forms, and even musical notes are acceptable in different congregations.

But this has nothing to do with the artist. And it has nothing to do with God. Still, we both are subjected to the comfort levels of those in leadership.

Capacity.

There is the reality that you need infrastructure to incorporate any activity in the church, including the arts. Some church leaders don’t believe they have the capacity (time, resources, know-how, space, etc) to include the arts in their congregational life. Of those, some view the arts as a nice addition if it’s convenient; but it’s not a priority so there is never any real motivation to find a way to make it possible.

Very few artists are ever included in planning and infrastructural conversations, so their possibilities to contribute are never heard.

Also, it rarely seems to occur to leaders that their artists are very capable of expanding that capacity when they are empowered to do so. Very few artists are ever included in planning and infrastructural conversations, so their possibilities to contribute are never heard. As leaders feel like they already have much on their plate, it is much easier to exclude the arts than it is to take the time to work through how they can be made an integral part.

JM: Coming back to your own experience, how do you think your own art life has deepened your relationship with Jesus? What have you learnt about God that you wouldn’t have done if you’d never been a dancer?

MH: My life as an artist has been an integral part of my relationship with God. In fact, I’ve gotten to know Him as I’ve pursued this life in dance.

There are two huge things I’ve learned that have liberated my relationship with Him. The first thing I learned is that the church’s way of seeing and interacting with me as an artist is rarely representative of the way God sees and interacts with me. I learned not to try to understand how God thought about me as an artist through the church. I had to get that straight from Him. I love the church. I appreciate the church. But I also understand they don’t often know how to care for me.

The second huge thing I learned is that God is not in relationship with me because I’m useful to Him. Nor is He in relationship with me because my gifts are useful to Him. He is in relationship with me because He loves me, and He has gifted me as an expression of His love.

I have learned that He gave me art for my life, not just my Christian service. My art is something He’s given me to engage with, and take space in, this world. He gave it to me to shape and form me. He gave it to me to release and receive. He gave it to me to commune with Him, to learn about Him and learn from Him. He gave it to me to enjoy.

I’ve learned that there’s not one thing about my artist-ness that I have to apologize for. I’ve learned that He takes great pleasure in it and gives me so much liberty to live in all the fullness of these things He’s gifted me to do. And this is what I hope to help other artists experience from their relationship with Him.

Read the second part of this interview here, or read more about Marlita Hill’s work at marlitahill.com.

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Escaping our siege mentality and sharing the richness of the world outside

Sputnik Siege Mentality Faith Art Bible Werner du Plessis

In 2 Kings 7, there is a story about the people of God in a spot of bother. Samaria has been under siege for a while and it’s taking its toll. Inflation is through the roof, women are eating their own babies, you know, standard Old Testament siege stuff.

Finally, four lepers decide they’ve had enough – they’re going to die anyway if they stay in the city, so they decide to surrender to the Aramean army. It can’t be any worse than eating overpriced donkey heads and living next to cannibal mothers.

So they go over to the Aramean camp – and find, to their surprise, that the enemy camp is deserted. There are tents; there are horses; there is food, and there is even plunder from previous battles. But the army has fled.

The lepers do a fair amount of revelry, eating and drinking and stashing away some gold and silver; but finally, they decide this is too good to just enjoy themselves. They go back into the city and report what they’ve found. As a result, the plunder is shared out to the people of Samaria. The famine is lifted. People stop eating babies (presumably). All is good.

Strangely, as I reflected on this year’s Catalyst Festival, and particularly the things we were involved with, I started thinking about this story. I wondered if it could be taken as a parable for the church, and how we can potentially relate more fruitfully to the culture around us. I imagine that it’s not immediately obvious what I mean, so I’ll explain.

Siege Mentality

I grew up in a context where I was encouraged to think of the church being in a similar position to Samaria in this passage: we were a people under siege. Inside the church community (and wider than that, the Christian sub-culture) we were God’s holy people, set apart and distinct. Outside, ‘in the world’, everyone was out to get us. The culture at large was populated by godless heathen, trying to attack the church with every weapon at their disposal. Scientists conjuring up half baked theories to undermine the Bible, politicians passing laws to erode biblical values, and – the most devious of all – artists, trying to seduce innocent Christians with their libertine tendencies and coded satanic messages.

Every now and then, we might forage out on a bit of an offensive (picketing an abortion clinic or writing a strongly worded letter to our MP), but on the whole, we responded by shutting the city gates and getting on with life on our own.

And actually, we kind of liked this set up. I mean, wasn’t this what heaven was going to be like? Christians hanging out, thinking about Christian stuff, and not being bothered by annoying others who didn’t share our core beliefs.

But, over time, our isolation started to bite. We found out that we weren’t made to live in isolation, and the culture we created couldn’t sustain us. We became culturally impoverished. We were chewing on the bare bones of Amy Grant, Frank Peretti, Ken Ham and Thomas Kinkade and we were starving.

Eventually, some people in the city decided that they couldn’t take it any longer, so they decided to leave and take their chances with the barbarians at the door.

We found out that we weren’t made to live in isolation, and the culture we created couldn’t sustain us. We became culturally impoverished.

However, to their surprise, they found the situation outside the city was not quite what they’d expected it to be. The fearsome army they were expecting simply wasn’t there. In fact, there was much of benefit outside the camp. There were riches in almost every sphere of human learning that, while by no means perfect, bore the watermark of the same God we allied ourselves with. Ingenuity; creativity; wisdom; understanding.

Rather than getting mowed down by machine gun fire, or being waterboarded till we recanted, these happy adventurers found that, as they explored outside the city, their love for Jesus grew, and their joie de vivre was intensified.

What’s more, their identity as God’s people remained, so they realised that they couldn’t keep this to themselves. They wanted to bring these treasures back into the city and make a way for the people of God to share in the good things they had found.

For example, at the Catalyst Festival…

I think we saw a microcosm of this at the Catalyst Festival this year. On the Saturday evening, Strange Ghost and Mr Ekow skillfully channeled years spent neck-deep in the work of the likes of Lauryn Hill, Hiatus Kaiyote and Outkast. On Monday evening, Huw Evans reflected on his journey with cancer, drawing solace and inspiration from Plato, Thomas Browne and the proliferation of skulls in Renaissance portraiture. And throughout the festival, Alastair John Gordon’s Travels in Hyper-Reality exhibition was on display for all to see. The title of the exhibition is taken from an Umberto Eco book, and the write-up quotes French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard.

Now, this may all sound pretty unexceptional, but it caught my attention because it was unusual in this specific context. In my experience, Christian conferences are events that are, in terms of the above parable, ‘for the city, by the city’ – celebrating the things of the city. Catalyst Festival has always veered from this model to a degree, but I think we went a bit further this year. We had a number of people contributing who seemed to have ventured out of the city gates and survived. More than that, they brought us back stuff that was of great benefit.

Treasure hunting outside the city

I’m sure my analogy is imperfect, and I’m not suggesting for a moment that this is what the author of 2 Kings was trying to communicate when he came to record this episode. However, I think this picture contains something helpful for those of us who are trying to think through the difficult question of how we, as God’s people, can relate to the world around us, in all its glory and corruption.

As Paul writes in Colossians 2:3, all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Jesus. I’m pretty sure that Jesus, in turn, has hidden quite a few of these treasures a little further afield than the church has reckoned on in recent years. My encouragement would be to keep your guard up and tread carefully, but to go and have a look outside the city to see what you can find.

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Heart-Expanding, Mind-Stretching: My Year as a Sputnik Intern

Sputnik Intern Year Birmingham Faith Art
Sputnik Intern Year Birmingham Faith Art

Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path, and leave a trail.

Emerson

This is one of my favourite quotes for many reasons; it’s a challenge to take risks, find the adventure, and leave your mark. For me, spending a year as the first Sputnik intern was exactly that – as I explored spoken word poetry, made connections and pushed myself further into my craft.

Learning the Basics

The first of my three terms was spent exploring different art forms, by shadowing and meeting other artists. I had a guided tour of Birmingham Museum with visual artist Luke Sewell. I shadowed Birmingham’s former poet laureate Giovanni Esposito (known as Spoz) as he taught spoken word poetry in local schools. I observed Anna O’ Brien, a skilled storyteller, engaging young children at The Barber Institute of Fine Arts through painting and craft. All of these were great learning experiences.

At the same time, I was learning the basic forms and structures of poetry from my accomplished tutor, Huw Evans. Every fortnight, I tried a new form in a poem – with mixed results! It was a challenge, but it was good to try, to learn and to build a good foundation, since I had little training in poetry.

Watching & Writing

The second term consisted of writing new work of my own, receiving valuable critique and – most importantly – editing my work. I learned, and continue to learn, that writing is largely about discipline and time. It’s imperative to be dissatisfied with your initial drafts, to fine-tune again and again to get to the core of the work, where the best writing and ideas live.

I learned, and continue to learn, that writing is largely about discipline and time.

That term, I was also privileged to attend Birmingham’s Verve Poetry Festival, a smorgasbord of poetry and artists from different forms and diverse backgrounds across the world. Highlights: Tomomi Adachi – a Japanese sound artist and poet, who invented an infrared jacket that produces eerie sounds when he moves and performs poetry. Or the sublime and mesmerising The Sea-Migrations by Asha Lul Mohammed Yusuf, an outstanding Somalian poet who now lives in London.

Across the whole festival, I saw poets who had mastered their craft over many years,writing and performing at the highest level; from the eclectic collective Nymphs and Thugs, to local legends like Spoz himself, who was powerful and entertaining to witness.

Performance & Publishing

Finally, in the last term, I was able to take my work to Catalyst Festival – a true highlight of the year. I performed some of the poems I had been working on, led a spoken word workshop, and of course I helped with the Sputnik stand, engaging with people at the festival. I discovered how much I enjoy performing and interacting with an audience; on top of this, it was wonderful to share this art form through a workshop and get people to engage with it.

I discovered how much I enjoy performing and interacting with an audience.

Throughout this, I’d been working on my debut collection, On Praise and Protest – a book of ten poems exploring themes of defiance, protest and celebration. It’s now available through the website that I also created during this year – tanyacpoetry.com. Check it out!

Broadening Horizons

Alongside the time working on poetry, I completed the Impact course, in Bedford – one of the best parts of my internship. To be able to engage with the Bible, with the help of church leaders and teachers; to ask questions and gain wisdom for life, was invaluable. On top of that, my fellow Impact-ers were outstanding, and it was a privilege to hear what God was doing in them, and through their projects at various churches across the country.

The sense of family between us was incredible, and crucial in supporting each other through the year. But the highlight of all this was our mission trip to Albania. It was an honour to meet the church in that nation, and especially touching to witness how God was working powerfully to save his people there.

This year has been such a heart-expanding, mind-stretching and horizon-broadening experience! It was an honour to work with Sputnik – especially with Jonny and Jemma Mellor, who gave me endless encouragement and support to grow, push past my comfort zone, and become an artist that speaks into culture with relevant, risky and kingdom-minded work.

In many ways, this year was just the beginning of that journey as a poet, but I have that goal in mind going forward, as I dedicate myself both to the craft of writing and the community of writers.

As I do that, I hope I can leave a trail…

Tanyaradzwa’s book is available from most major outlets or through her website. If you’re interested in starting the next Sputnik internship in September, get the application form here – but be quick!

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Artists: How to Get Involved with Sputnik

Artists Get Involved Sputnik Faith Art Joshua Coleman

1. Join the Online Conversation

Nothing beats real life, face-to-face camaraderie, but joining the online conversation is a good place to start with Sputnik. We update the website at least once a week with thinkpieces, features and news from our network and beyond.

We’ve been writing for a while – so there’s plenty in our ‘Think’ section to sink your teeth into. Try our series on ‘Beauty & Art’, or Sputnik founder Jonny Mellor‘s thoughts on whether Christians are called to influence culture. If you’re a writer of any kind yourself, why not join the conversation by writing something for us to share?

We keep things updated on Facebook and Twitter too, so be sure to follow us.

Sputnik Hubs Faith Art Visual
Birmingham Sputnik Hub

2. Get Involved in a Hub

Our Sputnik Hubs are opportunities for like-minded comrades, co-conspirators and collaborators to meet: an essential thing for any artistic practitioner, and perhaps even more so for Christians, who can feel particularly isolated in their creative activity.

Hubs meet on a termly basis. Usually, guest artists present their projects, we discuss issues of faith and art and we all get a chance to showcase what we’re working on. Our hope is that genuine friendships form to help you in your practice more broadly.

Join our mailing list to get a monthly email about Hubs and any other meetups. Our Hubs are in Birmingham and Bedford, but many more are in the pipeline. You can register your interest based on your location here.

Sputnik Patrons Faith Art Anthology Namiko Lee
Sputnik Poetry & Visuals Vol. 1

3. Get Hold of Work from Sputnik Artists

Finally, as well as getting to know one other, we think it’s important to provide an audience for each other too. To be part of Sputnik really means to be soaking in, getting challenged by and ultimately supporting the exceptional work being made in and around our network.

To this end, every 6 months, we compile some of the music, poetry and visual art from artists connected to Sputnik and put it together into a coffee table book. These are not for sale, but are available to anyone who subscribes to our Sputnik Patrons scheme at anything from £5 a month.

The funds all go towards supporting artistic projects, in some cases with direct funding, in other cases by paying for design, promotion, print/film/music production or more. Of course, you can apply for this support yourself, but we hope you’ll also spare a fiver a month to support fellow practitioners this way. And if you want a better idea about who’s out there in the network, start with our ‘Discover’ page.

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Hey, Artists: You Don’t Need to Justify Your Desire to Make Things

In Sputnik circles, some things go without saying: but occasionally, we ought to clarify those ‘unsaid’ things for people’s benefit. One of those is that artists don’t need to justify their desire to make things.

We’re taking you at face value. We take your artistry seriously, in and of itself. Some of you may shrug, but we so often have conversations with artists who feel the need to place their art in a ‘worthier’ context, like social justice, mental health, worship, or of course, evangelism. The conversations at our gatherings so often seem to revolve around permission.

I fully endorse having a good framework behind our art. But maybe we need a mental palette-cleanser from time to time: to be reminded that art is a human good, and that it has a function without being pseudo-spiritualized.

Art is a Simple Good

On one very simple level, as Christians we are free to enjoy making art. Think of it like food: God has created a vast map of gastronomic variety, and we’re free to combine things, roast things, explore things and to enjoy the delicious outcomes. He didn’t have to make food to be good; it could have just been functional. Similarly, there is a vast spectrum of visual and sonic possibility in our world, and God allows us to mess around with sound and light and enjoy the outcomes, simply because they are good.

Our favourite Scottish hyperrealist painter Ally Gordon puts it like this:

Creativity is the first thing God chooses to record about his character: “In the beginning God created” (Gen 1:1)… From the beginning God is interested in the aesthetic dimensions of living, declaring that the trees are not only “good for food” but first, “pleasing to the eye” (Gen 2:9).

As those made in God’s image, the act of good creativity is merely a very human experience and the artist should not feel a need to justify his art by scribbling bible verses in the bottom right hand corner of her painting or crow-barring a gospel message into his script.

And like anything that is good, art is good for sharing – or as Ally puts it in Beyond Air Guitar, “gifts are given for communal benefit and not just for individuals”. It seems to me a fitting part of the Christian life, to make things that deepen our experience of God’s creation, and share them with people. I was avoiding saying ‘beauty’ here; but, assuming we see beauty as more than a superficial aestheticism, it is a good thing to bring out the beauty and the mystery of life. Not just a good thing – it’s part of our call to stewardship of the world.

Yes, if we concentrated on this to the detriment of all else in our life, it might be unhealthy. Yes, art can be much more than this too. Yes, we will have other things we’re hoping to provoke or accomplish through our art. But on the other hand, we can take simple joy in making, the same way you can take joy in eating (and sharing) food that you’ve cooked, or grown.

Art has a Function Already

So the act of good creativity is a very human experience. And if you put humans together in the same space, the fruit of that human creativity is culture. We don’t even have to try to make it; we just can’t help ourselves. Practical needs lead to cooperation, and then BOOM: dancing, football, metaphysics, whisky, architecture. These things are all our way of figuring out what we mean to each other, rituals of belonging, a yearning for the oneness of the Godhead; our way of digging deeper into this weird thing called existence, and community.

Some churches love to talk about being counter-cultural, drawing the battle lines between us – the exiles – and ‘the culture’. But those lines can be incredibly unhelpful, too, because we are part of our culture, no matter what we do. Culture isn’t a top-down, passive enterprise. It’s the sound of neighbourhoods, of contribution and collaboration and compromise. And we are not outside observers. If we dislike what we see in our culture, we are complicit.

Good creativity is a very human experience; and culture is simply the fruit of human community.

No group of humans alive has ever not made culture, even when the immediate needs are still pressing, if cave paintings are anything to go by. Culture, and art, is far from peripheral. After all, ‘belonging’ is bang in the middle of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and in practical terms, that means shared culture. Dutch art historian and jazz critic Hans Rookmaaker puts it this way in the spectacularly on-the-nose Art Needs No Justification:

Just as plumbing is totally indispensable in our homes, yet we are rarely aware of it, so art fulfils an important function in our lives, in creating the atmosphere in which we live, in giving us the words to speak, in offering us the framework in which we can see and grasp things… even without our noticing it.

If we need to talk about the function of art, it already has one. What art means to us is not really found in the individual maker, the auteur or the prophetic genius. It’s found in the receiving of art, in the shared cultural experience. There may well be a ‘message’ that comes through it, but that is not in the artist’s control. As Rookmaaker puts it, “even the best art makes for bad preaching.” I might equally say, good preaching makes for bad art.

Art Works, No Matter How Small

At most Sputnik events, aside from those who are longing for permission, we also meet people who have discounted their own gifts altogether, or feel they don’t know how to pick up their craft again, or who are discouraged that pursuing art won’t lead to worthwhile success.

Many of us set high standards for ourselves, ultimately doing nothing rather than risking something mediocre. Maybe we’re aware that, if there are elements of Christian faith in our work, we won’t be taken seriously in the wider world unless we’re ferociously good.

Sputnik exists for these people, who want to pursue excellence in their craft. But sometimes we need to ditch the weighty expectations and loosen ourselves up to just create. Making culture is what we do. The only ‘wrong’ way to approach art is to not make it, or to keep it entirely to yourself.

I keep coming back to the food analogy, but you don’t stop cooking food just because you won’t get a full-time chef gig out of it. Don’t deny yourself the joy of making, and don’t deny other people the chance to be blessed by it. Even if it’s just for your friends, even if it’s never commercially viable, art does what it’s been created to do: it announces we’re alive, it expresses joy in God’s creation, and it reminds us we belong to each other.

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Kintsugi and the Art of Embracing Failure in Your Artistic Process

Kintsugi pot © tsugi.de

We are constantly under pressure to succeed and do well, to meet expectations and standards- at school, university, at work, in sport and in relationships. When we don’t meet up to our own or others’ standards, it can be hard to handle and can lead to low self-esteem and a lack of self-worth.

As an academic high achiever, I have always set the bar high for myself. The flipside of perfectionism is that I’m never fully content with what I’ve achieved and have a tendency to get frustrated with myself when I make silly mistakes or forget something. Becoming aware of my own limits and acknowledging that things don’t always go to plan has been difficult. I’d always wanted to be an artist, but a period of full-time dedication to this endeavour resulted in disappointment, isolation and a lack of creative drive and motivation. It’s taken time to start accepting that maybe being an artist, for me, doesn’t look the way I thought it would, that a change of direction is not a failure.

God has been gently challenging me lately about all this — reminding me that he expects nothing more of me than surrender. That academic or professional success are not targets He has set for me, that He is only interested in my heart. It’s only when I stop trying, give up and let go- when I admit defeat and reach the end of my abilities — when I well and truly fail- only then am I really where he wants me. Only when my pride in my own endeavours has been properly broken apart can I really accept and understand his love and grace. Knowing that my value in His eyes is as high as it’s ever been when I’m as low as I’ve ever been, and letting that shape the way I see myself, I am slowly learning to be gentler towards myself and to forgive my own mistakes more readily. Where my natural response is shame and frustration, I am trying to be more accepting of imperfection.

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. 10 That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

2 Corinthians 12:9–10

My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

Psalm 73:26

I have been trying to explore some of these thoughts creatively- so far my experiments are unresolved, inconsistent and unfinished. But I have decided that that is ok, and perhaps appropriate. I am exploring what a difference it makes if I give myself permission to do things badly or at least imperfectly. To not worry if my work is sometimes mediocre, amateurish or unoriginal. Surely it is better to be creating something unexceptional than to do nothing out of fear that it won’t be good enough? The practice and process of creating is the only way to develop these skills.

Kintsugi pot © tsugi.de
Kintsugi pot © tsugi.de

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. Similarly, Christ’s redemption increases our value, his grace and mercy being the gold repairing our brokenness.

Surely it is better to be creating something unexceptional than to do nothing, out of fear that it won’t be good enough? The practice and process of creating is the only way to develop these skills.

With this as my inspiration I am currently working on a series of canvases, which I am calling ‘Riven’, as a way of exploring the themes of failure and acceptance, damage and repair, beauty and brokenness. Each canvases’ surface has been cut or punctured in some way, some I then ‘repair’ using materials such as silk and gold thread to accentuate the value and beauty of the healing process. Others I am leaving broken, allowing the cracks and fissures to stand alone as my artistic impact on the canvas.

Sarah Ann Davies Riven
Element of ‘Riven’ canvas series, Sarah Davies

Kintsugi poem:

I’m a broken pot,
cracked and shattered
Unable to contain, to hold

You gather me up
Reassemble and repair
Fusing my fissures with gold

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LifeBox Theatre and the StageWrite festival of new writing

StageWrite Festival Theatre Sputnik Faith Art

Phil and Harri Mardlin are the founders of LifeBox Theatre company, based in Bedford. Both relative latecomers to the theatrical world (at least, by the industry’s standard) they’ve nonetheless carved out a successful niche for themselves by switching between several different hats: communication training in businesses, education and healthcare; agency-style management of other actors; and of course, your meat-and-potatoes gigs acting, writing and directing.

Sputnik Patrons helped to fund the 2018 StageWrite festival, run by LifeBox Theatre – a festival for new writers which Phil and Harri have built from the ground themselves.

Sputnik Patrons Promo Phil Harri Mardlin
(L-R) Phil and Harri Mardlin.

PHIL AND HARRI exemplify the Sputnik credo: an abundantly creative, affable duo, operating at a professional level; embedded in their industry, but also dedicated to their local environment, Bedford, where they lead a Sputnik Hub thriving with poets, painters and other actors.

For Phil and Harri, work, life and faith commingle every day; with humility, they pour themselves out serving a community that is rarely on the church’s radar. And by embodying a person onstage, they can challenge an audience to new empathy and perspective, without being heavy-handed (a well-known maxim of good writing: show, don’t tell).

“We have an opportunity to be embedded in our industry, and to give people a positive experience – whatever the stage of their career.”

In conversation with the Mardlins, it’s clear that they have a deep-felt, nerdy love of their artform, and an unabashed desire for the community around it to flourish. One particular passion project of theirs shows this in crystal clarity: StageWrite, which is run in collaboration with No Loss Productions.

StageWrite: a theatre festival focused on new and undiscovered voices

“STAGEWRITE IS A festival of new writing,” Harri explains. “We invite scripts from any writers, emerging or established, to give them the opportunity to see their work performed by professional actors, in front of an audience, and to gain an understanding of how their work really sits in that context.”

“It’s the most valuable thing, to see your work in front of you, being performed by professionals,” adds Phil, principally a writer/director himself. “We bring a sense of what it might look like in a fully-realised, professional production. You realise, for example, that those 25 lines of dialogue you wrote – an actor can do with one look.

“Out of the new writing festivals that exist, not many are offering that. The feedback we get from writers is that it’s hugely valuable: they learn to hone their voice, to get their message across.”

StageWrite is a fundamentally generous endeavour on the Mardlins’ part. Not only has it been self-funded for the last four years, but in its very essence, it exists to do good for the industry, to show a helping hand to all writers, whatever their background; to encourage people, and amplify unheard voices. It has immediate benefits in some cases: three pieces from previous StageWrite years have gone on to full production and/or touring. But it also takes the long-term view that to bring Gospel life to any community means inhabiting it fully, not as a ‘project’ but as a group of fellow humans in a notoriously difficult and discouraging line of work.

StageWrite, self-funded for the last four years, is a fundamentally generous endeavour on the Mardlins’ part.

Harri considers how to summarise the project. “StageWrite represents a greenhouse, to grow new theatre, which is important. But it also provides us an opportunity to be embedded in that industry, and to give people a positive experience at our festival: directors, actors, writers – whatever stage of their career. We want to live out our professional relationships with people well. We want to honour people.”

StageWrite LifeBox Theatre Sputnik Faith Art
Performers rehearse with LifeBox Theatre.

The Christ-like art of rehumanizing everyone in the room

IN A WAY, StageWrite has at its heart the same golden thread that runs through all of Phil and Harri’s work: communication. Whether they are teaching people how to communicate in a corporate setting, collaborating with actors to bring a play to life, or interacting directly with an audience, the Mardlins help people both to speak, and to listen: a distinctly Christ-like art of re-humanizing everyone in the room, showing us the face of our neighbour.

Phil: “You need to learn, as a writer, to capture your own vision so clearly that any director and a set of actors can pick up your script, and they’ll communicate what it is that you intended to communicate.

“We invite writers to come to the rehearsal of their piece, but they’re not allowed to feed into it; that’s really difficult as a writer – you’re sitting there, thinking ‘That’s not what I meant!’ But actually, that’s how the industry works: the process of submitting a script to a professional company, and having to step back.”

The same golden thread runs through all of Phil and Harri’s work: communication.

This year, our Sputnik Patrons scheme is helping Phil and Harri to fund StageWrite. After honing the list of submitted scripts down to just four, they’ll select one to take beyond just rehearsal into a more fully-realised production – and pay the actors who are taking part.

“Theatre is like no other experience,” Harri smiles. “It can’t happen without an audience; there’s an energy in live performance that doesn’t happen in other situations or mediums. You work with the audience, and off the audience as an actor: it’s an extraordinary experience that can have a very far-reaching, lasting impact.”

Help us to support StageWrite, and other artists like Phil and Harri, by becoming a monthly Patron of Sputnik.

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Mr Ekow explains why artists shouldn’t rely on inspiration

Artists Inspiration Mr Ekow Sputnik Arts

London rapper Mr Ekow (AKA Chris Gaisie) kicked off a new vlog for independent artists in January, and since then, it’s been going from strength to strength. After dealing with topics like collaboration, networking and performance, this week he’s addressing the whole idea of inspiration – and I think that this one is especially relevant.

The basic point that Mr Ekow raises is simple: inspiration is great, but we cannot wait around for it to hit us. Yes, there are times when we’ll pick up the pen, open the laptop, turn on the camera (whatever it may be) and it’s like we’re swimming in a slipstream of creative energy. However, we cannot rely on those times. Instead, we need to take a far more holistic approach to inspiration if we are to develop in our practice. He gives 2 really helpful tips to help us with this:

Make sure you are staying inspired

Making art is not just about the moments when we’re making art. We need to live our whole lives in a way that will enable us to create more effectively and increase the likelihood of getting inspired. This could involve engaging in art generally, whether it’s in your own artform or not, spending time purposefully with nature, or ensuring you seek out the right people and conversations.

For me, this year, I’ve decided to be much more purposeful in my reading, but especially in the area of poetry. I’ve always had an appreciation for poetry, but, if I’m being honest, I’ve never been able to dig very deep into this artform to really unearth the treasures that I know are hidden underneath the surface. So, one of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2018 was to learn how to read poems. I’m not intending to become a poet, in the classical sense of the word, but I’m already finding this exercise helpful in fueling my other creative enterprises.

Another thing that I’ve found helpful in this area is logging ideas. One of my most valued possessions is a particular lyrics book: brown moleskin cover; half-mutilated spine; page after page of verses, story ideas, observations, and random thoughts. On the top right hand corner of most pages are lists of multi syllable rhymes. I’ve developed some of these fragments into songs that I’ve recorded or performed live, but most of it will never leave the pages of my lyric book. But it all matters. Simply having the book on the shelf has meant that I’m always looking for new ideas to fill its pages, which means I’m fueling possible future moments of inspiration or simply giving myself something to draw on, if someone ever says: ‘I need a rap verse or a short story. And I need it now!’

Mr Ekow’s advice is to find the things that lead to inspiration for you and take time out of your week specifically to do whatever that is. It all might sound very technical and pre-meditated, but I think he puts it best and most succinctly when he wraps this all up in one simple instruction: ‘Enjoy life’.

Have you got so caught up in making art that you’ve forgotten to enjoy life? If so, you’re likely to struggle to get inspired, and struggle to create any work that engages with the world around you.

Commit to creativity

Building in patterns of life, conducive to inspiration is one thing, but you need to carve out an outlet as well. Mr Ekow suggests putting a time in your diary to create, and to follow through on this, whether you feel inspired or not.

Of all that he says in the video, this is the point that resonates with me most. To make art, you have to make art. To make powerful, engaging, wonder inspiring, heart grabbing, beautiful art, you need to make lots of art (most of which won’t deserve any of those adjectives!) And you need to do this whether you feel like it or not. Whether you feel like you’re on fire, or out cold. Whether you feel like the Holy Spirit is whispering in your ear or you feel like God has gone on holiday.

Put a time in your diary to create, and follow through on this, whether you feel inspired or not

Huw Evans told me recently of a time years ago when he decided he wanted to improve as a writer. He was married, working a full time job and had 4 kids, so there were certainly other things vying for his attention. However, he decided to start somewhere and set aside 2 hours from 11am-1pm every Saturday to write. Large portions of these writing sessions were spent staring at a blank piece of paper, but he committed to it and disciplined himself to fill up those blank pages. Now, decades later, he is about to release his first poetry collection and has other books in the pipeline too. He committed to creativity and it is paying off.

Are you committing to your creativity? When are you carving out time to create, regardless of inspiration?

Mr Ekow sums all of this up perfectly at the end of the video:

‘We get so afraid of creating outside of these inspiration moments that we end up not creating anything… don’t wait for inspiration to strike; make sure that you are being inspired weekly, commit to creativity and perfect your craft to enable your art.’

Thanks so much Chris for being so generous with your wisdom. Subscribe to his Youtube channel to keep up with future vlogs. Trust me, the riches will just keep coming!

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The Financial Insecurity of Artists Debunks the Myth of Self-Sufficiency

Sputnik: The Financial Insecurity of Artists Debunks the Myth of Self-Sufficiency

An artist can lead something of a hand to mouth existence. The stereotype is the starving artist, labouring on their work until their fingers stiffen up completely from cold or malnutrition. Perhaps Von Gogh springs to mind, dying in poverty, having only sold one painting, as something of a necessary prelude to his post-mortem acclaim.

I hope that few of you who are reading this would identify too readily with poor old Vincent, but behind the stereotype, there is a grain of truth in regards to the often uncertain financial position many artists find themselves in, if they are looking to pursue self-initiated projects for large portions of their working week.

I’m constantly impressed by the innovative ways that artists find to fund their work. However, even when these methods are successful, this is still a difficult path that will often make it unclear where the next paycheque is coming from.

Financial insecurity is a fact for even the most skilled artists

Duncan Stewart touched on this in his excellent presentation at Woodside Church last week. Duncan is a painter and sculptor from Port Elizabeth, South Africa, and he talked to us about one of his most successful projects: an exhibition inspired by and put on to coincide with the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. It was an exceptional project full of nuanced spiritual challenges, provocative calls for justice and an intimidating level of craftsmanship and skill. It was also very successful, gaining national media interest and, importantly for the Stewart family, proving itself financially viable. He sold the entire exhibition on the opening night. For many artists, this is the stuff of dreams.

Piece from Duncan Stewarts Football: A Dialect of Hope Exhibition

However, he ended by observing that this was now 8 years ago. Subsequent projects have not reached this level of success and he admitted to finding this frustrating. He, like so many other artists, lives without job security or a guarantee that this will pay the bills month on month. Duncan vulnerably shared the difficulties of this situation. This causes worry. This causes tears.

It was revealing to see that even those of us with exceptional skill and great determination can still find ourselves in this position. If you are pursuing your art as a means of income and finding that this is not leading you to Damien Hurst/Kanye West levels of prosperity and financial security, be encouraged! It doesn’t mean you’re not any good. It doesn’t even mean that you’re doing something wrong. This goes with the terrain. Obviously, we do need to listen to our circumstances and adapt accordingly but it is very worth noting that this way of living is shared by the majority of artists, even artists who would be regarded as very successful.

Painting from Duncan Stewarts Football: A Dialect of Hope Exhibition

Financial insecurity carries an unexpected lesson with it

This is encouraging on its own but Duncan ended his presentation by completely flipping our perspective. This was not an unhelpful drawback of the artists’ predicament, he told us. He considered it a huge blessing. Why? Because it led to a greater dependency on Jesus.

It would be easy to write this off as a trite platitude. The kind of thing you have to say to keep getting church gigs. However, it wasn’t a throwaway comment; Duncan had modelled this dependency all through his story. On his artistic journey, at every stage, he had been listening to God for guidance, praying earnestly for help and obeying what he felt God was telling him to do. This was not just at moments of crisis either, but this lived-out dependency on God was built into his everyday life.

Those of you who don’t have a regular 9-to-5 contract have got something to teach the rest of the body of Christ

Most telling for me was a moment in the Q & A. Duncan mentioned something about his ‘quiet times’ and then commented that setting aside such time was a challenge as he has four children. I joked that, in that situation, quiet times wouldn’t just be a challenge but impossible, taking the phrase literally (ie., it is impossible to be quiet in a four-child household). Duncan immediately struck me with a pretty stern glare, and clarified that this was not the case. Quiet times (ie. devotional times of prayer and Bible reading) may be challenging, but they certainly weren’t impossible, and he made sure that he had them daily.

For those of you looking to earn a living from your art, who don’t have a regular 9-to-5 contract, I want to encourage you. You’ve got something to teach the rest of the body of Christ as you navigate the insecurities of your daily life. For most people, myself included, the security of a contract and set amounts of money deposited monthly into our bank accounts, is seen as a blessing, and in many ways it is, but it certainly means that we are less likely to fall back, desperate and needy on Jesus to look to provide for us. This arrangement can often trick us into thinking that we are the ultimate providers for ourselves and our families, and that we’ve got it sorted. I’ve got to work hard to remember that this is a lie. The Bible tells us that all we think we own has been loaned to us from God to use for his kingdom, and our security is always in his hands. This reality is much more readily accessible for a freelance graphic designer, say, than a shool teacher.

Security can trick us into thinking that we are the ultimate providers for ourselves and our families

So, whatever schemes you are cooking up to make ends meet while still aiming to maintain your artistic integrity, Duncan’s model is a great one to follow. Acknowledge and embrace your dependency on God, and demonstrate that dependency in bringing it all to God in prayer. Jesus said this:

‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?…do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.’ (Mt 6:25-34)

What do we do instead? ‘seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.’ (Mt 6:33). Duncan told us that this was one of his favourite verses. No surprise there, then.

Sculptures from Duncan Stewarts Football: A Dialect of Hope Exhibition
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Huw Evans on the Dangers of Rhyme

‘Fundamentally, rhyme is dangerous in poetry!’

I have had several animated conversations with my good friend Huw Evans about the pros and cons of rhyme in poetry. On the whole, The pros have come from me, the cons from Huw. I recognise that it is hard for me to approach this objectively when my favourite artform, rap, is synoymous with this particular poetic device. To rap is to rhyme. I was never going to roll over on this one.

However, even with that bias, over the years, Huw has talked to me round when it comes to rhyme and written poetry and he has very helpfully put together a simple little video outlining his beef with rhyming and justifying such extreme statements as the one quoted above. It’s here, and it’ll take a mere 5 minutes of your time…

If you’ve made it to this paragraph without watching the video, I’ll give you a taster, before you scroll up again. Huw’s basic argument goes like this. Rhyme clearly has a function in poetry but it can cause more problems than it solves, especially when it comes to ‘meandering meaning and mangled syntax’. Poets should resist the urge for the easy rhyme, and if they find their meaning being driven by the rhyme, or it leading to a particularly ‘grotesque word order’, they should search harder for a different rhyme or change the phrase they’re trying to rhyme with. In short, a decent rule of thumb is:

‘If… a rhyme seems to be taking away from the meaning or needs a weird word ordering, get rid of it!’

With all that said, though, if you’d like some balance to the argument, or perhaps, like me, if you have such a connection to sonic symmetry in your lyrical diet, that all of this anti-rhyme talk makes you feel slightly uneasy, let’s end with something to restore your faith in ryhme. In short, kids, be careful of rhyme unless you can rhyme like this 😉

Huw is releasing a poetry collection in late Spring, which Sputnik is supporting as part of our Patrons Scheme, to hear more from Huw about his work or to find out more about the patronage, check out the Sputnik Patrons page.

 

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New Illuminated Bible by Dana Tanamachi

Joining the recent trend for tastefully-designed, hardback Bibles is the stunning ESV Illuminated Bible, with over a hundred full-page illustrations (in gold, no less) by renowned Seattle-based illustrator Dana Tanamachi. While obviously a project for the Christian market, Tanamachi’s previous work has been featured by Google, The Wall Street Journal, and plenty of others.

Tanamachi and her team describe the seven-month project, commissioned by Crossway, as a throwback to the Middle Age-practice of illumination – the painstaking illustration of Bible manuscripts typically undertaken by monks, which fell out of favour and practice after the Reformation and invention of the printing press.

You can see more about it in the video, below:

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Making Work That Requires Work

A few months ago, a much publicized national survey revealed Banksy’s ‘Girl With Balloon’ to be Britain’s most loved artwork. Firmly beating the Lowrys, Turners and Hockneys of this world, the result caused much eye rolling and consternation, particularly from newspaper arts correspondents.

This was the evidence they’d been looking for that artistic taste is finally dead and that Britain, culturally speaking, has well and truly gone to the dogs. It must be noted that a lot of the outrage was pretty reactionary considering that the survey in question was carried out to promote a Samsung TV and comprised of only 2000 participants. However, an interesting trend emerged among the various critiques: ‘Girl with balloon’ is simple and obvious, but art should be more than that.

‘Girl With Balloon’, Banksy

Jonathan Jones, writing in The Guardian put it like this:

‘Real art is elusive, complex, ambiguous and often difficult. Actually, remove that qualifier. It is always difficult.’

Now, I’ll stay out of the Banksy argument, as I have no strong feelings either way about that particular cheeky Bristolian scamp. However, I would tend to agree with Jones’ description of ‘real art’. In fact, this has been one of my main gripes with a lot of the typical output from within the Christian subculture. ‘Christian art’, as it is known in its modern sense, is often one dimensional, easily readable and instantly reducible into a simple sentiment or teaching point. Whether anyone can declare authoritatively that something is real art or not, this stuff does often seem less like a deep exploration of the nooks and crannies of existence, and more like a car advert or a party political broadcast.

As we conclude our series on the Old Testament prophets then, I find it heartily reassuring that there are at least hints in biblical art practice of Jones’ ‘real art’. It’s true that Isaiah et al had pretty didactic intentions, and they were certainly not locating the meaning of their work in the mind of their audience. However, their performances were deliberately ambiguous and as they drew their audiences in, they gave them considerable work to do. As mentioned earlier in this series, Jesus was just the same in making his parables difficult and, to some, completely opaque. The Bible records many people in both cases, who simply didn’t get it. And this wasn’t a failing of Jesus or the prophets.

A Justifiable Desire For Clarity

As Christians, we hold certain truths about the world so dear and we consider the stakes so high in other people understanding and subscribing to those truths, that clarity of communication is very important for us. In a Sunday service, everything must be clear. The sermon must be clear. The notices must be clear. Even the worship songs must be clear. Therefore, it is no surprise that this tendency is transferred to the church’s expectations of its artists.

Paul asks the Colossian church to pray for him ‘that I would make the gospel clear, which is how I ought to speak.’ (Col 4:4) And so the concensus has been that it’s not just Paul who has such an obligation. It’s how all Christians should speak. All the time. Even if they happen to be film makers or poets or photographers or dancers.

But Paul is not the only model of communication found in the Bible. God understands that clarity is key if you are talking to people who want to listen, but if that desire is lacking, it doesn’t matter how clear you tell people something, they simply won’t hear it. This is the situation that both the Old Testament Prophets and Jesus found themselves in. It’s also where we find ourselves if we want to communicate something deep and significant of the Kingdom of God to ears tuned to the frequencies of the kingdom of the world.

For us then, making work that requires work from our audience is not evidence of us being obtuse or obscure. It’s biblical.

Communicating through ambiguity

But surely we can’t just leave our audience to come to whatever conclusions they want to. How can we make difficult art that still nudges people closer to Jesus? Well, once again, Ezekiel helps us out.

In Ezekiel 12, Ezekiel acts out Israel’s journey into exile, with God providing the stage directions. It is, in many ways a simple performance, but its meaning is kept hidden from the casual observer. There was to be no running commentary (a peculiarity of Ezekiel’s calling was that he was to be silent except when there was a divine command to speak- Ezekiel 3:26-27) and no programme with explanatory notes. In fact, as Ezekiel went to bed after his successful opening (and only) night, his audience had absolutely no idea what he was up to. It was only the next morning that God told him what to do:

12:8- 10- ‘In the morning the word of theLordcame to me:“Son of man, did not the Israelites, that rebellious people, ask you, ‘What are you doing?’

“Say to them…’

God didn’t care too much about the onlookers who grabbed 5 minutes of the show, ate some popcorn and went on their way. He designed the whole show for the questioners- those who would let themselves be drawn in. Ezekiel wasn’t delivering a sermon, he was starting a conversation.

For us, we must be prepared to make work like this. Work that can’t be digested in one gulp. Work that may befuddle, frustrate or even offend. Work that requires work. But we must also be prepared to pick up the conversations that our work begins.

And here lies the challenge. If we are to take the Old Testament Prophets seriously as artistic role models, we have to take on board that we do have a message to communicate. God has a way of seeing the world that he wants us to share and encourage others to adopt. Not every piece we ever make will do this, but, if we’re to take our prophetic calling seriously, some of our work will. We don’t need to straitjacket our work or blunt its edges to make this happen, but we probably will need to be prepared to enter into conversations about our work with people who ask ‘what are you doing?’

Fortunately, Joel (Wilson, that is, not the son of Pethuel) has already written a brilliant, concise post on this already, so I’ll direct you towards that if you’d like some tips on how to do this.

Let’s close this series though by switching testaments. In 1 Corinthians 14:1, Paul writes:

‘Eagerly desire spiritual gifts, especially the gift of prophecy’ 

Yes, he was speaking mainly in the context of Christian meetings to Christians looking to communicate God’s word to other Christians or to seekers. However, as we’ve seen, in the context of the whole Bible, it wouldn’t be unfair to take the gift of prophecy a bit more broadly than that.

Are you eagerly desiring the gift of prophecy? Are you prepared to take up the call to be a prophet to your generation and culture?

I think the world needs some more Ezekiels, Joels, Isaiahs and Jeremiahs right now. Perhaps God wants you to be one of them.

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Interpreting The Times

Some of the Old Testament prophets dabbled in the performance arts, that’s for sure. However, not all of them.

For most of these guys, it was a matter of delivering a message to the people with good old fashioned words. Spoken or written. When we hear of prophets today, our minds often drift to the Nostradamus mode of prophecy- predicting the future, and that type of prophecy was certainly in the biblical prophets’ repertoire. However, they were often just as concerned with revealing God’s character to people, reminding them of God’s commands and promises, and also interpreting present events in the light of these.

One key aspect of their ministry was seeing layers of meaning behind the very natural events that were unfolding around them or even happening to them. So, Hosea’s wife’s adultery was seen as representative of the unfaithfulness of the entire people of Israel. Similarly, Joel witnessed a devastating locust plague and saw it as symbolic of the ‘great and dreadful day of the Lord’ (Joel 2:31) and therefore presented the crisis as a call to repent.

Jesus expected all his followers to keep their eyes open and see what was really going on behind what was really going on (e.g. Luke 12:54-59). But this expectation must be even more pronounced for his followers who make art. After all, artists are always opening up new layers of meaning to the subjects they attend to. It’s kind of what we do.

As I was reading through Joel in my Bible reading plan this summer, I was reminded of all this. Unfortunately, there weren’t any ravenous grasshoppers munching their way through my city, for me to muse on. However, there were a few hiccups with the bins.

As my fellow Brummies will be fully aware, the bin men went on strike this summer. Bin bags filled pavements all over the city as one of the most basic expectations of first world civilisation, regular refuse collections, fell by the wayside for the best part of 4 months.

It was funny, because I hadn’t thought about any deeper meaning to all of this (rather that is was a massive pain), until, in a church leaders meeting, two of my friends were discussing the symbolism of this whole fiasco. Not to be outdone, I put my mind to penning a verse or two. It probably won’t be pored over in 3000 years and it certainly isn’t God’s infallible word, but I’m pretty pleased with the outcome, which I’ve included above (thanks to Chris Donald for video and sound work).

What’s going on in your life/family/community/city/nation/world that God may be enabling you to interpret to your audience?

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The School Of Prophets: Reflections On An Arts Manifesto

“This is a book about some of the most disturbing people who have ever lived…” So begins Abraham Heschel’s paradigm shifting book The Prophets. He continues:

“The prophet is human, yet he employs notes one octave too high for our ears. He experiences moments that defy our understanding. He is neither “a singing saint” nor “a moralizing poet,” but an assaulter of the mind. Often his words begin to burn where conscience ends. [. . . ] The prophet is an iconoclast, challenging the apparently holy, revered and awesome. Beliefs cherished as certainties, institutions endowed with supreme sanctity, he exposes as scandalous pretentious.” *

In truth, I had adopted the biblical prophets as my guides long before I ever sat down to reason out why. I met plenty of Christians in the early noughties who were uncertain and anxious about what a Christian artist ought to look like; I ignored such discussion and dived after Ezekiel (my favourite) in his wake of woe and madness.

It was the end of the noughties when I decided to sit down and sketch this sort of approach out into a manifesto. I did this partly because others found the approach compelling, and I thought describing some principles might be helpful. But the greater reason was that the idea of the school of prophets had taken hold of my mind. The biblical prophets were not all loners. We often read of prophetic communities (eg 2 Kings 2:1-18) who together sought mystical experiences of YHWH, and embarked together on their strange prophetic activities. I had a notion that perhaps some like-minded artists of faith might similarly work together and create jarring public spectacles to interrupt the numbing rhythms of the broken present.

And so we did. There was performance art in front of the giant screens and coercive advertising campaigns. We played music on buses to disrupt the public numbness, and on monuments to call the images and powers into question. The manifesto kept us very much focused on aesthetic actions in public spaces (such as the prophets seemed to do). It was, on the other hand, very much against the safe containment of art in the abstract echo-chambers of cyberspace, or the domestication of art into the capitalist lounges of record shops, art galleries and billboards, and the mythos of the aspiring artist. It was also against art as a thing prescribed by empire for introspective moments, to sooth unsettled emotions while the world itself withers. Certainly not! Our art was to be offered directly to the everyday public in a manner that promoted immediate public discourse.

All this finally culminated in our participation in the No More Page Three campaign, which – after several years of slogging – finally succeeded in persuading The Sun to remove its soft porn images from the paper.

After this (or even before, really), the loose collective dispersed. People got married, had children, moved to other cities, and so on. I, who had been the chief organiser (and quite unsuited to organising anything), collapsed exhausted. And the manifesto went on the shelf, where I still occasionally glance over and wonder about dusting it off.

To reflect on this brief experiment: it was hard. Doing subversive art in public space is emotionally draining. Taking a public stance on an issue is costly. Aiming art exclusively at public life, to the exclusion of inner life, is unwise – as Jeremiah would have told me if I’d listened. Although others sometimes took the initiative, I was mostly the driving creative force. I was hoping to create a structure within which others felt empowered to thrive and speak with their own voice, and launch their own creative actions. This happened occasionally, but was pretty rare.

On the other hand, it was fun. We bonded. We lit up spaces with discussion and merriment that were otherwise numb and atomised. We saw small changes in response to our actions. We made new friends and connected with new people. One pair connected, got married and now have a third child on the way. We were all somehow enlarged and changed, and various people were, I think, positively influenced.

If I were to re-ignite such plotting, rooted in the example of the school of prophets, I suppose I would work harder at two things: first, a slow, sustainable pace. And, second, a prayerful common life.

I don’t think it entered our minds that one ought not to emulate the prophets. It never occurred to me to think of the Hebrew prophets simply as verbatim mouth-pieces for God (like Mohammed, say). I think if we try to capture a sense of them in their own moment, we find social, cultural and political activists working out of their Yahwist faith, and toward their Yahwist hope. They had no idea that they (or their disciples) were writing canonised religious texts. They were faithfully responding to the world as they found it in their own day. If someone decides to canonise your babblings in a few hundred years, that’s their business. Ours is to speak faithfully into the hope crisis of the present. God help us if we don’t.

One of the curious and marvelous outcomes of the experiment, for me, was the very mixed group that formed around it: some Christians and some not. I think one of the reasons (besides canonical anxiety) that people aren’t sure of how to emulate the prophets, is that their religious paradigms are quite different to ours. The prophets didn’t really try to “convert” people in the religious sense. They certainly called people to right living and authentic worship, but the Ninevites, for example, didn’t convert to Judaism, as such, neither did Nebuchadnezzar, or Naaman. As I reflect back on our little collective, it occurs to me that those who engaged most deeply with the Manifesto itself, were not Christians. And indeed, they helped shape and refine it. Non Christians took part in our actions, and we as a collective threw our weight behind secular movements (such as No More Page Three). Meanwhile, it was sometimes Christians who criticised us most fiercely. How did all the boundaries get so jumbled?

For now I’ll just reflect that that was how it went: being salt and light in this sort of paradigm felt a lot more like a mutual discipleship with others toward God, than the usual sorts of images (us in a boat, holding a hand out to the drowning folks in the water). In this respect, it chimes with my experience that Chris Donald might point to Kate Tempest as one of the most authentically prophetic voices in the present. The prophets so often jarringly critiqued the ordinary, ubiquitous, and systemic evils, in which all are enmeshed. And so the dividing line is, as Paul might say, abolished. All have sinned, and all – prophets included – are called to change, to metanoia, to repentance. No doubt, this raises questions, but it was, on reflection, very refreshing to engage the world this way.

*If I may recommend two books to read on the prophets, these would be The Prophets by Abraham J Heschel, and The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann.

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Ezekiel – The First Performance Artist?

One day. A long time ago. In Babylon. The exiled Hebrew prophet Ezekiel put on a show. In front of a diorama of Jerusalem (etched on a clay tablet) he enacted a siege, with props ranging from ramps to battering rams to iron pans. Then he lay down on his left side for a year, then on his right side for another month, keeping himself alive by eating food cooked over cow dung.

Then he shaved his hair and beard with a sword. He set fire to a third of the hair, distributed a third of his hair round the city and threw a third to the wind. He tucked a few remaining strands in his pockets, and to finish things off, he burnt the last bits.

An audience was (or presumably lots of different audiences were) present throughout and I’m sure as the stench of burnt hair filled their nostrils for the last time, they clapped and cat called in equal measure, and the local papers went wild with conjecture about this bizarre but oddly compelling artistic event.

The precise account can be found in Ezekiel chapters 4 and 5, and while I have put my own spin on it, I don’t think I’m overly embellishing what the text describes. We know Ezekiel today as a prophet, but I think that if he was alive today we’d give him a different title. Ezekiel was a performance artist.

Avanting the Avant Garde

His performances (of which the Bible records at least 5) seem to be pre-emptively in the mould of artists like Marina Abramovic, Joseph Beuys, Gustav Metzger and Yoko Ono. In the 20th century, these artists were seen as broadening the boundaries of traditional art from paintings, songs, plays, and the like to ‘happenings’, in which the ideas become paramount, and the audience’s interaction with the artist becomes part of the work itself.

Consider for example Abramovic’s ‘The Artist is present’ in which she sat immobile in a museum’s atrium for 736 hours and 30 minutes, completely silent and still, while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her. Basically a more comfortable (and fresher smelling) version of the main body of Ezekiel’s previously mentioned work!

And Ezekiel wasn’t the only one. Isaiah walked around naked for three years (Isaiah 20). Jeremiah made and wore a wooden yoke, which another prophet broke (and there could be an implication in the text that he then returned with a new yoke made of metal) (Jeremiah 27-28). For these prophets, while they wrote and announced their messages (usually in carefully arranged poetic stanzas, but that’s another post), they were also known to use highly symbolic actions to communicate what they felt that God was saying. Their performances were striking. The audience were often active participants. They always had a particular point to make, yet they drew people in by raising questions. This was avant garde artistic practice that avanted the avant garde by almost 3000 years.

Now, if you’re still with me, and you’re willing to look at the Old Testament Prophets at least partially through this lens, a couple of conclusions follow. Firstly, there are some examples of artistic practice in the Bible that many of us have overlooked. And secondly, those of us who make art have some new biblical role models to potentially educate our practice.

Not Just Bezalel

Potentially then the Bible’s whole teaching on the value and place of the arts gains another dimension. You see, when Christians go to the Bible for artistic inspiration or even validation, they usually bring up all the old chestnuts: Bezalel, Oholiab and the crafting of the tabernacle (Exodus 31:1-11), the design of Solomon’s temple (2 Chronicles 2-4) and the Psalms usually being pretty prominent. Now, all of these artistic endeavours have similarities. On the whole, these works are created for the faithful people of God to encourage them in their worship (admittedly the Psalms don’t all fit that description, but it is true of the main body).

Therefore, as aids to worship, for people who presumably already quite want to worship, they have some shared features. They aim at beauty in their appearance (or composition), clarity in what they are communicating and they are largely safe pieces of work (by this I mean, Moses and Aaron were not having pastoral meetings about whether Bezalel was corrupting the minds of the children. Again, there are huge exceptions in the psalms, to which we will return forthwith).

Two types of Biblical Art

However, once you consider the Old Testament Prophets in your survey of biblical art practice, you see that an entirely different type of art exists in the Bible to an entirely different audience. As we’ve seen, these guys are not making art for the faithful, but for the unfaithful. And because of this, their art is not beautiful, clear or safe. It is dramatic and attention grabbing because people didn’t really want to engage with what they were saying. It also has a tendency to be ugly, ambiguous and risky.

When we see this, another thing happens. Suddenly, those awkward psalms that talk about killing babies and languishing in the pits of despair aren’t a strange exception to the rule that all Christian art should be nice and happy and optimistic. Now they find themselves fitting snugly into a tradition of art that runs throughout the Bible that seems to operate in a whole different way to Bezalel, Oholiab and David (on a happy day). In fact (sorry if I appear to be getting carried away), couldn’t we add an even more prominent character on to the roster of difficult biblical art?

Jesus’ parables operate in a very similar manner to the aforementioned prophets. Jesus uses this particular creative mode because of his audience’s likely antipathy to his message (Mt 13:13-15, quoting Isaiah!) and again his work is at times ugly (Lk 19:27), ambiguous (the parable of the dishonest manager, anyone?) and risky (plucking out eyes, hating wives, etc).

In summary, once we start seeing the Old Testament prophets as performance artists, we see more clearly than ever that there are two very different types of art in the Bible. Art that inspires people to worship and art that questions why they’re not worshipping. Art for the faithful which is beautiful, clear and safe and art for the unfaithful, which has the potential to be ugly, ambiguous and risky.

The church has become very comfortable with the first of these and has been ploughing time, money and resources into creatives who practice in this way for some time. I think we need to start becoming a bit more uncomfortably comfortable with the second and raising up and supporting a whole load of modern day Ezekiels.

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What Do We Do With The Old Testament Prophets?

Following on from Chris’ post on Tuesday, I wanted to delve a bit deeper into what it means to make prophetic art. We’ll get to the art in the next post, but to give some context, I wanted to focus today on the thorny issue of prophecy.

I am what could fairly be described as a charismatic Christian. I am aware that, if that label means anything to you at all, you will now see me as anything from a faithful adherent to New Testament Christianity to essentially a snake handler. Well, I’m in no rush to fill you in on exactly where I would sit on that spectrum, but hopefully, whatever your theological tribe, there’ll be something in this post of interest, amusement and maybe even of value.

Charismatics, as you may be aware, are very fond of prophecy, and picture God as a very chatty father, who loves to speak to his children. But, someone might object, what if you get the wrong end of the stick? What if you just have a vivid imagination or happened to eat a lot of blue cheese before bed or just downed half a pint of adder venom or whatever? Well, of course, that’s a possibility, and for that reason, all prophecy should be weighed, as per 1 Corinthians 14:29. The image that’s always stuck with me regarding this process is someone weighing a lump of what appears to be gold, to work out how much of it is actually gold and how much is accumulated dross. So how do you weigh prophecy? Well, you recognise that we’ll always be slightly faulty receptors of God’s word (we prophesy in part- 1 Cor 13:9) and therefore listen carefully, hold on to what seems valuable, and graciously reject what seems a bit ‘off’, always using God’s revealed word (The Bible) as the gold standard.

But, what about Deuteronomy 18:20-22? I hear you cry! If I’ve misheard your particular cry on this occasion (probably something to do with the cobra fangs latched on to my right forearm), Moses says in these verses that if a prophet prophesies something and gets it wrong, they should die. This seems a far cry from giving an encouraging pat on the back and gently suggesting that, after all, there are other gifts of the Spirit.

Now, here is where we get close to the actual focus of this post, because at this point a certain move is made. In my opinion a good move, but a move that perhaps needs looking at again. In answer to this very reasonable objection, the modern charismatic would tend to draw a line between the gifts of prophecy in the Old and New Testament. Yes, in the Old Testament, there was a weight that was expected of all prophets (total infallibility), but now that the Spirit is freely available to all, and all ‘your sons and daughters will prophesy’ (Acts 2:17), there is more grace available to those wanting to communicate God’s will to people (and presumably also an expectation of more wisdom in those who are listening).

And so, with this line drawn, all the teaching I’ve heard on how to prophesy has been taken from the New Testament, with very clear instruction that we should not look to emulate the Old Testament prophets at all. The concern is that, if this is not underlined, we will open the door to the ‘Thus sayeth the Lord’, ‘I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger’, ‘sackcloth and ashes’ brigade. And we can’t have that.

But the result is that we no longer know what to do with the Old Testament prophets, except to discuss their theology. The bit about the suffering servant is great, but you obviously shouldn’t lie around for three years, eating food cooked over poo (Ezekiel 4). Agabus (Acts 21:10-11) may be a fine role model, but not Isaiah. And, if in doubt, (because let’s face it, Agabus seems a bit on the spectrum himself!) 1 Corinthians 12 and 14 help us out. In these chapters, Paul tells us exactly the purpose of prophecy for the modern day Christian, especially in 14:3-

‘But the one who prophesies speaks to people for their strengthening, encouraging and comfort.’ (1 Cor 14:3)

So basically as a brief summary of the teaching I’ve had on prophecy over the years: God still speaks. We should listen. If I’m going to share what I think He’s saying, I must make sure it’s a) in line with what the Bible says and b) is potentially strengthening, encouraging and/or comforting for people.

Now, just to underline what may have been lost in my slightly flippant tone, I like this stuff. I’ve hugely benefited personally from listening to God’s voice and from accepting what God is saying to me through others. I also love being part of a church that listens to God and encourages the use of the gift of prophecy.

However, at the same time, I do think that we need to reassess the role of the Old Testament prophet in this whole scheme. I think that the ancient Hebrew seers, both major and minor, have things to teach us about how we should communicate God’s truth, not just about how we should think about God.

And I don’t think that we need to make a huge shift here, but simply to do what this particular blog is adamant that Christians need to do in all spheres of our lives: we need to remember that we’re not just called to speak to the church.

1 Corinthians 12 and 14 gives instructions for the use of the gift of prophecy in a gathered meeting of Christians. Yes, there are allowances made for guests to the meeting who are not followers of Jesus (1 Corinthians 14:24-25), but the focus of this teaching is upon how we communicate God’s word to people who already have a certain openness to that word. The Old Testament prophets on the other hand spend most of their time speaking to people who are very resistant to God’s word.

God makes it clear to Isaiah that this will be the context for his whole ministry. As the prophet faithfully puts himself forward to serve God, God spells out, in Isaiah 6:9, what his message is to be:

‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding;

Be ever seeing, but never perceiving.’

For Ezekiel, his call is very similar:

‘Son of Man, I am sending you to the Israelites, to a rebeliious nation that has rebelled against me… the people to whom I am sending you are obstinate and stubborn.’ (Ezekiel 2:3-4).

Now, of course, these prophets were mainly ministering to those who were seen as God’s people (although not always, eg Jonah), however, God was making very different assumptions about the group these guys were addressing, than Paul was about the audience that were receiving prophetic input in Corinth.

In short, the teaching I’ve received (and often given) on the prophetic seems to have assumed that we are communicating God’s word only to Christians who need encouragement, or to people who aren’t Christians but have come to Christian meetings. If, as this website regularly asserts, the church needs to learn how to communicate much more effectively with people who don’t already follow Jesus and have no intention of coming to our meetings, I think we need a new model. And by a new model, I mean an old model. And by an old model, I mean the model of often eccentric, outspoken and unpredictable Hebrew prophets who brought God’s messages of hope and judgement to Israel and the surrounding nations between about 900 and 400 BC.

Just to clarify, I’m not suggesting that by following their example, we should have a different message from what we communicate in our church meetings. It’s important to remember in all of this what the Old Testament prophets actually did: they pointed people towards the Messiah. That is still the goal. In one sense, ultimately, it is the only valid goal. And my motivation behind this encouragement would be that this is so important that we shouldn’t neglect a method of achieving this goal that God gives over such a large chunk of his word to.

The reason why I am examining this topic on our arts blog is that I reckon that a helpful way to view the Old Testament prophets, at least at times, is as forerunners to the performance artists that began to emerge in the 20th century. When seen through this lens, I think we start to see who may be able to step into their shoes in our times, and how they could do that. We can also pick up some very important lessons for all artists who wish to strengthen, comfort, encourage and perhaps also dramatically confront those outside of the church who are presently hurtling happily towards disaster and trying to take the rest of us with them. Just like the Old Testament prophets, an artist has the ability to cause people to stop in their tracks, think about their present direction and ultimately turn towards Jesus.

So let’s look at that more in the next post. In the mean time though, where did I put my flaggon of poison?

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Show respect for your discipline, and nurture your craft

Sputnik Influencing Culture Faith Art Respecting Discipline

So, we’ve spent 4 posts exploring the question of whether Christians are called to influence society and, if you’ve missed it, you can catch up with the discussion, starting here. Today then, we finish things off by focusing in on how all of this affects our art practice.

There’s no getting round the fact that our lives outside of our art are vital if our art is going to have a significant positive impact, but we mustn’t neglect the work itself either, and this care for our craft, and respect for the disciplines we work in, is actually in itself a very practical way of loving and serving people who engage with our work. It’s also a key way in which we make ourselves available to be raised to positions of influence through our work.

Sloppy practice is unlikely to profoundly bless anyone, but even worse, a slapdash approach to the artistic culture you inhabit actually communicates a lack of love and care.

When an artist produces work they step into a tradition. It’s a bit like moving to another country, and for a Christian making art with a concern to serve others through their work, it’s a bit like doing so as a missionary. It’s generally understood that the colonial way of doing mission is deficient. To go into a country with nothing but distaste and condemnation for the traditions that are cherished in that culture is highly disrespectful and arrogant. As the prominent 20th century Christian leader John Stott put it so well:

‘The overriding reason why we should take other people’s cultures seriously is that God has taken ours seriously’ (Coote and Stott 1980: vii-viii)

God had some pretty major issues with human culture, yet he came down into that culture to serve not to be served, to save not to condemn, he came down with a call to repent, but at the same time he had a clear respect for us and our strange practices and traditions.

Therefore, in the light of Jesus’ example, someone may have the opinion that Jesus is superior to Mohammed as a spiritual guide (at the very least), but if they don’t know anything about Mohammed or actually, if they know about his life, but have nothing good to say about him at all, it’s probably best that they don’t move to the Middle East or give their life to try to reach Muslims. Respect is a form of love and because all people are made in God’s image, all human cultures will contain things that are good and right and true, however obscured they might be.

So to return to our practice as artists, Jesus’ model is very relevant to us as well as we step into our different artistic disciplines and traditions. As a rock musician then, as soon as you start making art in that discipline, you step into a tradition. The tradition of rock music. Therefore, to do this without knowledge of its key practitioners and history, or even if you have this knowledge, to enter the tradition of rock music simply taking the moral high ground over the individuals who are cherished in that culture, is genuinely disrespectful. If you really have nothing good to say about Kurt Cobain, James Hetfield, Kerry King or artists like them, I’d go as far as saying that you shouldn’t put yourself forward as a practitioner in that genre. To use another example, if you can find nothing good in the work of artists like Cindy Sherman, David LaChapelle or even Robert Mapplethorpe, you probably shouldn’t try to be a fine art photographer. You could apply this to any artistic discipline.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you go away from this blog and stream Slayer’s Reign in Blood while checking out Mapplethorpe’s body of work in google images (seriously, I’m really not suggesting this. No, seriously!) And you don’t have to have a thorough knowledge of the work of artists with this level of ‘edginess’, but if you can’t at least see some things to praise in the heroes of your discipline, however much else there is to condemn, then to put yourself forward as an artist in that discipline is unloving, uncaring and not practicing ‘faithful presence,’ however nice you are to the people you engage with through your work.

Nurturing your own craft then is a form of serving people and respecting the discipline that you work in is a way of loving your neighbour. Funnily enough, doing these things also enables God to use you to influence people more widely. As Solomon wrote:

‘Do you see a man skillful in his work?

He will stand before kings;

he will not stand before obscure men.’ (Prov 22:29)

Love and influence. Win win!

So to round off our series, a summary: When I read the Bible, what I see is that God is regularly on the look out for people to raise to positions of significant cultural influence. We’re not all going to be those people, and those people are not more important than everyone else, but we need him to do that in our society today.

For all Christians I think this means that we should live in such a way that we make ourselves available to being used in this way if God sees fit. As artists, with the opportunities that lie before us, this is especially relevant, and as a result of this whole discussion, my encouragement would be for the artists among us to look to be a faithful presence in the world, through how we live, how we practice our art and through our art itself.

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Minor Artists: a label led by its patrons

If you’ve been checking this blog for any length of time, I’m sure Chris Donald will be familiar to you. He is a key part of the Sputnik team and I thought it was about time we caught up with him to spill the beans on his art, Minor Artists and his newest musical project Strange Ghost.

Who are you and what do you do, Chris?

I’m a 30 year old human, a lapsed capitalist, an introvert who loves company, a confused over-thinker. I write and produce music, run a record label, try to be a good friend, husband and brother, write music reviews (and occasional fiction) and I’m a self-employed graphic designer. That makes me sound super busy, but they’re all pretty slow paced. I regularly confess to the cultural sin of not being busy.

CDonaldDesign1

What is success to you as an artist?

Success at the moment is making and sharing something in a way that gets beyond the roles of product and a consumer. For the player and the listener to see each other as equally complex people who are generously giving each other their time in that moment of performance (or re-played performance). A human moment and not just a commercial transaction. That doesn’t have to be deeply profound or gut-wrenching, but simply getting outside the pre-defined roles and platforms is surprisingly difficult, even just in my own head. At the same time, I’m always drawn to crafting something of a high quality and beauty – it’s so simple it’s almost redundant, but success is making something that I would honestly want to listen to. I think it’s possible to do that without it becoming some elitist or self-negating exercise.

https://vimeo.com/200556641

Tell us about Minor Artists. What is it and how can people get involved?

Minor Artists is a record label that puts out unconventional, non-church music made by Christians (check website here). We tell stories of oppression, injustice, revelation or mystery; avoid the Christian vernacular as best we can; keep you on your toes like Christ’s parables did, and sound great doing it. We’re also trying to level the field between musicians and their audience. Part of how we do that is the Record Club, a ‘per-product’ subscription service; essentially you agree to pre-order two or three albums across the course of a year. And that makes it possible for us to properly commit to making them. It’s an experiment. I hope subscribers feel personally engaged with it; at the least, we’re trying to re-frame this transaction that’s taking place. I appreciate it’s weird to subscribe to music you’ve never heard bStrut I think a certain type of listener will really like that, and will trust that we’re going to make it interesting. And perhaps now that we have the history of recorded music at our fingertips, we’ll want to reclaim a bit of personal investment in the music we buy. That’s my hope, anyway.

(The video above will fill you in on all the details and how to get involved)

What would you like to see change among Christian artists and artistry?

I’d love to see more reaction to the absolute absurdity of our times. Since the abject failure of modernism, Western culture is like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff, pretending the ground’s not gone beneath it. We want what’s good for the economy, but we can’t answer why that even matters. The West is absurd, and in constant crisis. Our art is going to need to be disruptive, because Jesus is disruptive. He’s not the icing on the bourgeois cake. I don’t mean disruptive in a ‘Modern Art’ way, where we absolve ourselves of responsibility for answers, or can’t be understood by your average observer. Quite the opposite. Disruptive storytelling can be fantastic art – the film ‘Get Out’ being a recent example.

You balance out earning a living from your creative skills and working on more self-initiated and passion projects. How do you find this balance?

Paradoxically, when I have lots of work it’s easier to find time for other things. When I’m low on work, it’s hard to do passion projects because I’m stressed about my income, even though I technically have the time. But I’m sure anyone self-employed knows about these crazy mind games. I don’t think the balance is much different from, say, going part-time to raise a kid. We all do recognise that the relationship between being paid for something, and that something being actually valuable to us, or society, is pretty weak. A YouGov poll said 37% of UK workers think their own job is pointless – I often think of Ron Livingston in ‘Office Space’, who finds salvation from his mindless tech job in becoming a construction worker. Surely people want to trade their time for something they care about, but I assume they feel like they can’t.

I’m not pretending I could just waltz into a high-paying job tomorrow, but ultimately I make a choice to value time more than money. I want to be radically generous like Christ, but I’d rather have lots of time to give to people than lots of money. But it’s easy to forget my own story. When I get swallowed by the neoliberal capitalist story, I begin to doubt myself.

Strange Ghost 2

Your latest project is ‘Strange Ghost’, a collaboration between you and your wife Wumi. How did this come about and what are your plans for this?

Wumi has a fantastic voice, and I’m sure we chatted about making music pretty early on in our relationship – which makes it sound so simple! It’s a new and intimidating thing for Wumi, and for my part I had a creatively tough spell while we were living in London. So it’s come about with a lot of deliberation and time. I think the time has been worth it, as I’m much clearer on what this project is for. I’ve had so many projects burn or fizzle out; I want Strange Ghost to be a vehicle for us to make music the rest of our lives – so, to be honest, I am just enjoying having completed the first step. As a friend said to me yesterday, if I had £20,000 for PR we could be famous next week, but as it is, I’m just going to share it and enjoy it, start figuring out how we might play this stuff live, and in what context we’d do that.

Thanks Chris. The Strange Ghost EP ‘Stagger’ is out on 18th May and we are proud to be among the first to announce that the first song is live to stream from this very page! Check it out, and save up your pennies for Thursday.

https://youtu.be/meDiNrerSTE

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Pip Piper on ‘The Insatiable Moon’ and becoming a filmmaker

Pip Piper Insatiable Moon Film Sputnik Faith Art

One of my favourite mornings of 2017 so far was spent having brunch with Pip Piper. Pip is a Brum based film maker (with an IMDB profile and everything), and I knew a bit of his story already. However, I’d never properly picked his brains before – and what brains they were to pick! I was hugely impressed by both his wisdom and integrity and as soon as the opportunity to interview him for the blog came up, I was delighted to take it so as to share the wealth a little wider. So without further ado…

Jonny Mellor: Hi Pip, could you introduce yourself to the Sputnik readers?

Pip Piper: I am a film producer, a charity director, a film company co-director, a documentary director and involved in several initiatives including being CEO of the Producers Forum and part time lecturer on an MA in film distribution and marketing that I helped set up. I have been married 27 years and have 3 grown up sons.

Originally, I was a full time youth worker and did that for many years in different guises. From 1997 I began developing the emerging work around OSBD (One Small Barking Dog), a media outfit that had grown out of the youth work and would become a formal charity in 2001. Alongside my wife Debbie and whilst raising our kids we also set up many initiatives to support young people and youth workers across the city and nationally. The first few years we just relied on God providing what we needed which was very exciting but terrifying at times to be honest! But I have often said that over 20+ years of not having a salary we have never missed a mortgage payment or a meal for the kids! God is good. TBH we all rely on the Father’s goodness no matter what our fragile circumstances!

In many ways since really pushing OSBD, making films has been the main passion and focus. So: 20 years+ of making and creating, enabling others, communicating and engaging.

JM: You made the strange journey from church youth worker to internationally acclaimed film director. How did this work out?

PP: Ha ha acclaimed! That’s nice…well yep I’m very appreciative- we have won some awards along the way, that is always great to get some recognition for what most of the time is very hard work by everyone involved.

As mentioned above in many ways it was a very natural journey that simply embraced the direction we felt we should be heading and combined with that cool mix of spiritual yearning, opportunity, passion and evolving support it found its way organically.

I’ve always been very keen to advise people to go for their dreams and accept perceived failure as lessons along the way. I am not afraid of perceived failure and, I guess from my mountain climber/instructor background, I love taking risks!

I have been very fortunate to have support from my wife and kids and also from friends and colleagues. That counts for so much.

JM: If you had to pick 3 highlights of your career so far (and one lowlight) what would they be?

PP: That’s tough!…

Well let’s maybe start with a lowlight and then build up from there.

I guess when you have spent an incredible amount of time, effort, money and goodwill on getting films made, when something really bad happens it really hurts. The Insatiable Moon is a feature film shot in New Zealand which I produced and took 10 years to make with massive sacrifices from many involved. The film was amazing and did really well, winning several awards. When a very well known film outfit brought the film out on DVD for global release, after a good run in cinemas, it was out of sync (lips didn’t match the spoken words) and that destroyed the film’s potential to break out. That was so gutting on so many levels. BUT, I believe the film is still to have its day!

Now for the 3 highlights!

1: Making The Insatiable Moon with an incredible team of people and having the stamina and determination to do so over a 10 year period. It is a film I am very very proud of.

2: Seeing young people I have helped to mentor, train and encourage flourish in the creative and film industry. That’s a huge bonus for me. Some, I have spent decades working with and others, just a few months, but it makes so much of what I do worthwhile.

“True success is in the success of others”, a very wise person once advised me.

3: The whole journey- if that’s not too much of a cliché. But I am amazed that both myself and key others involved in this journey are still going! There have been numerous set backs and tough times alongside amazing seasons too. The combination of God’s good grace, friendship and support, my family’s patience and love and never ending new opportunities for creating/collaboration and meaningful engagement is a truly marvelous thing.

Thanks Pip. We’ll continue the interview next time, but for the time being, this will give you a flavour of The Insatiable Moon…

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Author Mike French Creates Unorthodox Sci-Fi Narratives

When I first started sniffing around for artists in our particular network of churches in 2012, it was pretty tricky to find artists in any discipline who were making work that would be viewed as credible outside the church.

When it came to fiction writers, this scarcity was most pronounced. A few children’s authors slowly crept out of the shadows, but for about 3 years I failed to find one published novelist in any of our churches who was writing for an adult audience outside the church. Now, I in no way want to undervalue children’s authors- writing well for kids is at least as hard as writing for adults. However, this imbalance is worth reflecting upon.

A culture is shaped by its stories and its storytellers. If my experience is indicative of the wider Christian scene, our vacancy from this area should be a cause for considerable concern. To put it slightly differently, what does it say about us, as Christians, if we can only write stories that engage with children? Is it true that modern evangelical Christianity cannot engage over 18s who don’t follow Jesus in imaginative conversation?

I’d been perplexing myself with such concerns for some time when, with some relief, I met Mike French last year. Mike was the owner and senior editor of the prestigious literary magazine, The View From Here, and is the author of the novels, The Ascent of Isaac Steward, Blue Friday, Convergence and An Android Awakes (all published by Elsewhen). He is also amazingly a real life follower of Jesus and was part of a Catalyst church!

Being of such a rare breed, I’d recommend any of us who have an interest in making art that engages with a universal audience to consider what Mike has to say very carefully. I’ll be honest with you, some of you guys will struggle with his style and content (we’ll get on to what I mean by this shortly) but it’s a struggle I think it would be well worth undertaking. The choice is reasonably stark in this area: we can either continue to play it safe and remove ourselves completely from the main plot line of our culture’s evolution or we can, like Mike, seek to navigate the treacherous path of honestly and authentically sharing our stories in a way that people will hear.

With all that said and done then, Mike, over to you…

How does writing fit into your life? 

I work normally between nine in the morning to about three in the afternoon. Outside those hours I keep busy in home dad mode running the house and looking after my three kids. Although of course secretly my subconscious is at work 24/7 on my latest writing project. It normally wakes me up at 3AM and downloads all the stuff it’s been working on. It’s basically highly annoying.

Since reading Android, I’ve also read ‘Isaac Steward’ and hugely enjoyed them both. They seem similar in structure in that there are quite defined alternate stories going on in both books that actually tie in to a larger narrative. What comes first- the alternate stories or the narrative that pulls them together and how do they work together as you write? Are there particular influences that you draw upon in this specific style of writing? 

Normally the larger narrative is the starting place. With An Android Awakes this was definitely the case, although after I started I realised that I had made a lot of work for myself: Each story contained within the overall story is very short and so I frequently had to come up with a whole new concept and story to go with it.

I’m not aware of any influences in this format other than concept albums from bands like Pink Floyd, which have had a big influence on me. The Dark Side of the Moon for example has very distinct musical elements within it but they become more than the sum of their parts by feeding into a larger conceptual landscape.

The thing that makes you different to any other Christian writer I’ve read is the amount of sex in your novels! This is something that most other Christian writers wouldn’t touch with a barge pole, and many Christian readers would find really unsettling. How would you respond to a Christian critic who thought that your novels were too graphic in this regard (or even in terms of violence or swearing)?

Well I wouldn’t call myself a Christian writer, rather a Christian that writes novels. I think there is a difference, certainly to me.  When I first started writing I got professional help from a literary consultancy and they liked my style but pointed out that I used very flowery Christian language whenever I covered adult themes. I studied other writers like Julian Barnes and Iain M. Banks and after a lot of soul searching decided that if I wanted to be good at my craft then I should use clear language when describing sex or violence. Always making the right word choice is something I try and do as a writer and if you can’t do that because you are afraid of what people might think of you, then you are probably in the wrong job.

As to going there in the first place…

I think as a writer you are trying to emotionally connect with people and deal with human struggles and challenges and a major part of being a human is your sexual identity and desires. If as a writer that is off limits, then that severely restricts a writer’s ability to cover the whole spectrum of what it is to be a human on this planet.

I also think as Christians we should really be in this arena, rather than being afraid of it.  Part of the problem is we often confuse the cultural sensitivities of the society we live in with Christian ethics. Often they have nothing to do with each other.  It was culturally acceptable for example for the Minoan woman in Crete thousands of years ago to wear clothes that left their breasts exposed. If we were to time jump them forward to today then people would find that highly offensive. At the time it wasn’t.

Your 4 novels have all been published by Elsewhen. What advice would you give writers looking to be published or looking to self-publish? 

Prepare for rejection, pain and heartache. Visualise a wall before you and then run repeatedly into it until you become unconscious.

If you can survive that then good, you are made of the right stuff and the following might be of interest.

  1. Don’t scatter gun all the agents and publishers with your novel. Approach it like a job application. Do some research on who might like your kind of work and then contact two or three of them.
  2. Look for junior agents that have just started their own lists of clients.
  3. Email specific agents and publishers and ask if they would like to see your work. (Make this very short and do not attach your work.) If they don’t advertise their email then take a leaf out of Sherlock’s book and do some detective work.  Many editors are always looking for new work even if their company says they do not take unsolicited work.
  4. Make sure you have a decent one page synopsis.
  5. If you are considering self-publishing then do not believe any of the hype you might read. Unless you already have an established fan base the chances of you selling loads of copies is very small.

You are presently working on the sequel to Android. How’s it going and can you give us any teasers?

I’ve finished the first draft and I’m very excited about it! It’s called Fictional Alignment and will be out early next year.  I’ve really enjoyed writing it and it deals (amongst a lot of other things) with the importance of stories in shaping and forming our society. In the novel, androids have decided that fiction is evil and they want to eradicate it.  What follows from this really pits fiction against fact.  They are two very different world views and so I throw them at each other – what happens isn’t pretty!

 

Thank you Mike. To get hold of any of his work, there is a South American River that can help you. If that doesn’t ring any bells, just click here.

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To Make Others Happy Through Music

Easter holidays beckoning, todolist sufficiently shrunk, I sat down this morning to finally read Tim Keller’s ‘Every Good Endeavour’. Haven’t even made it to the foreword yet, because of the opening quote…

During the year 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music. I feel this has been granted through His grace. ALL PRAISE TO GOD.

This album is a humble offering to Him. An attempt to say “THANK YOU GOD” through our work, even as we do in our hearts and with our tongues. May He help and strengthen all men in every good endeavor.

It is from the liner notes to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.

I don’t think I need to add to that.

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Reading and Writing (The Second Bit)

In the first part of this mini-series I explored something of how reading can connect us into earlier writers, who may well be making their own contribution to a conversation that has been going on for a while. In this second and concluding part I want to consider how we can make use of that in our own writing or creative practice. (Again, I’m writing about writing, because that’s what I know: you can cross out ‘writing’ and put in ‘my practice”.)

One recent example I came across was W E Gordon’s collection of poems The Shining Path, which he read from at last year’s Catalyst Festival. The poem Taking Leave begins:

‘Less than halfway through

my tempestuous life I awoke

to find myself far off the beaten track…

 

I was all alone …

 

I quickly lost my bearings

and wandered into a

forest so strange and dark …’

 

Does that sound familiar? Yup, we have an echo of the opening stanza of Dante’s Divine Comedy (here in the Sean O’Brien translation):

‘Once, halfway through the journey of our life,

I found myself inside a shadowy wood,

Because the proper road had disappeared.’

 

When Bill Gordon wrote his poem was he just wanting to increase his quotation score, or wanting us to think he’s a brainy kind of guy because he’s read Dante? No, he’s using that phrasing to tell us something about what he is writing. Dante narrates a journey from earth, through Hell, up Mount Purgatory and then up into Heaven: a spiritual journey which confronts sin and redemption. As you read on in The Shining Path you find that this is also a spiritual journey: he is not simply bolting Dante on, but joining the conversation to speak of his own experience of spiritual crisis.

The power of a conversation of this sort is that just a few words can conjure a mood, an event or an entire story which we read alongside, with and under the actual words on the page. (If you are a particular sort of academic reader you will find all this talk of authorial intent either distressing, passé or hopelessly naive: do I care? I do not.)

Of course, like any artistic strategy, there’ll be people to object (some people wondered why Dante was writing in Italian, instead of using Latin, like all good poets before him). The main objection to this conversational approach to reading and writing is that your reader (viewer, audience) may not be familiar with the work you are referencing? Surely if you put all this clever clogs stuff in then you are just being elitist?

No, we are not being elitist (although we might be being a bit difficult – and why should everything in life be simple?) Do you really want every book to be at a Janet and John level? (That’s Biff, Chip and the magic key for younger generations.) Should every film be like Transformers or a rote recitation of Campbell’s hero’s journey? By no means.

Think of it like visiting a really good garden. If it’s done right you should be able to go in and enjoy it, without knowing the name of any of the plants, or their preferred habitats (the kids will enjoy balancing on the edge of the pond, and they know zero about gardening). But if you know a little bit about plants and garden design you’ll get a bit of a kick from identifying hostas (we’re reaching my limit here) and understanding how the gardener has selected and deployed plants to get a certain effect. Knowing a bit more enables you to get more out of it.

There is, though, a more hidden danger: you can stuff your work so full of allusions, hints and nudges that it becomes a rag-bag of fragments and no complete THING emerges. There are so many parts, shooting off in so many directions, that none of these conversation partners can get a word in (that for me is a subset of the writing problem labelled ‘too many ideas’: that is perhaps worth an explore in another post).

So what to do? It’s easy really: find out who are your conversation partners. Odds are, they will be the writers you read and respect. Writers who speak to you, who make you want to speak. The writer who stops you short with wonder, revelation and insight, who brings you joy (and also the sense of despair embedded in ‘I’ll never be able to write like that’). Also, don’t limit yourself to artists in your own discipline: there’s no reason a writer shouldn’t speak with a composer. (And don’t listen to the ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture’ crowd, they probably don’t understand dancing or architecture: trust me, dancing about architecture would be a brilliant thing to do.)

Once you’ve found out who your conversation partners are, talk to them.

 

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Reading & Writing (The First Bit)

My artistic practice (and yes, I can just about write that without laughing myself off my chair) depends on two things: reading and writing. Reading, because what I write is connected with what has gone before, and writing, well, because I mainly write. (And before you filmmakers, musicians and visual artists turn off, you can substitute other pairs like watch and make, listen and compose, look and paint.) In this two part post I want to poke at each of those in turn to get a better understanding of how they interact: let me start with reading.

In my haphazard way I read the second Bridget Jones book before the first one. I was ambling through Bridget Jones – the Edge of Reason enjoying the diarising and the self-disgust  when I came to this passage in which Bridget is stuck, kneeling down at a party with a small boy clinging to her neck and refusing to get off:

‘Then suddenly William’s arms were released from around my neck. I felt him being lifted away … I turned to see Mark Darcy walking away with a writhing six year old boy under each arm’

I stopped reading. I had recognised something else in there. I was not just reading Helen Fielding, I was also reading Jane Austin’s Persuasion at the same time:

‘In another moment she found herself in the state of being released from him; some one was taking him from her, though he had bent down her head so much, that his sturdy little hands were unfastened from around her neck, and he was being resolutely borne way, before she knew that Captain Wentworth had done it.’ (Persuasion, Chapter IX.)

Two hundred years apart, two different authors, but the same scene at the same structural point in each story, as the heroine rescued from an annoying boy by the man she has been/is still in love with. Identifying that incident unlocked the book for me. I read on with more attention and found other pieces of Austin’s plot and fragments of her characters under Fielding’s twenty-first century clothing (although Bridget Jones is no Anne Elliot). The trip to Lyme Regis and the fall on the Cobb became a weekend house-party and a foolish jump into a shallow lake. The books which drew two lovers together were no longer the romantic poets, but self-help books.

As I read, my familiarity with Persuasion (which for personal reasons is my favourite Austin novel) coloured and deepened my enjoyment of Bridget Jones. By drawing on Persuasion Helen Fielding put Bridget Jones into the continuing conversation among the other romantic heroines of lost, and sometimes recovered, love from Ophelia onward. I had travelled from Kansas to Oz. From black and white to colour. Or perhaps it was the difference between hearing someone whistle the tune of Ode to joy and hearing that same melody embedded in the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

We need to read: it is a courtesy we owe previous writers, in the same way we should listen to other people in a conversation, and not just selfishly formulate what we are going to say next, irrespective of what they have said. We don’t need to read everything, just as we don’t need to to listen to every conversation going on at a party, but we do need to pay attention to the conversation we choose to join: it will make our writing better.

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David Benjamin Blower And The Book Of Jonah

It’s always a pleasure to catch up with Dave Blower. Last time we met up, it came with the added bonus of hand ground coffee from a funny little machine he had lying about in his kitchen! Upon drinking said coffee, he agreed to do a short interview about his latest project ‘The Book Of Jonah’ which, I would argue is his most ambitious project yet, and is about to be released on the unsuspecting world on 13th March, through our friends at Minor Artists.

So, here it is. If you’ve not come across Mr Blower before, you may want to pick up the story so far here, here or even here.

With the formalities done then and now that we’re all on the same page…

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Jonny Mellor: Before we get on to your new release, could you fill us in on what’s been going on since we last heard from you. ‘Welcome the Stranger’ seemed like a very important release- has it opened any new doors for you or even changed your practice or methodology?

David Benjamin Blower: Welcome the Stranger is a collection of folk protest songs about the refugee crisis. Of course, since last Spring when the record came out, the world has changed and countries like ours have become very unwelcoming. The record is themed around Jesus’ story of the sheep and the goats, and the notion that to reject the suffering stranger is reject Jesus himself. The last year has been hard to watch.

This is the first record where I’ve used songs to tell real people’s stories, of living and dying as refugees. Having played these stories in different places, so many people have come up to me and asked, “What can I do? Where can I send money? Where can I volunteer?” I’ve been struck by the importance of telling people’s stories as an artist. We can do things the news can’t.

JM: Your new release ‘The Book Of Jonah’ follows the path set by ‘Kingdom vs Empire’ and is a book and album (the book is called ‘Sympathy For Jonah’). How did this project come about?

DBB: This happened haphazardly. I started writing a musical of the story of Jonah, mostly out of a fondness for the Bible, Moby Dick, Pinocchio etc. and while I was putting together songs about how terrible things were in Nineveh, I saw on the news footage of ISIS blowing up the tomb of Jonah in modern day Nineveh; that is, Mosul, in northern Iraq. I thought to myself, “I wouldn’t want to go to Nineveh either.” The news about ISIS (back in 2014/15) became so disturbing that I lost all taste for the musical and started, wide-eyed, writing a book about how frightening real enemy love might actually be. Everyone picks on Jonah for his lack of warm feeling towards the enemy, but I don’t see many of his pious critics marching off to Mosul to make peace with the regime there. And any historian will tell that the Ninevites (Neo-Assyrians) were more dreadful than ISIS, by a long way.

The book was published last summer, and then after that, rather more soberly, I finished recording the musical retelling.

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JM: I know it has been gestating for a while and I imagine that there has been a weight to living with these ideas for so long before being able to finally unleash them on the world. How do you manage to contain such a strong prophetic vision (alongside the accompanying passion and restlessness) without it eating you up?

DBB: I think it probably does eat me up. I don’t know if you can make good art about something without allowing yourself to swallowed up by it. If you’re not battered by the journey, then where did you go, and what do you have to tell? Perhaps this is why artists have often been considered dangerous by controlling societies. We’re unhinged openings for dangerous and unpredictable kinds of power to enter the orderliness and disrupt it: in this case, grace, forgiveness, re-humanisation of the enemy, redemption of the irredeemably evil, etc. The prophetic job is to bring in this dangerous new thing, not, I suppose, to always come out in one piece.

Living with this story over the last few years has also been interesting, because the contemporary subject matter has changed. When I began, the monster of public discourse was ISIS. Today, many struggle to see people like Trump, Farage and Le Pen as human beings – an attitude which is quietly and dangerously transferred onto all those who support them. I also know people on the right who can only talk with disgust about “liberals” and people on the left. Who wants to go Jonah-ing over to the terrible other now?

JM: At Sputnik, we usually draw quite a thick line between art that is made for Christians and art that is made for a universal audience. You are something of an exception to this rule, as you are one of the few artists that people who aren’t Christians still want to eavesdrop on, even when you’re speaking primarily to Christians. ‘The Book Of Jonah’ would be a project like this as your focus here does seem to be Christians and the church. Can you tell us about about how you see the Christian artist’s responsibilities to speak to the church and to the world and how that works for you?

DBB: You mean that our art is best when it speak to a universal audience, and not into the Christian bubble, I think?

I agree. But of course, stained glass windows, cathedrals, orthodox icons, choral evensong and the KJV were made for Christians, and yet they’re also delighted in by a universal audience, because they have integrity. When we look uneasily on art made for Christians, I think we usually mean the sort of art made by evangelicals for evangelicals in decades past, which we’ve come to distrust as a sort of matrix designed to keep us in the fold. But for me it would be dishonest to make art stripped of Judaeo-Christian aesthetics. This is the well I drink from, and plenty of outsiders want to drink from it too.

I feel I’ve always been trying to make work for a post-secular audience. I could never accept the sacred/secular divide, and I’ve always been trying to bring these two realms together: trying to bring religious discourse back to earth, and trying to reveal how religious the secular world always has been. The prophets have always been my model as an artist, and they simply addressed their people, whether they worshipped this or that, something or nothing.

I find the present moment a very exciting one to work in, because the post-secular mishmash has now become the fact (where it is accepted that religious narratives of all sorts are sloshing everywhere, and nothing is neatly contained or separable). Meanwhile, the old sacred / secular divide is collapsing. We could gone on about what all that might mean for a long time.

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JM: The Book Of Jonah then- give us the hard sell. Why should this release be added to our bookshelves and Itunes libraries?

DBB: The Book of Jonah is a radiophonic production of the biblical story, read in it’s entirety from the old King James bible by the deep voice of theologian Professor N. T. Wright, whose wisdom and wit illuminates the narrative. Jonah himself is played by the theologian and activist Professor Alastair McIntosh, in his wheezing Hebridean sea-dog’s tones. The story is punctuated with dark folk ballads and awash in spaghetti western soundscapes.

Sympathy for Jonah is a series of meditations on the biblical tale, delving into the necessity, and the dreadful cost, of enemy-love, for all of us. Especially in these divided times. It’s short. I’m told it’s funny, though I didn’t particularly mean it to be. And it gives theologically digestible exploration of both the Book of Jonah and of the cross of Jesus.

JM: What’s next for you? How are you going to promote this project and have you got anything else in the pipeline?

DBB: I’ll be spending time performing The Book of Jonah where I can; lounges, bars, churches and gatherings, and holding discussions around the themes of the book. There’s always something new in the pipeline, but I’ll focus myself on planting our community garden and gathering some theological learning groups in the coming months.

* * *

Thanks Dave. As always a pleasure. And if you can’t wait until the 13th March, here is an exclusive little preview of a track called ‘Sackcloth and Ashes’to whet your appetite…

https://soundcloud.com/sputnikmag/sympathy-for-jonah-exclusive-sackcloth-and-ashes

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Learning From ‘Silence’: Asking Difficult Questions

Perhaps I’m not watching the right films, but I don’t remember ever seeing a film that did to me what Scorcese’s Silence did to me. Without trying to be clever, I can genuinely say that it brought me to silence.

But as anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m not brilliant at keeping my mouth shut, so I thought, with a couple of weeks, a reading of Endo’s original book and a few good conversations with friends under my belt, it was about time I put down some thoughts here, particularly in regards to the impact this work has on us as Christian artists.

Scorcese has at least until recently described himself as a lapsed Catholic (although he may have had a delapse) but there was nothing lapsed about Endo. Though he wrote Silence, for which he is most remembered, while fighting a particularly nasty bout of tuberculosis, partly processing his own experience of the silence of God, he never stepped on the fumi-e himself, at least publicly anyway. While Scorcese’s spiritual journey is fascinating in its own right, I’d like to assess the film and the book together, as products of Endo’s faith filled imagination, and therefore as an example of exceptional art made by a Christian. This is a piece of art to be savoured (for this try, here), but it is also a fascinating picture of how to make exceptional art if you’re a Christian (and also a helpful heads up as to what may happen if you do).

Before I offer 4 lessons I’ve learnt through the book/film then, I’d better give the rather predictable spoiler alert. However, it’s not just that spoilers lurk in the following paragraphs, but that you will be doing yourself a major dissservice if you engage with ramshackle reflections like this one and miss out on the work itself. So, if you’ve not read the book or seen the film, I can think of at least two more constructive things to do than to read any further at this point.

Okay, with that out the way, what can we, as Christian artists, learn from Silence? I’ll start off today and finish my reflections next week.

We must be prepared to raise dangerous questions and guide our audiences through them

In one respect this is very obvious, but the power of Silence is surely in its ambiguity. Was Rodrigues right to tread on the fumi-e? Would Jesus really ever tell anyone to deny him, particularly as it led to many more denials and acts that actually betrayed other believers? Whose example should we value in this story? Whose should we reject? Should we side with the faithful peasant martyrs, although they may just have been sun worshippers who took Mass? What about the stoic, unflinching Garrupe- who submitted to death, but whose dogma seemed to trump his humanity? Or, of course, the proud, but ulitmately compassionate Rodrigues? And where should Kichijiro fit into our affections?

‘Should’ is probably the key word in that last paragraph. Is there a ‘should’ at all in how we should respond? By that I mean- was the creator of the work’s intention to drive us down any of these particular paths or just leave them all open to us and let us take our pick? This is where Scorcese’s adaptation becomes particularly interesting, as I wonder if the film and book have different approaches to how we ‘should’ respond. The film leaves us with the strong hint that Rodrigues’ faith had continued, not just in him but in his family, but the extent of this faith and the meaning of the events that we’d witnessed are left untouched. Endo however leaves us with something much more tangible. Just before the appendix, Endo depicts Rodrigues administering the sacrament to Kichijiro and the final paragraph leaves us in no doubt as to the final spiritual state of his protagonist:

…The priest had administered that sacrament that only the priest can administer. No doubt his fellow priests would condemn his act as sacrilege; but even if he was betraying them, he was not betraying his Lord. He loved him now in a different way from before. Everything that had taken place until now had been necessary to bring him to this love. ‘Even now I am the last priest in the land. But Our Lord was not silent. Even if he had been silent, my life until this day would have spoken of him.’ (p 257, Picador/2007)

For Endo then, Rodrigues is not an apostate at all, but someone who has found a deeper, more mature love of Jesus even through his apparent act(s) of apostasy. There may even be some quite firm theological convictions here about incarnational evangelism vs simple proclamation of the message.

However, with that said, by this point, the work has been done. My head was in such a spin from all the theological puzzles and overturned expectations that I left the book (just as I left the film) trying desperately to tie everything together, and this for me was where the power of Silence really kicked in.

By raising so many difficult questions, and then at best half answering them, I was forced to think through the places where my own zeal and conviction have been overshadowed by arrogance, what part my own desire for praise plays in even my most apparently selfless acts and whether I’d be prepared to be rejected by Christianity for Christ. Needless to say, these are deeply unsettling questions and I could imagine a work leading you to these in a very unhelpful way. However, in this case, it felt safe. It felt safe, because ultimately my journey was not guided by an unanchored seeker like Ferreira (or perhaps like Scorcese, although that may be a little unfair) but my guide was Endo- one who had heard God speak clearly in the silence and had endured tuberculosis and the rejection of the church and still came out trusting Jesus.

I think this gives us an excellent example of how to take people on these sorts of journeys through our work- how we can lead people down the path of difficult, even dangerous questions, while simultaneously acting as a light to guide them through to a firmer faith in the end.

Our lives help to interpret our work

To reiterate then, while Endo skilfully leads his reader away from the rocks of apostasy through his skill as a writer, the work is rooted not just by what we find in the text, but in what we find outside it- in the life of its author.

There would surely have been many people who stumbled into the cinema on a Saturday night in early January, expecting to see Wolf of Wall Street 2, and have left slightly bamboozled, but perhaps also with the opposite impression from the one I’ve laid out above. It would be quite possible to view this film as a condemnation of missionary activity and a declaration of the powerlessness of the Christian message. However, if you did even a little bit of homework, it would be impossible to hold on to this view for very long.

It may seem very simple, but it is important that Endo wrote this. A person of faith. A person who loved Jesus and worked through these questions positively in his own life. For us, as Christian artists, it is also important that our work is made by us, and therefore our lives should be considered as important interpretative tools of our work.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the content of my work doesn’t matter. Far from it. However, it does mean that if I am following Jesus closely, trusting him in my own life and growing in faith in him, then I am much more able to raise difficult questions constructively in my work than I would be if I was a flaky Jesus-affiliated drifter.

Ultimately, powerful art raises powerful questions. On the other hand, ‘Christian art’ (as it has been perceived) has often laid out powerful answers, but done it in such a prescriptive way that almost all the power has been evaporated. We must buck this trend and make art that raises the kind of questions that real people are asking, and actually that we are asking. Even those we haven’t yet settled on the answers to.

We don’t want to cause anyone to stumble and we definitely don’t want to lead our brothers and sisters into sin, but actually I wonder if Christians have rushed to sanitise their work (and therefore often neuter it) because they’ve forgotten that their faithful lives are already interpreting their work for their audience.

Of course, this does require that as Christian artists, we hold fast to Jesus, but if we do this, I think we should resist the temptation to fill in all the gaps for people out of fear of being misunderstood. Our lives and our art work in tandem. Let’s aim to make both excellent!

In the next post, I’ll give some reflections on what we can learn from the response to this work, both in the church and outside it.

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The Grotesque And The Beautiful In Faithful Art

Grotesque Beautiful Faithful Art Sputnik

One occasionally hears complaints from Christians, that art these days is ugly where it ought to be beautiful. Unsettling installations, chaotic abstractions, unsavoury juxtapositions of images and symbols; all seemingly calculated to jar and upset. Why would Christians be joining in with these gloomy trends? The question was posed to me last week, “shouldn’t they be making work of beauty, in order to point people towards God, who is beauty itself?”

I must say, the person who asked me this didn’t think so, but was relaying to me a sentiment brought to him by perplexed others. I have occasionally met with these questions myself, but less often the more I go (perhaps I have been gradually sorted out of those circles). I hope I’ll be forgiven if I seem to be knocking down a straw man. Perhaps, in that vain process, we might also stumble over some useful thoughts on the grotesque and the beautiful in faithful art.

To begin with, I find the idea that upsetting themes and images ought to be avoided very puzzling coming from Christians, of all people, who gather each week around the imagery of ancient Roman torture and execution instruments. We who claim to follow the crucified God (and have done for nearly two millennia before Nietzsche was causing people to faint in their drawing rooms) ought really to be unshockable by now; though by no means un-grieveable. The notion that dark meditations are unfitting for Christian artists, raises more questions about the theology of the questioners than the faith of the artists.

I certainly don’t think that all aesthetic grimness is justified or, worse still, that beauty is somehow theologically deficient. “By no means!” How then shall we navigate the grotesque and the beautiful as artists of faith? Since I’m no aesthetic theorist, I’ll confine myself to considering some examples I have admired (and aped), and to exploring their theological imperatives and justifications.

The Grotesque

The prophets of both testaments have always been my model as an artist, and prophets are called to tear down and to build up. In this spirit I see both grimness and beauty coming into play. I notice the former emerging in several ways.

Firstly, grotesque art often speaks of the things which are, but which cannot be spoken; because they are taboo, or inexpedient, or unpleasant, or ugly. Sentiments like doubt, shame, terror, lust or hate, for example. This is a task which saves the whole, because the whole is poisoned by the unexpressed and unheard suffering within. As regards the individual, the psychologist Carl Jung frankly called this “confession.” Within a community or a society, it is artists among a few other groups, who make this possible. Consider the Psalms; ancient songs for the community which often gave voice to doubt (77:9), despair (22:1), vengeful hate (137:9), self loathing (22:6) and so on.

Secondly, grotesque art emerges when artists attempt to deconstruct the powers and principalities. When power structures become wicked and oppressive, it is the job of their spin doctors, propagandists, publicists and architects to ensure that what remains seen is the image of legitimacy, stability and righteousness. The task of the prophetic artist is to re-present the powers as they really are (as best the artist can discern). What often results is a horrifying image of something we are used to seeing as orderly and harmonious. This is all the more jarring when we find that these are structures that we ourselves are passively leaning on or invested in. Consider John’s re-presentation of the Roman Empire as a diabolical and blasphemous dragon (Rev 13). Or Jeremiah, whose answer to King Zedekiah’s triumphalist propaganda was to walk about Jerusalem wearing an oxen’s yoke (Jer 27).

It must be added that, while the prophets often contended for the people against the powers, it was not beneath them to critique the people too, who were very capable of capitulating to the powers and becoming a poisonous power in themselves (as we plainly still are). Such was the message of Hosea’s work, which makes Tracy Emmin’s Unmade Bed look quite benign. Had he done what he did today, there would surely be no end to the disapproving pastoral visits.

Underlying all this is a theology which is cross-shaped to the last; a theology that doesn’t recoil from suffering but boldly steps into it. The history changing event, of the incarnation of God into human life, human suffering and human death, is also an ongoing practice… a way of being in the world. We are told that, if we want to follow, we will need to take our crosses with us, and the cross is a step into the sufferings of the world, not an off-the-shelf escape from them.

The Beautiful

The route to resurrection is death, and so it is not in spite of all this grimness, but rather through it that beauty triumphs. In the work that I have admired, I think beauty has emerged in roughly two sorts of ways. The first I will find difficult to articulate, and the second is, I think, the concrete practice of living toward that hazy imagination.

A good starting point would be Theodor Adorno, who once wrote this:

“The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. [ . . . ] Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day, in the messianic light.”  (Minima Moralia, maxim 153)

This is what Walter Brueggemann calls hopeful imagination – the task of creating encounters where a wholly beautiful future can be imagined. Christian hope is anticipatory. We are not forever looking backwards at a merely mechanistic atonement in the past, nor are we looking sideways for momentary escape from the experience of the present. Christian hope looks, ultimately, forward, to the renewal of creation, to the healing of the nations, and to a time when God’s Goodness resides fully among us. Every glimpse of beauty is a glimmer of this end, a present manifestation of a future which will ultimately swallow up and transform a suffering and broken present, and the faithful artist works to cultivate this sort of anticipatory imagination.

Of course this beauty comes, necessarily, with suffering: with the pathos of anticipation… the intensified longing for what will be revealed, while still surrounded by, and experiencing, the suffering, brokenness and incompleteness of the present. Even in (or perhaps especially in) works of utterly unclouded beauty, like Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, the pathos is only all the more present in the listener, who listens from the place of his or or her own broken and incomplete experience. Perhaps this is why authentic beauty in the present age is so often met with tears.

On the other hand, work which offers a moment of escape from the world’s ills cannot be, if I may say so, Christian, in that respect at least. It offers escape from the very story we are called to deeply inhabit – the story of God’s suffering creation, which is to be redeemed.

The second way in which I see beauty emerge from faithful artistic practice, is simply by making the world that we and our neighbours inhabit more beautiful. Of all the work I’ve created myself, I am perhaps most delighted with a natural slate floor, a coffee table, a good loaf of bread. These are not things which aim to transport the heart and mind elsewhere, but to make life here and now more beautiful, and to refashion it toward what it must one day become. We badly need to recover the thought of people like William Morris and John Ruskin, who believed everyone should live amongst things well-made, useful and beautiful: gardens that delight, architecture that lifts, furniture that charms, objects wise in form and function. The manner in which people today are housed in shoe boxes and high rises, betrays the fact that we no longer see the image of God in people, we see, rather, populations to be managed by governments. The fact that most objects of use today are neither well made, nor carry the wise human touch of the craftswoman and the craftsman, betrays the fact that we no longer see life in its fullness, but consumer markets for industries. It is the work of the artists, artisans, chefs, bakers, gardeners, builders, joiners, dancers, singers and poets to make life on the ground more beautiful – right there in the places and communities where they actually are. To leave this task to governments and multinationals while we busy ourselves making escapist art to fling meaninglessly into the placeless glitz of cyberspace would be a very sad abandonment of our calling indeed.

* * *

This is one shoddy sketch of why faithful art may well be grotesque, or beautiful, or both. Faithful art lives in the real tension between the cross and the age to come, between suffering and hope. It shouldn’t surprise us too much that the deeper we sit into the biblical story, the more universally resonant our work will be. And never more so than today.

It is, I think, for such reasons that artists of faith are no longer content (if they ever were) to make cosmic tourism brochures for escapist religious institutions. A cruciform people will make cruciform work.

I’m told that some have begun to wonder what sort of art will survive when creation is renewed? It is suggested that perhaps the beautiful will remain, and the grotesque, naturally, will pass away. Maybe so, but the Kingdom of God, as we know well, is in the habit of turning our categories upside-down. The resurrected Jesus still carries his wounds. Perhaps it’ll be so with many things, that the grim marks of suffering, trauma and abuse might themselves be redeemed and turned into a mark of beauty, while triumphal greatness waits outside the gates.

(To read the rest of our ‘Beauty and Art’ series, click here, and for the next instalment here).

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Doctor Strange: A Masterclass in Christian Film Making

A few years ago, when laying out the vision behind Sputnik to a gathering of creatives, I made the claim that there were no Christian artists producing culture shaping art now (or in the last 30 years). Basically, I think I’d been warming to my theme, and though I stand by my general point that Christians are not proportionately represented operating at the highest levels in the arts, I was, of course wrong.

My friend Joel Wilson graciously rubbed this in by immediately compiling a list of 50 Christian artists who I’d claimed didn’t exist. Jonny Cash, Makoto Fujimura, Alice Cooper, Terence Mallick, PD James, etc, etc.

Well, that was early 2015. I’d like to add another name to the list and as regards cultural influence, I wonder if this one may be a new entry at number 1. He would have been a pretty high entry when Joel first compiled his list but for the fact that nobody would have guessed that the director of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Hellraiser:Inferno and Sinister may actually have been a Jesus follower! Now, he’s the the helmsman of the latest Marvel blockbuster and I imagine that we haven’t heard the last of Scott Derrickson.

Doctor Strange very much follows Derrickson’s modus operandi up to this point, in that it is the last film you would naturally expect a Christian to touch with a bargepole. Dr Stephen Strange is the invention of comic artist Steven Ditko and he made his first appearance in 1963 to bring a bit of black magic into the Marvel Universe. From the start, he appealed very naturally to a generation experimenting with psychedelic drugs and eastern mysticism and his escapades are punctuated by spells, incantations, vampires, demigods and demonic possession.

In some ways, the movie follows suit, exploring some of the occult elements from the comics but also relying heavily on a multiverse cosmology- an idea that has become popular through Richard Dawkins, largely as a way to explain the existence of our universe without having to resort to a creator. For these reasons, predictably, there has been a backlash from some quarters of Christendom (here and here). As ‘the editorial staff’ at movieguide.org puts it:

Some movies, however, not only distract some people from the Truth, but introduce completely new paths for people to follow that will lead them away from eternal life with Jesus Christ and away from loving their neighbors as themselves. Sadly, Marvel’s DOCTOR STRANGE is one of those movies.

I’ll be honest- I couldn’t disagree more. As I watched the film, I was incredibly impressed at how Derrickson steers the film in such a way that he not only fails to alienate the comic fan base, but actually leads people potentially towards Jesus through the most unpromising of evangelistic source material.

In many ways, it follows in the footsteps of The Exorcism of Emily Rose as an apologetic against materialistic naturalism (the belief that there is no supernatural reality). One of Strange’s early conversations with the Ancient One makes this very clear:

The Ancient One: You’re a man looking at the world through a keyhole. You’ve spent your whole life trying to widen that keyhole. To see more. To know more. And now on hearing that it can be widened, in ways you can’t imagine, you reject the possibility.

Dr. Stephen Strange: No, I reject it because I do not believe in fairy tales about chakras or energy or the power of belief. There is no such thing as spirit! We are made of matter and nothing more. We’re just another tiny, momentary speck in an indifferent universe.

Now, fair enough, The views Doctor Strange is converted to from this point aren’t exactly from the pages of Grudem’s Systematic Theology, but to hone in on details would be to miss the point. It’s another cinematic blue pill/red pill moment and its effect is to cast curious minds upon the possibility that there’s more to life than meets the eye. (About 30 million curious minds so far, judging by the box office takings).

You see, Derrickson understands his audience and knows the battles which need fighting. The church’s sensitivity to the occult in popular media has been based, at least in part, on a presumption that people’s default position was of Christian faith or at least something similar. Therefore, as the above quote states, these biblically prohibited practices would ‘lead them away from eternal life with Jesus’ and should be resisted at all costs. However, that bird has now flown. People have moved further and further away from faith in Jesus in much more fundamental ways than dabbling with the odd ouija board (dangerous as that may be). A secular mindset has become dominant on both sides of the Atlantic, and therefore, like it or not, you are dealing with people who are already miles away from Jesus. If you want to lead people back, adding another splinter into their mind to cause them to question a materialistic view of reality is surely exactly what is needed.

In this way, Derrickson is a brilliant example of how to engage our culture with the Christian worldview. If we are to regain a voice through the arts, we must learn to pick our battles, ignore our hobby horses and hone in on the key obstacles to faith. We must become adept at bringing out truth from our culture’s own stories, while treating those stories themselves with respect. Derrickson can’t even help himself in this regard and ends the movie with a pretty blatant atonement allegory. This guy’s a hero!

As well as thinking through the positive message of the film, it’s also worth noting what was missing. Think for a moment about what a Doctor Strange movie may have looked like in another pair of hands. Deadpool was Marvel for people who want swearing and sex, Doctor Strange was the one those who wanted séances, tarot cards and occult rituals. But in Derrickson’s hands, all of these elements are underplayed and a vague mysticism pervades. There is an indication that some of the key characters have been dabbling in the dark realms but again this is done in such a way that it would be hard to imagine that many people would be enticed to follow suit through the movie (Will Smith’s son being a high profile exception) . Damage limitation may seem like a humble aim for Christian involvement in the arts, but it is of some value.

However, it would be amiss of me to leave it even there. It’s not just that Derrickson survived his first blockbuster directorship while staying true to his convictions. He’s made a very enjoyable movie going experience. Yes, it’s a pretty generic superhero origin story with fairly 2 dimensional characters but it would be fair to say that in the areas of special effects and action choreography, he has truly broken new ground. Throughout the film, the fight scenes bend the rules of space and time in a manner that should have been a total mess, but instead were thoroughly original and exhilarating.

It’s not high art, but it’s high quality art, made by someone with an attention to detail and a respect for their craft that is quite formidable. And it leads a trail of breadcrumbs that could lead to Jesus. And it does it through the story of an occult magician. And multiverses.

Please pray for Scott Derrickson that God would strengthen him and keep him upright and wise in the industry that he is in. And pray that God would raise up more artists like him. Then keep your eyes peeled, as it will be fascinating to see what he’ll do next.

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An Interview with Josh Whitehouse (Pt 2)

So, if you caught the first part of our interview, you’ll know that Josh (aka jowybean) has a pretty standard story. Brought to faith through Veggie Tales, brought back to Jesus through My Little Pony. You know, the usual!

As well as catching up on his artistic and spiritual journey though, he shared with me something of the substance to his work, the themes he likes to explore and also how he handles the different challenges that his particular art form throws up for him as a Christian.

Two major themes in Josh’s work are juxtaposition and a love for place and one’s local environment. One of Josh’s favourite pass times is watching youtube videos taken by people driving around major cities in the world. It’s like he drinks in the different environments, architecture and people, then filters them through his world-creating imagination to create new and hybrid cityscapes. Perhaps one will be an image of London and Tokyo combined. Perhaps New York and Amsterdam. Perhaps it will be an African and European city merged together or even a Middle Eastern city, imagined 50 years in the future.

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This juxtaposition can be seen very clearly in almost all of us his work as well, as he combines very diverse styles of illustration in single pieces. One of his most recent projects is Humanization.com, a series of comics in an imagined world where humans are all dead, but the internet has become alive. The main character, Cadra, is drawn with a sense of realism, whereas other characters are more influenced by Japanese manga styles, and others will have the wide eyes and podgy noses of Warner Bros characters. And the impressive thing is that these different styles all combine to create a coherent world.

As he puts it:

One of the themes I do in my art is juxtaposition and that doesn’t always mean juxtaposition of subject matter. I’ve tried doing political things but… it was something I never really got a connection with. But if I started doing whimsical things with dragons and ogres next to butterflies- just cute things next to ugly things, that’s the best way I can try to describe it- I got more of a kick out of that… I enjoyed that more..

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Now, he’d see the purpose of his art first and foremost as a challenge to people’s creative horizons rather than an attempt to change people’s worldview:

Although I’m not like a deep conceptual artist… I prefer to talk about the world both in the good and the bad, but mostly in a positive light, not always to challenge people in the world but maybe to challenge them creatively. To say to young generations, you don’t need to draw Spiderman characters, or Batman looking heroes or draw Japanese girls in the same uniform to be successful- you can, but it’s better if you try to do something different with it.

But, even with this said, he definitely has the power to communicate clearly through his work. Since starting coming to our church two years ago, he would regularly respond to the Sunday morning sermons by drawing (each piece is started and completed in the duration of the sermon). We then stick these up on the church blog, mainly to encourage creativity in the church and to remind people of the sermon’s message, but increasingly, his pieces contain spiritual insights that add helpful and personal layers to what was said. At our midweek groups, he draws people’s prayers. You know when someone says to you ‘I’ve got a picture for you.’ That kind of thing, only Josh really has a picture for you!

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If you have even a passing interest in animation and illustration, you’ll be aware that this genre moves away from cute pictures for children reasonably quickly. In fact, maybe as a reaction against the traditional view of comics and cartoons, there is a deliberate corruption and sexualisation of cuteness everywhere. I personally would find it very difficult to delve deeply into this culture, knowing the temptations that are real to me. However, this is the world that Josh has grown up in, and while he recognises that he has to tread carefully, there is something of an immunity he seems to have developed to some of the culture’s more twisted manifestations.

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His work reflects this and if you flick through the second issue of Humanization.com you see this quite quickly. You’ve got prostitutes. Serial killers. A whole scene depicting one character’s prodigal son like descent into depravity. We’ve talked at length about these sort of depictions and I asked him how he would justify such images to a Christian who felt them unwholesome. His point is quite simply that this is the world we live in and to engage with people in this world, we cannot avoid such subject matter:

We live in an age where this is the majority of society’s attitude to material processions and the notion of love, with the wealth of information we have produced in the last decade a lot has come from very weird/dark places that have gone beyond anything you could have discovered from a play boy magazine or risky news report in the news paper. This particular page you mentioned (the aforementioned montage depicting a character’s moral slide) is just a window to highlight these issues, not glorify them or encourage practising them. I think this quote from the page will help sum up my point “But I mistook taking as living, and lived as fully as I could, takin’ what I wanted, when I wanted, however I wanted”

Whatever your feeling about that particular image (you’ll have to buy the comic for that) I think that Josh is absolutely on to something. Christian artists must become better at depicting the ugliness of the fallen world or we will fail to connect with the people who live squarely in that reality. If we simply present a hope to come, without a realisation of the grime that’s here, it will seem to many like wishful thinking disconnected with reality. This is clearly very murky territory, but I think that it’s murky territory some of us have to explore. I think Josh is a great example of someone working right on ‘the line’, and honestly working through how he imbues his art with his faith and deepens his faith through his art and uses his talent to communicate powerfully to those around him.

It is also worth noting that the world of geekdom and comics is not exactly overspilling with Christians.  I asked him about this and he recognised that there weren’t many other Christians around but that people responded to the fact that he’s a Christian positively and with curiosity.

In his work itself, he’s certainly moved past the preachy images of his childhood. (‘…It would be weird to plug every picture (at a My Little Pony Convention) by telling people that Jesus loves them.’) For Josh, the best way he can be a witness in his world and work is to be ‘nice to people, do the best I can and stay very positive.’  He expresses his aim succinctly and simply, but as usual gets it totally on the button in my opinion- he wants people who meet him to go away saying:

‘That Jowybean guy, there’s something about him that was different.’

He’s come a long way since Veggie Tales and I’m very excited to see where he’s going to go next. He’s already working on the third issue of Humanization.com and is also looking to continue working as a freelancer in everything from children’s picture books to comics to animations to continuing vending at geek conventions. The project he is most excited about though is working with local historians to document the story behind towns and villages around Birmingham and further afield (building on his Bearwood Art and History Project). He sums this up like this:

I believe that this ambitious endeavour of mine would be a way of giving a spotlight, not to just me as a creative, but mostly to the unsung heroes that God has made… God has blessed me with a wacky but beautiful imagination and I know he wants me to share that with as many people… both in faith or not.

I couldn’t agree more.

To see more of Josh’s work, check this link. To buy Humanization.com, go here.

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An Interview with Josh Whitehouse (pt 1)

Who are the people in your life who energise you?

We all need people like that. People who inspire us, encourage and provoke us. People who you come away from feeling fresher than you felt before you met up. I have the pleasure of meeting up with Josh Whitehouse every couple of weeks and he is certainly such a person.

If you’ve been involved in Sputnik for any length of time, you’ll probably have met Josh. For Josh, illustration is less a skill, more a superpower. I’ve met many artists who can do things I know I’ll never be able to do, but with Josh, often I don’t even know how he is able to do the things he does. His mastery of his craft is breathtaking, but more than that, he thinks in a way that I particularly appreciate and it means that Friday morning catch ups are always highlights in my week.

On one such morning recently, in the middle of a typically involved and fascinating conversation about Japanese animation, I thought that I should really stop being so selfish and share some of Josh’s insights a bit wider. It was never going to be a particularly linear interview, but via a few Facebook messages, a chat recorded on my phone and some other conversations over coffee, I think I’ve got enough to give you a bit of a window into the world of Jowybean. Next time, we’ll go into some of the themes in his work and how he wrestles with the challenges he faces as a Christian illustrator, today I’ll let him guide you through his rather unique artistic and spiritual journey…

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It all started with singing vegetables…

Josh, like so many of us, was brought up with Christianity all around him. However, that is probably one of the sole points of common ground most of us will have with his spiritual journey. Growing up, his faith was seen through a very specific lens: Veggie Tales! Such was the influence of Larry and his talking vegetable chums that, as a child, Josh found church quite dull (I mean, singing cucumbers are quite a hard act to follow) and started life with a strong feeling that there was something intrinsically sacred about vegetables!

The basic foundations were set right there- Christianity and cartoons. Working through how to combine the two in any non-vegetable related way was tricky though. Josh was prodigiously good with a pen from childhood. At 9, he got his first exhibition for Disability Art in London (Josh was diagnosed with autism at an early age) and was the official artist at the opening of Millennium Point, Birmingham, when he was asked to produce an original piece of art for The Queen.

Regarding content, he initially drew what he refers to as ‘propaganda, sort of preachy pictures’– devils getting beat up by angels, that sort of thing. However, even then, his artistic vision didn’t quite fit in with expectations. Sometimes the content would be deemed a bit scary by folk at church, but more generally his drawing was just seen as a bit of a distraction. ‘Why was Josh sitting drawing and not listening to the preacher?’ That was how he felt people responded to him in church. They didn’t get what he was doing and more than that felt that his art was somehow unhealthy, and partly because of this, he stopped going to church as a teenager. (Josh was keen for me to point out that another contributing factor to his church absence was a burgeoning obsession with Sonic the Hedgehog which was taking up a lot of his time!)

And perhaps there were unhealthy elements to his work. Josh is the first to admit his own weaknesses and his work (and the imagination behind it) has been a blessing and a curse:

‘For much of my life I felt I was a cartoon character trapped in a human body, I felt I wasn’t real- a Roger Rabbit type character…’

When I first met him, I remember talking at length about how he feared that he lived too much in the imaginative worlds he created and not enough in the real world. I understand his concern, but to be honest, having heard about some of the worlds he’s created, I’d probably quite like to live in them too! It’s always reminded me a bit of JRR Tolkien, who not only constructed the entire history of Middle Earth while writing Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, but created the elvish language too.

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Brought back to faith by My Little Pony?!

Whereas Veggie Tales provided Josh’s Christian foundations, his route back to Jesus was through another animated series, and this is a little more surreal. Josh was brought back to faith through My Little Pony.

When I first met Josh, I discovered almost immediately that he was a Brony. Bronies, for the uninitiated are adult male fans of My Little Pony, and I do use the term in the plural, as Josh is far from the only one. When My Little Pony relaunched in 2010, its TV show ‘Friendship is Magic’ was primarily aimed at young girls, but it unexpectedly gained an eager audience among young and middle aged men (as well as women). Maybe it’s a cosplay sort of thing, maybe it’s just a strange offshoot of geekdom, but whatever it is, it’s a thing, and it seems to be the thing that God used to bring Josh Whitehouse back to faith in Jesus.

The world it was based in, the way it was told, and just the visuals- it just had this essence of heaven in there, and at some point I suddenly started hearing God again, coming through there, through the interaction between the characters, the storylines and even the catchy songs, to the point that even some of my pony pieces actually have names of Christian songs in there… And again I do feel strange even now as a Christian talking about this and saying that ponies was a way of sort of getting back into talking with Jesus but in a way that was where the faith grew.

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As well as kickstarting his faith, MLP provided Josh with his widest platform as an artist. He is a renowned MLP fan artist and regularly displays and sells work at conventions across the world. But to label Josh, or jowybean to use his artist moniker, simply a Pony artist, would be a huge discredit to him, whatever you think of Hasbro’s colourful horses. Next time, I’ll divulge a little more why that might be.

In the mean time, check out his work. Perhaps his instagram is a good place to start.

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So, What Do You Think Of My Work?

I realise that creatives come from every degree of the personality spectrum. Regardless of our temperament, our level of self-belief, our raw talent, our techniques or our oratory skills, as artists it feels risky and vulnerable asking people to talk about or evaluate our work. You might well have issues or misgivings about one of your own art pieces, songs, designs, poems, short films etc. but hearing someone else critique it can feel like a dagger to the soul.

Perhaps artists will balk at what I’m about to suggest but suggest it I will. When the opportunity presents itself ask people what they think of your work.

As I wrote and shot my short film ‘The Quickener’ I tried to strike just the right balance between mystery and revelation, rap lyricism and medieval instrumentation, sorrow and hope, grit and grace, hip-hop culture references and arcane quips. After the gruelling months of post-production I was still wondering ‘Does this work?’

Despite having numerous opportunities after screenings of ‘The Quickener’ I often felt unable to ask viewers what they made of it. I’m frustrated that I didn’t have more face-to-face conversations about the film. I want to get better at asking one or more of the following simple questions about my work:

  1. Did you like it?
  2. What did it make you think about?
  3. How did it make you feel?
  4. Can I tell you some of the story behind it?

And if you and a friend are responding to the work of someone else you can also ask:

05 What do you think the artist wants to say through this? 

Are you able to ask people about their perspective on your art? When I’ve asked the right question and got a well-considered or simple, honest gut response it’s made my day. People reveal things about my work I didn’t even recognise while I was making it. Moreover I’ve actually started friendships in those ‘what do you think of my work?’ conversations. And yes, I’ve also had some ego-bruising (and at times baffling) critiques.

I know that some art is made for quiet engagement and prolonged reflection. I’m not saying that an intense conversation is the indicator of success. What I am saying is that much of our work has got something prophetic, transgressive, provocative, evocative, satirical, hopeful, melancholic, autobiographical, surreal, biblical, beautiful we genuinely want people to respond to. If you’re keen to get people talking you’re the one whose probably going to have to get the conversation started.

Just ask one of those 5 ridiculously simple and completely natural questions.

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Re-presenting our Communities

In my community there is an owl called Perry Chocobow Swanet. It was commissioned as part of Birmingham’s ‘Big Hoot’ in 2015, which aimed to celebrate the diversity of Birmingham and its different communities through giant customised owls, as well as celebrating a kind of civic unity. Without the paint, the owls were essentially uniform.

I have mixed feelings about Perry Chocobow Swanet. All of the different motifs depicted on the owl are explained on the Big Hoot website. I understand the references, but I don’t feel that Perry the owl represents them. When I chatted to the artist, who’d visited different parts of Perry Common to come up with the design, I found that he had similar frustrations.

In visiting so many different groups within the community, who all had very strong ideas about what the owl should represent, the final design ended up looking like ‘something that could belong in any park anywhere’. In attempting to satisfy the diverse outlook of a community, the owl said nothing distinctive. The intriguing name, which was apparently chosen by children at a youth group I volunteer at, was quietly ignored on a local press release about the owl, which referred to it simply as ‘Perry’.

As part of a collective of artists, and as part of the community of the church, I find the challenge of representing a people fascinating. It sounds really difficult.

A couple of years ago, I came across an artist whose body of work accomplished this really well. KC McGinnis is a friend (and a photojournalist) from America. Hailing from Iowa, in the Mid-West, KC’s work frequently represents communities in the States in a way that is striking, unique and incredibly reverent; three words that probably couldn’t be used for the Big Hoot project. I sat down with him over Skype to ask some questions about how he looks to represent communities through his art.

Most of the communities KC has photographed are local to him, but different. These include Iowa’s Iraqi and Roman Catholic communites, as well as what one might view as a more ‘traditional’ picture of rural America.

I ask how KC approaches a community as a photographer, and how he goes about being an ‘outsider’. KC says that accepting you are foreign is an important step. Photography is inherently autobiographical. You are present and so people are different. KC embraces this autobiographical element, attempting to be fair in what he represents, but not trying to blend in. Having some knowledge of the community helped, though. Knowing how mass worked, or learning some Arabic enabled small talk and engagement.

Representing is a good verb, says KC, because he aims to re-present. Although he wouldn’t identify as a ‘representative’ for these communities, KC instead aims to say ‘this is what I interpreted with the tools available to me.’ He then asks ‘is this voice fair?’ A photo can be stylised and effective, but for KC, the fairness of the voice is a deciding factor. He references a series of photos he took of a GOP rally with a harsh flash that made the most of a gathering storm in the background. The image was striking, the symbolism clear, but KC and his editor decided they were unfair. And so the photos didn’t get published.

My thoughts turned to PJ Harvey, whose album The Hope Six Demolition Project, released in April of this year, attempted a cross between song-writing and journalism in documenting housing projects in Ward 7 of Washington D.C., a city KC incidentally moved to shortly after our interview. Ward 7 was a community to which Harvey did not belong, and though the album drew generally positive critical reviews, it backfired spectacularly in the projects it attempted to document, where PJ Harvey was accused of desertion, described as ‘inane’ and worst of all, as ‘the Piers Morgan of music’.

I ask KC if strangers have ever reacted negatively to his work. ‘Oh yeah’, he says. There was an Iraqi man whose hair was receding. When this was made evident in a photo of KC’s, the man objected, believing the photo was taken to make him look bad. We live in a snapshot culture, says KC. Intentionality is unexpected, and so people can be annoyed if a photograph is not overtly formal or spontaneous. People think photography exists to either make you look good or exploit you, and as a result the photographer is themselves both trusted and distrusted.

I’m also intrigued to understand KC’s identity as an Iowan. Though worlds apart from Birmingham, Iowa is often dismissed in familiar disparaging tones. It is renowned for its corn, and when I tell Americans that I’ve been there, most respond with an incredulous ‘why!?’

For KC, Iowa is home and he says that the best storytellers are always the locals. Preconceptions about Iowa generally include corn, farmers, and weirdly, food on a stick. I ask KC if he tried to combat these assumptions. He says that he can be a bit defensive, but that ultimately stereotypes are there because elements of them are true. He instead sees Iowa as a microcosm of the United States, with sustainable energy, agriculture, faith and the loss of rural life all important national and local themes.

KC is currently working for USA Today in Washington D.C. You can have a look at some of the work described here on his website. Hopefully this can provide some insight into how we re-present our city, the church, our neighbourhoods, whichever community you are a part of. How can we tell local stories in ways that are striking, unique, beautiful and fair?

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Michelangelo, Character and Community

At the age of 72 Michelangelo began work on a pietà (a work depicting Jesus dead after being taken down from the cross), probably for his own tomb in Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.

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Unlike his previous pietà which depicted Mary holding the body of Jesus across her lap, this one showed Mary and Mary Magdalene on either side of the dead Christ. Behind Jesus, passing him down from the cross was the hooded figure of Nicodemus, his bearded face based on Michelangelo’s own.

Michelangelo never finished the sculpture: after eight years’ work he took a hammer to it. (There are many theories about the destruction: it might have been frustration at flaws in the marble block, or concern that the identification with Nicodemus would result in problems with the newly established Roman Inquisition). The fragments were gathered and reassembled, and now the unfinished pietà is displayed in the Opera Duomo Museum in Florence  together with two marble panels carved with Michelangelo’s sonnet 65 in Italian and in English.

Here’s the English version:

On the Brink of Death

(To Giorgio Vasari, Sonnet LXV)

The course of my life has brought me now

Through a stormy sea, in a frail ship,

To the common port where, landing

We account for every deed, wretched or holy.

So that finally I see

How wrong the fond illusion was

That made art my idol and my King,

Leading me to want what harmed me.

My amorous fancies, once foolish and happy

What sense have they now that I approach two deaths

The first of which I know is sure, the second threatening.

Let neither painting nor carving any longer calm

My soul turned to that divine Love

Who to embrace us opened His arms upon the cross.

It was the middle stanza that caught my attention: how wrong the fond illusion was that made art my idol and my King, leading me to want what harmed me. This is Michelangelo acknowledging the tension between total dedication to his art and the working out of his faith. For me, those lines set out the distinctive challenge for any artist of faith: to create the deepest, strongest work, putting our whole selves in, but at the same time to acknowledge that art is not ‘it’, is not everything.

How do we do that? Let’s get two small things out of the way. First, religious subject matter doesn’t get one off the hook: Dante spent a lot of his Divine Comedy getting back at the people of Florence. Secondly, neither does an attitude of ‘oh that’ll do.’ As if somehow the fact that art is not ‘it’ excuses the half-hearted, the half-baked and the half- … yes, well. It does not.

So what will help? The exact answer is going to be different for every artist, but there are two things which I think move towards an answer: character and community.

Character, because that is the internalised result of the lived life of faith, which enables the artist to make good judgements: at a minor level, to make the proper choice between a poem and a prayer meeting (some days it may be the poem, some days the prayer meeting). At a higher level, for example, to acknowledge that a particular project needs to be shelved or abandoned or radically refocussed.

Community, because that brings the accountability beyond the individual conscience and raises questions beyond the immediate concerns. I know that I have benefited from reading and considering some of the posts on this site. And preferably a community of artists, as they will understand the specific issues better than a community of, say, management consultants. Outside of a community we are thrashing about on our own in a very large sea.

I’m not saying those two on their own will makes us as good as Michelangelo (I wish), but they may help us produce our best possible work without messing up ourselves or the lives of those around us.

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Making Stuff, Not Just Talking About Stuff

One of the features of the Sputnikzone that has been present since the inception of the Catalyst Festival has been our art workshops.

We’ve put on jewellery making workshops, story telling workshops, photography workshops, willow weaving workshops, painting workshops, felt making workshops, creative writing workshops, percussion workshops, printing workshops, still life drawing workshops, songwriters’ workshops, workshops about how to start creative projects, workshops about how to run art workshops… actually, we didn’t go that far, but you get the point!

I was a little reluctant to dedicate a post to why we did this. I mean why wouldn’t we? Art workshops are fun and there seems to be a plethora of talented and kind people in Catalyst churches who have been very eager to share their skills each year (you know who you are- you guys rock!) It’s not exactly ground breaking as a basic idea.

However, two things made me think that it may be worth outlining the raison d’être of our workshops. The first reason is that this was a deliberate ploy at the first festival and actually there was some thought that went into building these into the programme. The second reason stemmed from a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago. Let’s start with that phone call…

A couple of weeks ago I was chatting on the phone with a guy from another stream of churches about a festival they were putting on. It was a similar idea to the Catalyst festival and he was thinking through the arts stream and wanted to use me as a bit of a sounding board for what he was planning. The idea was simple. He was planning to deliver a series of 3 seminars about the arts.

The content was great and there were loads of good quotes that I will probably nick in upcoming posts. However, while good content may suffice for presentations on most areas of Christian life, in the arts, I think that we need to do something more. I have certainly enjoyed seminars like this before- I remember once hearing Dave Fellingham talk about the arts at a conference and leaving with the comforting feeling that perhaps I wasn’t quite as odd as my two decades in church up to that point had made me feel! However, I can’t help thinking that there is something inherently self defeating in talking about art, unless it’s accompanied by appreciating art or even better actually making something.

Andy Crouch branded this on to my brain with his excellent book ‘Culture Making’. I won’t go into too much detail as I’ve written about this at length before (here), however, one of his key points in the book is that while modern evangelical Christians have put lots of time into critiquing art (placing it into its cultural context, talking about the merits and demerits of different pieces, basically- doing seminars!), there has been very little attention given over to actually creating. For Crouch, to change culture, we must create culture.

Having read this just before the first Catalyst Festival then, we decided that we would make it our habit that whatever we did, wherever possible, we would try to include an element of actual creation. This was the main reason we initiated our Sputnikzone art workshops and have continued with them each year. It might sound quite grand and over blown, but we want to make a statement not just through what we say or what we display, but in what we do- that the practice of creation is valuable.

We applied this at our Sputnik artists’ gathering last year too, where we got Rob Cox to lead us through a monotype printing workshop to kick off the day. It proved an excellent way of putting people at ease so that they could get to know each other, but more than that, it reinforced this statement- we don’t want to be known as those who talk about art, we want to be known as those who make stuff. Excellent stuff, I hope!

So I hope you guys who were at the festival enjoyed learning how to make jewellery, create basic prints, use metaphor effectively, weave willow and tell stories. I also hope that some of you learnt some new skills that you can pursue further in the future. On top of that, I hope that my friend manages to embellish his good seminar ideas with some good art practice. But more than all of this I hope that Christians in the UK stop being known for being good at talking about things and start being known for being good at creating things- beautiful, ugly, provocative, difficult, challenging, powerful things.

 

 

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Art is the product of thought, practice and years of dedication

One of the explicit goals of this year’s Sputnikzone at the Catalyst Festival was to show something of the work behind the work.

This emphasis was specifically to clear up the common misconception that artistic works of value simply materialise out of thin air. They are products of thought, practice and usually years of dedication. We wanted to help upcoming artists just starting out to know what lay ahead of them- the responsibilities and the joys- and also for churches in general to understand that if they want to value the finished product, they must also value the dedicated labour that will necessarily precede it.

This is especially important in churches like those in the Catalyst sphere of Newfrontiers (our gang!) When I reflect on my experience of charismatic Christianity, I recognise that so often, there is a love for the spontaneous and an expectation of God’s dramatic, instantaneous intervention, but this can lead to undervaluing the necessity of putting in the work, of perseverance, of the hard slog. I mean, if the gifts that we value most highly can simply be deposited on us by the Holy Spirit at any given moment and entirely by grace (gifts of the Spirit like those listed in 1 Corinthians 12 for example), there is surely limited point in putting time into developing other skills and talents. If our hope for the turnaround in our nation’s spiritual climate rests squarely on Revival, why bother working hard to get involved in every area of our society to slowly and patiently influence and transform? Although these conclusions do not automatically spring from the premises, this thinking seems to be quite common. I personally think we should value the gifts of the Holy Spirit more than we do, and I regularly pray for a dramatic and sudden intervention of God in our times. However, as with so many things, this is not an either/or, and as one side of this equation has been promoted so vigorously in our churches, I’m more than happy to redress the balance somewhat.

The mindset creeps in: if our hope for the turnaround in our nation’s spiritual climate rests squarely on Revival, why bother working hard to get involved in every area of our society to slowly and patiently influence and transform?

As Christians, we must be those who are willing to give our lives for the kingdom. Please excuse the non-artistic digression, but take the gaining of wisdom as an example. In James 1:5, James instructs his readers that if they lack wisdom, they should ask God and ‘it will be given to you.’ I’ve often heard this Scripture used as a foundational verse about how to to get wise. How do you do it? Ask God, and he’ll give it to you. Bish bash bosh! Microwave wisdom that springs from a moment’s prayer, rather than a lifetime’s labour.

Proverbs gives a very different picture. How do we get wisdom according to the book of Proverbs? Well, it starts when we’re children, at which point we need training in which way to go (Prov 22:6). From that point, we give careful thought to the paths our feet should take by learning how to control our tongues, our attitude to money, to work, to how to get ahead in life. The key word is ‘learn’ (1:5, 24:32, etc) . We learn at first through ‘the rod’ and then as we become wiser, through rebuke (25:12), advice (12:15) and instruction (1:8).

And of course, learning takes time. James 1:5 points us to the fact that God in his grace can help us when we’re in a tight spot as an exception to the general rule, but the rest of his letter, which is basically a remix of the Old Testament proverbs, points us back to the same foundation for wisdom. Wisdom is learnt through a life lived pursuing it, not received on the back of a moment’s prayer in an intense spiritual experience.

This really shouldn’t take us by surprise. Nobody would advise a student preparing for an exam- if you lack knowledge of your subject, simply ask God and it will be given to you. The same would go for a sportsperson who wants to get into the olympic team. We revise, we practice, we prepare, we learn. And funnily enough, the same is true for artists.

Therefore, at the festival it was great to highlight artistic motivation through the exhibition and reveal what drives people to make work in the first place. I was also delighted to have two seasoned craftsman, Rob Cox and Chaz Friend, creating live pieces throughout the festival, so that people could see in real time, the work involved. The most instructive thing in this regard though was Rob’s ‘A Walk Through Isaiah’ exhibition. Rob had created a print for every chapter of Isaiah and for the first time ever, at the festival, the whole body of work was exhibited.

Rob is no hobbyist! He is a man who has given his life to developing his art practice, and his passion for his art form and expertise in his field spill out of him in even the most fleeting of conversations. Hopefully, walking round his exhibition, people will have discerned the dedication, blood, sweat and tears that went into this fabulous project. In case this went below the radar, myself and Phil Mardlin paid Rob a visit just before the festival, to try to capture something of the process that goes into creating a Rob Cox print. Here is the result, which we showed in the madebymotive exhibition.

So, if you’re just embarking on your creative journey, please take note that you’ve got some work to do! It is a genuine joy to learn your craft, but there is a responsibility to dedicate yourself to this pursuit. To become an expert in your field. To experiment with different techniques and identify which ones you will master. If you’re serious about becoming excellent, formal education may be helpful (depending on your discipline). There are no short cuts and I’m afraid praying for ‘anointing’ won’t get God to do the work for you. Please do pray. Pray for the strength to persevere. Pray for wisdom to know your capacity and how you should be using your skills. Pray that God would keep your eyes on him as you navigate the potentially perilous waters that most art forms present. But then learn, prepare and practice. Put the work in! And have fun while you do it!

And if you wouldn’t consider yourself an artist, but would like to see more excellent artists in your church, give artists the space to do this. I’d give a special plea to church leaders:

  • Don’t try to fill your artists’ timetables with church activities and responsibilities and understand when they say they can’t commit to this group or that serving opportunity. This won’t be true for everyone, but it is very possible that those people who are spending their evenings and weekends reading, writing, painting, drawing, acting, or generally ‘being creative’ are not engaging in a frivolous hobby, but learning a craft.
  • Don’t overly emphasise the bubble of Christian culture- excellent authors will not grow out of Christian paperbacks, songwriters will not develop the expertise necessary to speak into our culture from a diet of contemporary worship albums.
  • Be careful about platforming instantly accessible art in your meetings and through your church communications that is made by people who have not sufficiently learnt their craft. There may be short term benefits from showcasing such art, but if the artists we exhibit on the walls of our buildings, in our Sunday meetings and through our evangelistic events are full of the Holy Spirit, but don’t have a depth of experience and expertise, we are actively downplaying the importance of craftsmanship and those in your congregations who have spent decades on their art will feel devalued and misunderstood. And they will probably leave. Or get grumpy. Or both.

For previous reflections on the festival, try this link. Next week, I’ll explain why we try not to talk too much.

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Film, Folk Guitar, and a New Kind of Album

A couple of weeks back, we highlighted Stewart Garry’s exciting new project Sojourner. Basically, Stewart is one of the country’s finest acoustic guitar talents, particularly specialising in fingerstyle, and ‘Sojourner’ is an album and a film, recorded live at a number of locations that have inspired him in his writing (from a lighthouse on the outskirts of Newcastle to a Scottish whisky distillery). Sojourner was officially released yesterday, but we caught up a couple of weeks back to find out more about the project and the man himself…

So Stewart, introduce yourself.

Hi, my name is Stew Garry, I’m 27 years old, currently based in Coventry but originally from Newcastle upon Tyne. I’m a part time student studying theology and also work part time as an elder for my church in Coventry whilst continuing to play music when and where I can.

I’ve always been into music. Growing up, my parents brought me up on a solid foundation of jazz music- Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong stand out as people who I still love to listen to and inspire my writing! I started out playing penny whistle in school folk groups (ending up playing on ITV at one point somehow?) but quickly had a fascination for all musical instruments, playing violin, steel pans and various other instruments until I was settled on the drums. I joined a rock band aged 13/14 playing mainly black sabbath covers, which was truly awful! But we got this gig playing at an opening of a local studio in Newcastle. So we played our set, thought we’d nailed it and on walks this older guy, with a beat up guitar. I’m thinking ‘who’s this guy?’ And he plays one of the most stunning pieces I’ve ever heard on the guitar! The guy’s name is Tommy Emmanuel and he was playing his version of ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’. Needless to say when I picked my jaw up from the floor, I dropped my drumsticks and said ‘I’m going to do that!’. Ever since I’ve been trying to work out how to play guitar like that, looking at other great guitarists like Andy McKee, Don Ross, Eric Roche and Antoine Dufour for technique and Inspiration.

Throughout that time I also played in a lot of different bands, jazz (which was a must to try and play like Miles) and rock bands, including a post hardcore band called Juinera where I got to play alongside Chris Donald who produced this album.

How did you come up with the whole idea for Sojourner?

I composed this album bit by bit over the last 4 years, gigged it and refined it until I was ready to record. I tried a few times to record the album in a studio, but for whatever reason, it wasn’t sounding right.

One day, Chris and I were talking  about how much YouTube was playing a role in the rise of modern Fingerstyle guitar playing and he had the idea of doing a live film, where we would visit different places that have inspired my music.

There are so many factors that have gone into Sojourner. I love the way that it’s not just a collection of songs, but a laying bare of the factors behind the songs and of you as an artist. One of the key elements seems to be place and geography as you record all the songs in places that have inspired your writing. How do you feel place and location affects your art?

Yeah, something I love about instrumental music is that it evokes different things for different people, it allows the listener to engrave their own stories onto the music which I think is awesome! But for this album I thought it would be great to bring the listener into some of my thoughts about the compositions and what inspires me, that way I think people who may struggle with instrumental music might be able to understand where I’m coming from as well.

Playing live at the different locations was a really fun way to record, it makes everything more relaxed! You’re not shoved into a small booth, with microphones thrown in every direction at you! It’s just playing that music I love to play in the places that are special to me, which was a huge joy! I think that made all the difference to the album, each place had a unique look, sound and feel. For example ‘After the rain’ was played in this little chapel in Cornwall that me and some friends visited a lot, so I had some great memories of the chapel but also the reverb in there was awesome, the weather played a part as well! It had just rained and so it made filming there even more perfect.

How does your art fit into your role as a church leader? In what ways do you find the two a natural fit or a source of tension?

I love doing both music and church work! I think having both aspects of music and church works well. Music is an outlet of creativity, I see it as a sabbath activity, it’s restful and brings joy, it’s also worship whenever I’m playing. Church work allows me to spend a lot of time studying the Bible which is a great joy, the more I study the more I learn about Jesus which in turn inspires me to write! So I think the two overlap nicely. The only tension would be touring and how that works alongside church, but it’s a small tension and one that is usually easily workable.

When the project is fully released on 16th May, what can we expect?

The project will be sold in various formats. You can get it digitally or physical copies. It will come as a CD/DVD double disk, so you can watch the film or just sit back with a dram and listen to the album. You can order the album/film from the Minor Artists shop (you can get it from bandcamp or iTunes but we would prefer if you could get it from us directly).

Thanks Stewart. If he hasn’t convinced you to shell out for this fantastic project,  let the music speak for itself: here is the second video from the project (featuring Sputnik favourite Joanna Karselis) to whet your appetite:

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Interview with Phil Mardlin (LifeBox Theatre Company)

It was great to meet Phil and Harri Mardlin early last year at our first SputnikDay, and ever since we’ve been chatting about how to connect with and serve actors more effectively. We thought it was about time to bring you in on the conversation, particularly because we’ve got some schemes fast approaching that we’d love all of you script writers and actors to get involved with. So, to that end, we caught up with Phil…

So, Phil, introduce yourself.

Hi.  My name is Phil Mardlin. I started LifeBox Theatre Company with my lovely wife, Harriet.  So many theatre companies just don’t make it in today’s competitive market place so we wanted to make sure we ran a company that made us money and allowed us to work artistically.  So, we have two strands to our company; we specialize in forum theatre, delivering training around communication issues in healthcare, education and business and we also provide actors for other training companies that deliver communication based training to businesses across the region.  Artistically, we run an annual new writing festival in Bedford called StageWrite, which has just run for the 4th year.  We take unsolicited scripts for much of the year (this year we had a record 67 scripts submitted) and then we select 8 and put them on, script-in-hand over 4 nights in front of an audience.  After each performance we have a question and answer with the writer, director, actors and the audience to help them develop the piece further.  We tend to select one of the strongest pieces and, working with the writer, help them take the piece to full production with a short tour.

How did you get into acting and who are your main inspirations?

Well, after a career as a children’s cancer nurse, followed by 8 years as a lecturer in children’s nursing, I had a very early mid-life crisis and gave it all up to become an actor!  Madness, I hear you cry… and you’re probably right but, it’s the best decision I ever made.  I was too old and with too many responsibilities to be able to go to drama school so I did a degree in English and Theatre and managed to bag a first class honours!  Since then, largely through our company, I’ve discovered directing and writing and love being able to switch between the two of them, plus being a performer, depending on the project.

As for inspirations… gosh, that’s hard because I have so many!  I remember going to see Waiting for Godot with Patrick Stewart, Sir Ian McKellan and Simon Callow and just watching it thinking, if I can’t be that good, is it worth bothering?  Of course it is, and whilst I will never be in that league, I know I’ve always got something to aim for.  As a writer, I am heavily influenced by Alan Bennett.  He’s so incredibly observant about life and, having performed in The History Boys, I find that he writes in such a way that every word seems to logically follow on from the next.  I know that sounds strange but it meant that it was just one of the most joyous and easy scripts I’ve ever learned.

How do you see your faith and your creativity coming together?

I don’t really see creativity as an extension of faith because the two things are inextricably linked and, for me, one can’t exist without the other.  For me, being a child of God is at the very core of who I am.  When I live out of that place, anything I do, creative or not, should come from a place of desiring to please Him and serve Him.  I would also add that doesn’t mean everything I do creatively is ‘about’ God but it is ‘for’ Him.  Much of what I do either as an actor, director or writer, I do because I believe in the message of the story or the impact and questions it might raise in those who engage with it.  Sometimes, that means engaging in a world that might, on the face of it, seem quite dark.  I believe that sometimes, to reach the people in those dark places, you have to reflect back their world to them, and theatre and film can do that very well; what you then do with what you are shown is the responsibility of the observer.

How will you be involved at the Catalyst festival this year?

I am so excited to be involved with Catalyst this year and, along with a few others, we are going to be creating a space for emerging writers to see their work up on its feet with the help of professional actors.  We will be working with selected scripts over the Sunday and Monday afternoons of the festival and this will culminate in a performance of the scripts on the Monday evening.

How can people get involved with this project?

If you are a writer, then we would love to read your script.  We are looking for scripts of around 20 minutes in length, so it could be the opener to a bigger idea you have or it could stand alone as a short piece of theatre.  It needs to require no more than 4 actors to put on.  Depending on volume of scripts we can’t guarantee that we will be able to put them all on but we will give you some brief feedback if you would like it.

If you are an actor working professionally or with some relevant experience, then we would love you to get involved with us to work on the scripts and perform them on the Monday evening.  If you are interested in either of these, please contact Jonny at jonny@creativeartsnetwork.co.uk. (Better be quick though as the deadline for scripts is 15th May)

How do you think churches can support actors more effectively?

Good question.  I could probably write for hours on this but ultimately it’s about communicating.  I think the biggest thing you can do as a church to support actors is to simply engage with them.  Invite them for lunch (we’re generally poor so free food is always a bonus) and talk to them.  Too often, actors and creatives generally are seen as mavericks and people don’t often have a box to put them in. So talk to them, listen to them, hear them and seek to understand them.

 

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Interview with Photographer Simon Bray

Originally posted on Creative Arts Network.

Hey Simon, tell us a little bit about yourself and your work..

Hey! I’m a landscape and documentary photographer based in Manchester. I also manage The Anchor Coffee House, which is owned by Vinelife Church, which is an absolute pleasure. I moved up here from Hampshire nearly 10 years ago to study music and now I take pictures and make coffee, which is a really nice balance. I’m married to Sarah, who studied textiles down in Falmouth and is now training to be a midwife, so essentially, two southerners living in Manchester who’ve taken their time working out what they want to do in life, but we’re getting there!

What made you want to become a photographer?

I’m not sure I’ve ever been asked that before! I’ve always enjoyed creating, and up until a few years ago, I’d thought I’d end up being a musician, but when I started experimenting with cameras I discovered that I see things differently to other people. I enjoy the process of creating something concrete that was tangible, a moment in time captured, but the photographer has license to create something literal or true or to create their own take on events through creative techniques. There is a huge responsibility on the image maker to create something that they can justify, but that depends on your motivation. My landscape work in inspired by God’s creation and I feel a need to capture that in images that I hope others can enjoy, which comes with a certain amount of artistic license. My documentary work requires a brutal honesty, that’s not to say I can’t work creatively and use metaphor in order to build a story, but I have a responsibility to tell the truth and not embellish anything because of my own motivations, and then my commercial work is created for someone else, so I have to understand what they’re seeing and interpret that through my images.

We love your current project The Edges of These Isles, what was the inspiration behind this project?

Thanks! Tom and I got to know each other whilst undertaking a Three Peaks challenge (Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike & Snowdon in 24 hours) and we’d both independently decided that we wanted to focus on landscape work, so we thought, why not go exploring together! We asked friends to recommend some of their favourite locations from across the UK, and over the past couple of years, we’ve been visiting them in order to create work that will be exhibited in Manchester at The Whitworth in September. So far, we’ve been up to Lindisfarne, Buttermere, Glen Coe, the Brecon Beacons and the Gower Peninsula, all of which have been inspiring and exhausting in about equal measure! Our final trip is the Causeway Coast in Northern Ireland next month, then it’s on to preparing for the exhibit and designing and printing the book. We’ve just started up an instagram account so everyone can see what we’re up to!

What has it been like collaborating with an artist on this project? Has this altered your practice in any way?

It’s an intriguing combination, not something that I’ve seen much before really. On our first trip up to Buttermere, I set up my camera by the water and took a few shots, then turned around ready to move on and Tom was just about getting his sketchbook and chalks out! So I ended up sitting in that one spot, watching the light to change, and the shadows move across the lake, giving me time to experiment with some different filter combinations, it really helped me consider the images I wanted to create. We also get to have these long winded in depth conversations on our huge journeys whilst listening to our niche ambient electronic record collections, which goes a long way to informing the decisions we make about the work we’re creating and how we want the viewer to engage with it. Tom work’s with homemade pigments, paint and wax to create these amazing, and often abstract, impressions of the landscape before him, which may well be influenced by a mountain ridge or the mist or a tone, where as my photography works on a much larger and more scale and is very literal, so I’m looking forward to our editing process and seeing which pieces work well together and how they inform one another.

Who or what has been the biggest single influence on your way of thinking?

I can’t draw on one influence really. I try and soak up as much photography work as possible, read journals, go to shows, have conversations with other photographers and people involved in photography, and each of those aspects will help build my understanding of the medium and inform how I create images. I’m always trying to develop my eye, my understanding of what a photograph can be and appreciating how the viewer may or may not respond, because my emotional attachment to an image that I’ve created can be vastly different from theirs. I try to avoid imagery that is on trend, I want the work that I go on to create to last a lot longer than I do, so I’m exploring different means to encourage a deeper appreciation of my subject matter that allows the viewer to truly engage. A lot of it is about educating yourself in understanding what has gone before you, being able to appreciate the constant evolution of photography and also why people connect with an image. The fact that an image from Ferguson shot by a bystander on an iPhone can end up on the cover of TIME tells you all you need to know about how photography is changing, and the new generation of photographs is appreciating that you can be just as inspired as an image your find online that someone with no public profile has taken, just as much as something by one of the greats.

What do you currently shoot with?

I’ve never been that fussed about gear. I’ve got a Canon 6D and a Fufi X100s which I can carry everywhere. I’ve toyed with film, I’m currently trying out my dad’s old box brownie with some medium format film, which is really new to me, but is helping me slow down when I take my images, which is something I’ve tried to do, but which digital just doesn’t give you space for. I think as soon as I’m shooting a documentary project that is just stills, medium format will be the way forward, to help me build a stronger aesthetic to my work and be more considered when working.

Your Loved and Lost project is really touching, what was the biggest challenge working with such an emotional concept?

Thank you. Loss is not an easy subject for most people to talk about, which is the reason I wanted to start the project, to open up that conversation. I’ve had to have a lot of meetings with medical and mental health experts, read up on the subject and process my own experiences, having lost my dad to cancer, in order to build the project to where it is today. The greatest challenge for me is working with the participants in order to gain a true understanding of the depth of their experience of loss whilst also making it a constructive and, if possible, a positive experience for them. I’m just about striking that balance, but I have a few ideas on how the process can be improved. If it can be a cathartic experience for the participant, that’s great, and if what they are sharing can inform and comfort the viewer, even better.

What are you currently fascinated by and how is it feeding into your work?

I’m currently working with a new collective on a project about fashion, so I’ve got my head into the ways in which uniform forms identities and how people build their own uniforms for work or social wear in an attempt to stand out or fit in. It’s great to be working with a broad variety of other photographers, even though none of us started out with a strong interest in fashion, we’ve talked about it for hours together and those conversations have begun to inform what we’re researching and shooting, which is really exciting.

What are your top tips for people just starting out as photographers?

Keep exploring and taking images! I’ve spent years refining the type of work I want to take, the aesthetic I want to create with different styles of work and building up an understanding of the medium in order to try and create work that the viewer can connect with in a meaningful way. I don’t know if I’m quite there yet, it’s a long game! I’ve never studied photography, so I had to learn about the history, the work of great photographers and try out loads of different techniques through trial and error, lot’s of things didn’t work out, and it’s especially frustrating when a commercial job doesn’t go as smoothly as you’d like, but you learn each time and grow for next time.

All images © Simon Bray

Find Simon on Twitter @simonbray, Instagram @simonbray and at simonbray.co.uk

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Stewart Garry’s ‘Sojourner’

Minor Artists is part record label, part collective and part music production company. Founded by Sputnikmagazine contributor Chris Donald a couple of years back, it already has at least three bona fide classics under its belt- mSTORK’s ‘The Crux’, Benjamin Blower’s ‘Kingdom vs Empire’ and Ebenezer’s ‘Outremer’, but its forthcoming project is its most ambitious yet.

On the back of a successful Kickstarter campaign, ‘Sojourner’ will be released in 16th May. It’s a cinematic folk album (which I think means that it’s an album and a film) by one of the UK’s finest acoustic guitar talents, Stewart Garry.

Stewart has built a career playing around UK venues, but in ‘Sojourner’ he returns to places that have inspired his writing, from Laphroaig Distillery on the Scottish island of Islay to a lighthouse in the outskirts of Newcastle. The album was recorded live in these diverse locations and filmed simultaneously and last week, the project’s first offering: ‘The Don’ was released. It’s a video featuring beautiful imagery of Islay, a short interview with Stewart and of course the song itself, performed in the cavernous depths of the island’s famous whiskey distillery.

It’s the perfect way to experience Stewart Garry, infusing his very tactile music with a powerful sense of place while exposing the intense physicality of his style.

We’re hoping to grab an interview in a couple of weeks, but to tide you over we thought we’d just point you towards ‘The Don’ and let you see/hear for yourselves:

 

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If art has a function, it is much broader and richer than the church imagines

At our last Birmingham Sputnik hub gathering, we had the pleasure of a visit from Ally Gordon. Ally is a highly respected contemporary artist and the co-founder of Morphe Arts and after an invigorating afternoon, I instantly wanted to share his wisdom to a wider group than those who could fit into the Wilsons’ living room! This article seemed like a good place to start- originally posted on the Evangelical Alliance website a few years back, and reproduced (and very slightly abridged) with permission…

The story of art is rich with those who have glorified God through excellent art from the painterly genius of Rembrandt and Cranach the Elder to the musical magnificence of Mendelssohn and Bach. There is no shortage of believers who wrestled with the significance of what they made before the glory of their Creator yet today there are few Christians of evangelical faith on the national arts platform. One can’t help but ask why?

James Elkins, professor of art history at the Chicago Institute of Art writes, “contemporary art is as far from organised religion as Western art has ever been and that might be its most singular achievement.” Why do so few Christians enter the arts today? Why don’t artists like coming to church? Perhaps we are still experiencing a cultural hangover from the Enlightenment or still working out our reformed theology of images. As people of God’s Word we might feel a bit sheepish when it comes to pictures. We value clarity, especially in preaching, but art is anything but clear, often mysterious and at times a bit emotive.

The Dutch art historian and jazz critic, Hans Rookmaaker, suggested two possibilities in Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (pub. IVP 1946), “The artist who is a Christian struggles with great tensions. An artist is expected to work from his own convictions but these may be seen by his atheist contemporaries as ultra-conservative if not totally passé. On top of this he often lacks the support of his own community, his church and family.”

Rookmaaker wrote over half a century ago but his words are still prophetic to our times. Since artists often find themselves on the cutting edge of philosophical and critical thought, those who confess faith in Christ swim dangerously against the tides of prevailing worldviews in mainstream society, perhaps most severely against the thinking of militant atheists such as Dawkins and Jonathan Miller whose influence is felt as sharply (if indirectly) in the arts as it is in the sciences. At the same time, many artists feel unsupported or unappreciated by their church family. Art is sometimes considered to be an unnecessary decadence or indulgence. One art student told me her pastor asked how she would feel if Jesus came back to find her painting pictures of daisies – what, after all, is the value in a painting of flowers when there are millions yet to hear about the gospel? In my experience, such extreme discouragement for young Christian artists is rare these days but there is still a great need for encouragement.

God’s Word is rich in its instruction and example to those who make art. In the broadest sense of ‘art’, the bible is a magnificent artistry in its own right, bringing together creative writing from a plethora of writers, each bringing their own style yet representing generations of culture and historical insight. The bible is unique art in being rendered by human hands yet divinely inspired (breathed-out) by God’s Spirit (2 Tim 3:16). Consider the great art in the erotic poetry of Song of Songs, the captivating stories told by the prophets and Christ himself or the apocalyptic imagery of John’s Revelation: images of catastrophe to rival any Hollywood epic. Think of the deep poetic despair and joyful elevation expressed by the Psalms and lyrics that inspired Bono of U2 to describe David as “the greatest blues writer of all time”.

In the bible, creativity is the first thing God chooses to record about his character, “In the beginning God created” (Gen 1:1). God’s creation was “good’ and “very good”. From the beginning God is interested in the aesthetic dimensions of living, declaring that the trees are not only “good for food” but first, “pleasing to the eye”(Gen2:9). As those made in God’s image the act of good creativity is merely a very human experience and the artist should not feel a need to justify his art by scribbling bible verses in the bottom right hand corner of her painting or crow-barring a gospel message into his script. Biblical artists such as Bezalel and the Psalmist David were recognised by God for their artistic excellence and Bezalel being chosen by God for his “skill, craft and knowledge” (Ex 31:3) in design.

The Christian is free to make art in whichever discipline, medium or genre he chooses and there really is no such thing as “Christian art” just as there is no such thing as ‘Christian medicine’, ‘Christian food’ or ‘Christian plumbing’ for “the earth is the Lords and everything in it” (Psalm 24:1) The diversity of subject matter available to the Christian is as rainbow rich as the creation itself. As Paul wrote to Timothy, “everything God created is good and nothing is to be rejected” (2 Tim 4:4). There may not be “Christian art” but there are Christian approaches to making art. A good starting point is the question, “how does art function in the Kingdom of God?”

The apostle Paul writes, “In whatever you do work at it with all your heart as working for the Lord and not for men” (Col 3:23). We graft hard for the glory of God in whatever arena of the arts he leads us to. As with every act of service to Christ, making art requires prayer, study and the renewing of our minds through the power of God’s Spirit and his word.

When we ask how art functions in the Kingdom of God we are assuming art has a function (and beyond making walls look pretty, although there is much benefit simply in this). Art can open a window for the viewer to see the world in a way they have yet to experience. The artist can show us something of God’s creation or the fallen nature of the world. Artists can build bridges with those who don’t know Christ by exploring ideas and themes that are common to our daily experiences and the gospel.

Contemporary American artist, Betty Spackman writes, “we make art to remind us of the invisible and to heal our forgetfulness”. Art serves as visual signposts towards what lies beyond peripheral vision or to the realm of ideas and concepts. A painting is more than a collage of pigment and chemicals on canvas but also a window to reveal how the artist sees the world. As such, art is a good vehicle for exploring the Christian worldview. In a similar way, art is well suited to help us document and remember the past, art can help us grieve or lament and it may trigger the memory of important events, people or conversations.

Artists can tell stories through their art. All stories fit into the greatest story of the gospel and some artworks will explore grand and profound themes such as the existential questions, “why are we here?” and “what is the purpose of life?” Others will explore more modest ideas such as “look at that fading flower”.

For pastors wondering how to encourage artists in your church perhaps a good starting point would be to ask them seriously about their work. Ask them how their art functions in the kingdom of God?” Ask them what ideas inform their art and who inspires them. Avoid questions like, “do you do landscapes or portraits”, “what are you trying to say” or “tell me what its about”. An artist takes much time deliberating on the aesthetics of their work to help you engage with their work sometimes in a non-verbal way. Quite often the greatest Christian encouragement for an artist is when other believers appreciate their work enough to buy it. This may be the single most helpful act of support you can offer.

If you are a Christian and an artist may I point you towards the writing of Dr. Francis Schaffer and Dutch art historian Hans Rookmaaker. Rookmaaker’s Modern Art and the Death of a Culture was a breath of fresh air to me as an art student and I still return to Schaffer’s “Art and the Bible” when I need a little spiritual encouragement. More recently writers such as Calvin Seerveld, Steve Turner, Betty Spackman, Hilary Brand and Adrienne Chaplin have also written well on the subject (most their books published by IVP or Piquant).

You can also check out what Morphe are up to here or more specifically, Ally’s book- Beyond Air Guitar. To understand that this guy doesn’t just talk the talk though, check out Ally’s own work. 

Finally, these two posts were originally posted on the Evangelical Alliance website (here). Thanks for the permission to reproduce.

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An interview with Re:flex the Architect

If you were familiar with the previous incarnation of Sputnikmagazine, you may have noticed a certain Stephen Adams (Re:Flex the Architect) in the contributors section. There was a song streamed with Barrowclough spouting something about Bart Simpson and a short interview, but since then very little has been heard from this shadowy Sputnik contributor. Until now.

For the last decade or so, Stephen Adams has been working away quietly establishing himself as one of the mainstays of Christian hiphop in the UK. In April 2014, we caught up with him about his involvement in the second album by US hip hop crew, Scribbling Idiots. We managed to pick his brains about working with the Scribbling Idiots and to tap into his wisdom on the strange science of beat making.

To stream and buy the album, click here.

Introduce yourself….

Hey, I’m Stephen Adams, also known as Re:Flex the Architect. I’m a hiphop Beatmaker/ MC/Mix Engineer. Living in London, but I’m a Polish-born, Leeds-raised Nigerian.

I’m part of the Scribbling Idiots crew, predominantly based in the US, but I’m one of two European members and the only Brit.

How did you get into making music and how did you hook up with the Scribbling Idiots?

Got into music when I was about 13. Heard some really cheesy youth-group type rap when I was young and for some reason that ignited a spark in me to rhyme. Later on, discovered US artists like Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Tunnel Rats, Grits, Blackalicious, Cross Movement, etc, whom I studied and learned the ropes of how to approach hip hop with a real passion for the craft.

I started producing really because I figured out quickly I needed stuff to rap over & I just assumed that rappers made their own beats at that time. My granddad bought me one of those Yamaha keyboard with the pre-arranged backing tracks. Graduated to the Boss DR-5 drum machine, which I really learned how to produce on for a number of years till I then graduated to more computer-based software. I always wanted the MPCs or the Logics or Pro-Tools everyone else seemed to have, but somehow I was able to make what I had work for me. Pretty much taught myself as I didn’t meet other people who were MCs or producers until I went to uni.

At about that time, I found an online forum called Sphere of Hiphop which had a ton of Christians who were passionate about good hiphop. I used to post some of my beats to get feedback and through that, started talking to CAS METAH, who co-leads Scribbling Idiots. He invited me to join the crew about 2001 and I’ve been their UK correspondent ever since 🙂

What do you feel are the main challenges for a Christian making hip-hop music?

Great question.  There are surface challenges which get talked about a fair bit. Things like hip hop’s general attitude towards Christians, where artists are viewed with severe suspicion before you’ve even rapped or made a beat, because frankly, Christians have been occasionally responsible for some terrible hip hop music over the years (not all though). Meanwhile, the church as a whole tends to expect artists to only make musical doctrine statements to discourage youth group kids from sleeping around and leaves no room for artistic expression, growth or voicing your own personal struggles and opinions. Behind the sarcasm lies a large vein of truth.

It’s one of the reasons some of the people who currently inspire me are artists like Shad, who writes from what sounds like a clearly Christ-inspired worldview, but has stayed out of the “Christian music” clubhouse and is respected across the spectrum simply because he is undeniably dope! It’s also one of the things I love about my crew Scribbling Idiots and some of the other artists I work closely with like Tommy Eye or Wizdom (formerly of Greenjade), that we all inspire each other to make good music that steers clear of either of the above traps while still being true to our faith in Christ.

As a producer, it’s a tough one, because you have less control over the end product unless you want to stay in the Christian music ghetto. One of my big influences is a producer called S1 aka Symbolyc One, who has produced for Beyonce, Jay-Z and Kanye West, Game and more, but is a passionate follower of Christ. You’d think it must be tough for him to work on records that the end result may be promoting things he does not necessarily agree with, but to me, his faith shines through in how he goes about his business, the reputation he builds in the industry for his talent AND integrity and the lives he gets to speak into directly as a result.

It’s here that houses the real challenge for Christian in hip hop – to let your faith be seen in the closed-door business dealings and off-stage interactions. To be a man or woman of your word, honour the money, time and trust people invest in you, or to treat others well regardless of their status or immediate benefit to your career.

It’s more important that hip hop as a whole see my faith in action more so when they interact with me as Stephen Adams, far more than anything Re:Flex the Architect says in a verse. I’ve been on the receiving end of shady ethics and dishonesty from artists who share my faith and it makes you quite disillusioned. I try now to use it to remind myself to be better in the way I interact on a business level.

That’s where the real challenges are for me, ‘coz it’s hard to remember that my actions whether in business or in everyday reflect not just me, but how people see Jesus and the church as a whole.

While you are a gifted MC, you are most known for your beat making. For the uninitiated, what does this involve and how would you go about making a beat?

Haha! Cheers Jonny. Beatmaking, to me, is first and foremost about creating a feeling in the listener, whether it’s the rapper who has to write a song based on the emotions the beat evokes, or the listener hearing the final product. I’m always trying to create something that gives me that “Ooooooh” feeling. That feeling that makes me want to stop everything I’m doing, close my eyes, screw my face up like I just smelt something rotten while nodding my head violently! If the track makes me lose myself like that in it, then I know I’ve done my job right. Still a work in progress though.

Outside of manipulating samples and synth sounds, I play keys, drums and percussion to an average level, and am learning bass and guitar, so I try and incorporate either live instruments or at least some form of melody and musicality into the beats.

I’ll be shameless and use my crew’s newest release as an example (Scribbling Idiots – Invitation Only). I produced four songs on the record, but my favourite of them is a song called “Nothing to Prove” . I’ll break down in detail what I did on this one.

While crate digging, I found a 70’s jazz-fusion record where I recognized the “cast list” on the record sleeve had a few incredible jazz / funk musicians of that era playing on it. When I took it home & played it, I heard this incredible song with a gorgeous brass section and piano chords with a beautiful female lead vocal over the top. I hit this section where the singer hit this haunting long note while the brass section played these great riffs that instantly gave me that “Oooooooh!!!” feeling I was talking about earlier.

I sampled that section into the production software I was using, slowed it waaay down to 91bpm and chopped it – picked out the individual brass chords  I wanted from different and rearranged them in a different order and style to create something different from the original – to sound more military-like while still maintaining that haunting musical feel of the original.

I grabbed and layered individual drum sounds I had and played a simple, but hard-hitting drum pattern with them from my Korg PadKontrol, ( a USB drum machine that allows you to play the sounds on your computer live). This gave the drums a more human feel, so it didn’t sound super-rigid like if I just programmed them. Then I played the bass guitar live for the verses and chopped it for the chorus to give it a variation.

The result was a track that sounds to me like a scene from a Marvel superhero movie or Leonidis’ last stand in 300. The MC side of my creative brain could picture a character sticking his chest out, digging his heels in and facing whoever comes against him with fiery confidence. CAS METAH who A&R’d the Invitation Only album, picked MCs for the track who, without any instruction from me, clearly felt the same qualities in the song and you can hear that echoed in their lyrics.

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An Interview with Duncan Stewart

About a year ago, my friend Lex told me about a South African artist he’d got to know. I checked out his website and quickly realised that this was not some hobby-ist with a bit of a creative itch. Duncan Stewart is a painter and sculptor whose work is profoundly thoughtful and technically superb. His wide range, both in terms of style (oils, charcoal, bronze sculptures) and subject (addressing social, environmental and theological issues) is as impressive as his craftsmanship.

His raison d’etre, as expressed on the website’s ‘about’ tab also resonated with me:

‘Trust God and live life forward’ encapsulates my life’s philosophy… to do work that opens people’s hearts long enough, through whatever appeal my art may have, that the deeper narrative which imbues all my work, may be both ingested and digested.’

I caught up with Duncan to delve a little deeper.

Who are you and what do you do?

The  short answer is that I am a human being whom God has graciously rescued from eternal destruction, in the process delighting my heart with a restored fellowship with Him and causing the gifts and passion He placed within me to be the vehicles which I now have the privilege of using for His glory and the blessing of others.

Even shorter answer: husband, son, brother, father, painter, sculptor, preacher, prayer, runner, paddler…in no clear order.

How did you decide to make art more than a hobby in your life?

Before Jesus interrupted my life, I never had the faith, vision or even desire to become an artist. I was hungry for the worldly promises of wealth and comfort which the life of an artist seemed completely incapable of achieving for me. Yet I always loved to draw things which ultimately translated into me keeping the flame of art alive through evening courses whilst working in the ad industry during the day. And then one day, God spoke to me from the story of Moses in Exodus, showing me that if I was willing to throw down what I had in my hand – my talents and artistic abilities, He could do in the supernatural what was impossible for me to do in the natural – use my work, my life, to lead others from captivity into freedom, into a promised land. I couldn’t imagine a more meaningful way to spend/invest my life. That moment, compounded by miraculous moments of divine provision and favour on my work, propelled me into the future I am now living but could never have dreamed of.

How would your art be different if you weren’t a Christian?

I think if I was not a Christian, I wouldn’t be an artist. My new identity – the person redefined by Christ on the cross, that person is an artist. The man I was prior to salvation had some artistic ability but the heart and passions, the fear controlling me then would have either sabotaged me or driven my work and my life in the pursuit of selfish pleasure, fame and fortune.

What would you like to achieve through your art in your lifetime?

Honestly, having my life/art play a role in the salvation of souls, millions or some part there-in.

The satisfaction and joy of redirecting vast sums of worldly wealth into the kingdom.

Influencing a whole industry to the truth and glory of God.

Model that the calling/living of an artist is a blessing and privilege, not requiring a host of dysfunctions or being subjected to poverty but rather a fountain of life and creativity and generosity and courage (not that I have achieved this, but I press on…:-)

What would be your advice to any young Christian artists finding it difficult to balance their art with the other demands of life (including church commitments)?

Know your boundaries and don’t be afraid to follow paths that others may judge as selfish.

Invest in yourself, your health, your talent, your education…value who God has made you to be, so that when you come to invest outwards – which is the goal, the outpouring of Christ is from a vessel that is whole.

Lose your religion ( viz. hypocrisy/legalistic spirit)….don’t be afraid to be seen and mix with people who aren’t Christians, true humility is a great weapon/tool for an artist.

Take time to rest, it may take more faith than to be busy but it is vital.

Be strict with yourself in practicing the daily discipline of seeking/being with Jesus.

Store compliments in your heart for encouragement when needed, not in your head which can get too big/proud; store criticism not in your heart where it can poison, but in your head where you can reflect upon it’s value and determine if you need to make correction or if it can be dismissed as irrelevant.

All church leaders I know say that they would like to both encourage artists (and creativity in general) in their churches, however thriving local church based artistic movements are few and far between. What do you think needs to change (in the churches and in the artists) for churches to start becoming homes for genuinely innovative and prolific art collectives?

From my experience there are at least 2 aspects that need consideration; the artist and the church/leadership of their local community.

Church side: I have the privilege of being in an extremely diverse community of people – black, white, rich poor, English and many other languages and nationalities and what I respect so much within our leadership is their vision and courage to create room for every member to explore and find their niche – the role God has uniquely gifted them to perform (1 Corinthians 12), creating opportunities within that for personal expression and challenge whilst recognising that it is God who brings the growth. They don’t always get it right, but one gets the deep sense that they are desiring to please God before man…which for me is key….they call us often into stretching, seemingly inconvenient relationships or tasks, gently but firmly. It is not necessarily always comfortable in our church – which is a good thing. So a leadership that is able to not box or over-administrate a church but desires to see a true reflection of the bride living in harmony with all its various parts…..so easy in words, so messy in life.

Artists side: What I have learnt is that we are not special, or rather more special, than anyone else. That we need to model the best of being an artist, even if it means giving when it hurts, helping, serving – playing out of position sometimes. We also need to be confident and secure in ourselves and with our leaders to trust them enough to be able to speak out our fears/dreams/frustrations so that they can position us better for success and connect us to a bigger picture. We need to share our gifts and talents (and ourselves) with the body to fulfill our unique God-given calling within and for the benefit and well-being of the whole body.

If you’ve enjoyed our interview with Duncan, please check out his website or like his Facebook page to get regular updates.

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An Interview With Author Tom Avery

A few years ago, I heard on the grapevine that a friend of mine, Tom Avery, had won a competition with a novel that he had written. That’s funny, I thought, I didn’t know Tom wrote. All I knew was that he was a good bloke and seemed like a very good primary school teacher. But that’s the thing about fiction writers in Christian circles isn’t it? Unless you write about Christian stuff exclusively for Christians, there are very few platforms in most churches to showcase your skill or test out your ability.
Well, it turns out that this wasn’t just a ‘pat on the back’ diversion for Tom, but the start of a new career which has been going from strength to strength ever since.

Just 5 years on, he writes children’s fiction full time to critical acclaim and has won the Diverse Voices Book Award and been nominated for the 2015 Carnegie Medal. He has just published his third novel, Not As We Know It, and so I thought it was long overdue that we caught up with him and got inside his head a little.

So, for all you closet writers out there who think that Tom’s story seems a bit like a dream come true, hopefully this will provide some encouragement and wisdom.

So, Tom…

For readers, a novel from a new author comes out of the blue, but this is seldom the case for a writer. What was your experience of writing before your first novel ‘Too Much Trouble’?

That depends what you mean by writing.  If you mean putting pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard, my experience was slight.  I’d never attempted a novel.

As a reader, you pick up a book by an author you know and there is an expectation of the quality of prose, originality of concept, of character.  For a debut, your expectations are lowered.  You step into the unknown.  I might suggest that your expectations in some regards should be higher.

Most novelists will have been conspiring to write and thinking about that first tome for years, if not decades, directly or indirectly, before they chisel their ideas in stone.  This was my experience.  I had years of working with young people logged in the back of my head when I started writing.

Sure, an author learns their craft through experience, through the write and repeat cycle of creating and shaping, deleting and re-forming.  Sure, a debut, for most, will not showcase their writing, plotting, storytelling at its polished, mature form.  But a debut novel says what an author has been waiting to say for years.  The ideas should be original.  The voices fresh.

Having said all that, if someone asks me which book of mine they should read, I don’t recommend Too Much Trouble.  I usually plump for my latest.  My latest book is what I want to say now.

What do you hope to achieve through your writing?

My working life aside from writing has been in education, working in schools in London and Birmingham.  Everyone is different and this truth becomes evident when you have thirty little lives squashed in a classroom.  Everyone is different but children’s books are not.

Tropes of course are necessary.  We want to connect story to our previous experience.  We want a frame of reference where we can see Frodo Baggins in Harry Potter, James Bond in Alex Ryder.  But children also want to see themselves and their lives in the books they read.  Some of the great names in children’s fiction like Jacqueline Wilson and Malory Blackman have shown that children want diverse protagonists.

All of my books were borne out of a desire to write about a real child’s circumstances.  My aim is never to write an ‘issues’ book but a ‘real’ book.  What I want to achieve is hope spoken into the real challenges that children face.

How does your Christian faith affect your writing?

Occasionally, when Christians hear of my profession, they jump to the conclusion or make the suggestion that I write great allusive books like C.S. Lewis.  But with all respect to the great don, I don’t feel called to this allegorical way of presenting Christianity.

I alluded to it above.  I want to present hope.  I want children to see that circumstance can be redeemed.  The Christian message is that God is in the business of renewing all things.  I want my books to be ones of renewal.

Lots of Christian authors, maybe especially those writing for young adults, have a tendency to become very didactic and moralistic in their writing. Do you feel this temptation and if so how do you deal with it?

I guess I don’t.  Not to any great extent.  I’m in the business of telling stories.  Stories carry message.  Stories have impact.  Without setting out to preach, stories convey a world view.

I take care to write about what I feel convicted to write about but in the same way that I would not set out to write an ‘issues’ book, I don’t set out as an apologist.

On your website, you give some really helpful writing tips (here). If you could give just one piece of advice to an aspiring author, what would it be?

Keep writing.

A novel is 40,000, 50,000, 60,000 words (unless you’re George R. R. Martin).  That takes a mighty long time to write – more than enough time to see the magnificent flaws in your writing, your plot, your characters.

Keep writing.

It takes perseverance to write through the time when your own writing makes you laugh it’s so bad.

Keep writing.

One day you’ll have those tens of thousands of words with a beginning, middle and end (or something like that).  One day you’ll have the novel that only you could write.

It is painful but keep writing.

You’ve got a new book- Not As We Know It. What is it about and do you know what your next project will be?

Not As We Know It is a tale of mermen, Star Trek and fraternal love set in the early 80s.

Jamie and Ned are twins. They do everything together: riding their bikes, beachcombing outside their house, watching their favourite episodes of Star Trek.

But Ned is sick.

When they discover a strange creature on the beach, Jamie begins to hope that the creature might bring some miracle, and stop his brother from going where he can no longer follow.

My next project – I’ve recently moved with my family to Amsterdam and I am working on a book that takes inspiration from this – a girl and her father move to the city where they want to find a fresh start.  I’ve also been writing some retellings of folk tales about giants from around the world.

You may or may not see them in bound book form.

 

 

Thank you Tom. Please keep an eye out for Tom. Buy his books and support him in any way you can. To find out more or get hold of his books, click here. Traditionally Christians have thought that influential Christians are the ones who speak to other Christians on a Sunday morning or write books to fill other Christians’ book shelves. This guy is bringing hope into the homes of the 90% who would never come to church or buy any Kingsway paperbacks. We need more Tom Averies!

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Interview with Ross Spencer

I wonder how many songs have been released featuring just one man and his guitar. It’s got to be a fairly impressive number. It’s tempting to think that this simple combination has already thrown up all its possible permutations in the history of music and that the listening audience of the 21st century demands something just a little more sophisticated.

And such a view would not be unsubstantiated. Anyone who has frequented local gigs or small scale music festivals will know that when the solitary singer-songwriter wanders up to his stool armed with just his trusty acoustic, it may well be a good time to get a drink/go to the loo/go home.

However, I guess a lot depends on that ‘one man’. If, for example, he happens to have wild ginger hair, sprouting from both his scalp and chin, sport a pair of glasses with the lenses wedged into the frames by pieces of cork, and go by the name of Ross Spencer, I warn you- do not, for any reason, leave the room. Instead, find a decent spot and prepare yourself for to be utterly entranced by one of the most immersive and powerful live performances you’ll ever experience.

Ross is an incredible talent who has already produced one of my all time favourite albums (Ego Mute) and has just released a new 3 track EP, featuring title track ‘Fallujah’ (performed at SputnikLive last year, see the above video).

We caught up with him and submitted him to the Sputnik interrogation. I’ve split it in two to help those of you with limited attention spans- part 1 today and part 2 next time. Have a read and then go and find out what I’m on about by buying his new EP (here)

Who are you and why do you make music? 

I am D Ross Spencer (secret Dave, always been called Ross), and I’ve been writing and performing my own songs since my late teens. Other than that I like to skateboard, draw weird cryptic patterns, and look at the hidden geometry in trees (note to self, stop showing off).

Why music? I guess it helps me connect with my feelings, it’s a wonderful balm for the soul, and it’s like an exploration, diving in caves without a map.

Also, I just read an excerpt from an essay by John Fowles which explains Prof. Gilbert J. Rose’s proposition that some children retain a memory of the transition from an infant who identifies with the mother, to a singular entity and the dawning of a reality in which they are in some sense, alone. It reminds me of our separation from perfect unity and continual community with God. Anyway, what he goes on to say is that these children go on to be artists, in an attempt to recreate that state of unity, of oneness, and in a way going back to that place on behalf of others.

Your lyrics are consistently fantastic, seeming at once intensely personal yet also readily relevant to me, as a listener. How do you usually write lyrics? Do you have a usual method or way of writing or is it more spontaneous? 

My favourite way to write is on the spur of the moment, when I jam one out for an audience or with friends, but most of those songs, ‘Rhubarb’ being an exception, are only there for the moment and can’t be retrieved. So when I compose by myself I let the music develop to a point where I feel moved to jump in, till I’m ‘feelin’ it’ as they say in street vernacular (do they still say that?) Then I see where The Spirit leads me.

The words are often connected to pictures and moods in my head, which is how I then remember them, replaying the film so to speak, and reliving feelings.

I don’t have much confidence that I can communicate my thoughts directly in a way that people won’t find patronising or boring, or that I really have anything of much importance to say that hasn’t already been said, so I rely on vagaries, collage, and unstructured thoughts and songs.

I find the themes of small animals, a sense of wonder and worship, and a pining for resolution and justice coming back again and again. Fruit and veg seem to often crop up in my freestyling as well, along with fierce animal alliances planning rebellious raids with the aid of hot air balloons. There’s a head film still in development, not sure how that one ends yet. Plenty of angry badgers and hedgehogs though, for sure.

 

Sputnik will keep everyone informed as to when Ross’ angry badger film is being released! We’ll be back with part 2 of the interview early next week.