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| Two of my mother's art journals |
The editor of Everyday Spiritual Practice, Scott W. Alexander, defines an everyday spiritual
practice as “any activity or attitude in which you can regularly and intentionally
engage, and which significantly deepens
the quality of your relationship with the miracle of life both within and
beyond you” (5). When our activity is
intentional, regular, and deep, when we are committed to making it a recurring
and significant part of our lives, then, Alexander writes, it achieves the
level of “spiritual practice.”
In this same book, Julie-Ann Silberman writes of her artwork
as her daily spiritual practice. “My
goal,” she says, “is not to create masterpieces, but to get more closely in
touch with my interior spiritual life” (255).
Silberman describes how her art practice developed out of a
need to grieve over her father’s death beyond words she could speak to her
friends; she had images in her mind that better reflected her emotions. She developed her practice out of chalk and
oil pastels on canvas.
In a similar way, my mother, Anne Landrum, developed a
spiritual practice of art journaling while serving as the primary care-giver
for her husband for three years after he experienced a massive stroke in 2010. Her “art language” was collage, which she
found more accessible than drawing, and helped her to realize, “I could
illustrate things I couldn’t put into words.”
For example, several of her journal pages reflect her
experiences of an intense lack of sleep, as she was on-call for her bed-bound
husband’s needs through the night. She
created one page filled with images of people sleeping, and for her, it
expressed her intense desire for sleep without sounding like she was
complaining.
Her pages allowed her to celebrate the good days, and calmed
her down on the rough ones. Since she
was spending so much time in her house anyway, without as much housework and
cooking to attend to anymore, she found that her journaling offered her
quality quiet-time.
“I didn’t have to think about the outcome,” she
explained. “The jumbled pictures matched
my jumbled mind, and when I cut pictures, they didn’t have to make sense.”
Alexander points out in his introduction that our spiritual
practices may shift and change over the years according to our circumstances (6),
and that has been the case for my mother.
Two years after her husband’s death, my mother has moved to a new state to
live near one of her daughters and two of her grandchildren, and she has the
freedom to visit her other daughter and grandchildren now that she is not so
tied to home because of care-giving.
Now, when she sits down to create art
journal pages, she says the process feels more “forced”: “I feel there’s
nothing I can put on the paper that’s going to make me feel any better than I
already do.” She feels as though her pages no longer tell a story about
herself, and that with no more “angst” to release, she can “come up with stuff
and make it pretty,” but the practice doesn’t talk to her anymore.
Cutting out various images from magazines and decorative
papers allowed my mother to create pages that brought about order from chaos—with
the symbolic act on the page helping her escape the powerlessness to do so in
her real life. “Now, there’s no chaos,”
she says. “I don’t know how to make more order now.”
If art journaling was a process of coping for
her, now she says she has begun a process of learning—especially through
reading and Bible study. She also enjoys the
new trend in coloring books for grown-ups.
Where, before, the process of choosing colors for the designs would have
driven her crazy, she says, now she enjoys the act of selecting colors and staying within
the lines. “It’s a different thing,
because I’m in a different mood.”
When art is used as a spiritual practice, like my mother’s
art journal pages, it is not necessarily intended for public display. Our
art-making, in its service to our spirit, isn’t about display, sharing, or selling. This makes more sense when we equate
art-making with practices like prayer or scripture study. The value in these practices is found in the doing, and as Silberman points out, no
one expects us to share these
disciplines in a public way (258). When
people find out we make art, they may want to see it, and may wonder why we “bother”
to do it if we aren’t planning to show it or to sell it.
I faced that attitude from my own self: did it make sense to
purchase so many art materials and dedicate a whole room to my projects if it
wasn’t going to bring some practical result: income? publication? some way in
which other people have the
opportunity to validate my work?
Silberman reminds us of a truth we may have to spend some time
convincing ourselves of: “Creativity is about the process, not the outcome,
especially when it is being used as a spiritual discipline. Creativity is about the experience, the
identifying and releasing of feelings and core responses to the world around us”
(258). Whether we want the world to be privy to those feelings and responses is
a question we can consider later, when we can determine if we are resilient enough
to continue with our practice no matter how
other may respond to it.
Each person who desires to pursue art-making as a spiritual
practice has a wide variety of materials and approaches to choose from. Through personal interests and trial and error, each individual can consider what will most effectively
fulfill his or her spiritual goals:
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Watercolor
Acrylic
Oil
Paper
Canvas
Found materials
Assemblage
Digital art
Mosaic
Marker
Spray paint
Art journaling
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Collage
Fabric
Ceramics
Stitching
Gluing
Hardware
Photography
Encaustic
Pastels
Pencil
Mosaic
Drawing
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As people
made in the image of God, we are
creative beings; we carry some element of God’s creative power within us. Engaging in art as a spiritual practice is a
path to getting back in touch with
this personal characteristic that has been with us all along; it’s just been
misplaced in the shuffle of life, perhaps buried under different concerns.
How might you explore the possibilities of art-making as a spiritual practice this year?
