Kate’s Artist Statement
My inspiration
In making art I have been surprised at the depth of pain I have felt and expressed. I have also been surprised at the color and shape of hope that is there. I am an Anglican pastor and I love to preach and teach. I am also an artist (and many other things… just like you are many things too). I wrestle with God in the ordinary places I paint. I wrestle with myself - my hopes and desires but also my fears, frustrations, and losses. They collide in the quiet of each mark. My intentions die as I erase, paint over. Each time, I find a way through that I didn’t expect. I look at what I made and the colors and shapes respond that there is life from death.
Painting connects me to myself, to others and to God. Former ArchBishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is a poet, art critic as well as theologian. In his book, Grace and Necessity, he describes how art is a form of creative excess. Humans since time began have been making art. It is not needed to survive and yet it is a part of our make-up, our drive. It is gratuitous. It points to a Creator who created with excess. I call it grace.
Williams would say that an artist echoes this “excess” in the act of making: “If it [the art] is well and honestly made, it will tend towards beauty – presumably because it will be transparent to what is always present in the real, that is the overflow of presence which generates joy” (14). The artist experiences this “overflow of presence” - creative excess - when she sets out to do this or that bit of work and in doing so is taken on a journey to discover more of herself and her world. The Foundation for Art and Healing calls it “the flow” when your blood pressure drops, you lose track of time, and you are fully present in the process. That is the gift I experience in the quiet wrestling on the page or canvas - the worst of me and of my world encounters grace.
Whether you are a person of faith or not, there is an inherent gift in making art. You experience the gift of a self. Rowan Williams would say in this experience of art-making you experience a powerful “other,” a gift giver who loved what he made. I feel that gift from my Creator (in my case, it is Jesus.) I explore pain and always find hope because of that excessive gift-giver.
I always explore pain – even if it is in the mundane of an empty room. I am making sense of my own that is both ordinary and unique. I invite others to name it too. Acclaimed Russian Filmmaker Andrei Targosky (1972, “Solaris”) described the act of making art as a form of grieving. In his book, “Sculpting in Time,” he writes, “Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual, for the ideal: that longing which draws people to art” (38). I am grieving for heaven. This world is so far from it. Things are not good. I yearn for all things to be made new. I produce out of this yearning. I am comforted in it too.
In painting, I act out the grace I have received. I die in the process as I erase, start over, get surprised. I find death is not the end. The piece of work is born after death. And I’m given a gift of presence, of self, of hope in grief. It makes me want to do it again and share it with you.
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