I was saved in 1991 but was not able to hear the voice of God until I first attended Mark Virklers seminar in the spring of 2001. Over the course of that weekend I had six protracted two-way discussions with the Lord which helped clear out a lot of the emotional and theological baggage which kept me from hearing God clearly and established me in the practice of journaling and looking for vision from the Holy Spirit.
A couple of months later while I was driving to church I felt the Lord tell me that He wanted me to start producing the visions that He was giving me while I was soaking and journaling. [I had originally thought that he said to paint them, but I realized later that it was too limiting a word for what He wanted to accomplish.] This declaration wasnt a complete surprise, as I used to draw quite often up to and through my college years. But it was a major stretch for me, because I had artistically shut down after I graduated from college because of performance orientation. I have an undergraduate degree in engineering and I make a living as a software engineer. At the time I received this word I hadnt drawn anything in 9 years, and pretty much reckoned that avenue of artistic expression to be closed to me for good.
Though I agreed with the Lord that this was something I should do and in fact wanted to do, I couldnt see any way around all of the obstacles in the way (most of which were internal). During the following weeks as I journaled about the obstacles, the Holy Spirit cleanly and painlessly identified and removed all of the emotional and mental blocks and reactivated an excitement in me for art that I hadnt felt in 10-12 years. Since most of the visions that I was having at that time involved people I signed up for a figure drawing class (another major stretch, as all of my previous drawings had been landscapes and architectural studies). During this class I noticed that a number of things about my practice of drawing had changed as a result of my practice with journaling. Firstly, the time Id spent listening to the affirmation of the Lord eliminated most of the self-critical voices which I used to commonly hear in my head ten years before. Secondly, I felt empowered to experiment in artistic areas that I had never tried before. Thirdly, I was much more attuned to the sense of flow as I worked, and the Lord was showing me how to properly integrate left-brain function (logic, analysis, problem-solving) into the practice of making art.
I also noticed that while I am not by nature a very detail-oriented person, during these times of working in flow I was able to concentrate for long periods of time on minute details that I would have ordinarily found tedious and boring. I was made aware of this when someone else in my class commented that I must have the patience of Job to be able to spend so much time working on the portrait I was drawing. I thought to myself, Well, I know thats not true; Im typically pretty impatient so when I got home that evening I journaled about it and this is what came out:
Lord, how is it that I can have this much patience while I am doing this?
I see a picture of myself working on the drawing, completely focused on what I am doing. I see another picture next to it of the Lord putting me together in my mothers womb. The Father says:
The care and attention you take over the work you are doing now is a measure of the care and attention which I had when I formed you in your mothers womb. I am a creative God and I have made you in my image, to create beauty where none existed before. When you are drawing and feeling the flow of my spirit through you, you are participating in the same creative act by which I made you. This is how you should always work in participation with my spirit, feeling my life flowing through you to do what you could not do without me
With this one vision and the explanation that accompanied it, the Lord effectively changed my perception of art from being something that I am doing or creating in my own strength, to something that I am receiving from the Lord and participating with the Holy Spirit in bringing to life.
The kinds of artwork which I most appreciate personally and to which I have always aspired have been those pieces which take movement and energy and express them in a way that you can feel it in a deep and personal way when you look at it. A number of the visions which the Lord was giving me were accompanied by a strong impression of energy and power, so while I was taking drawing classes I struggled to find a way to bring that feeling to life in my work. In the December of the following year a friend of mine suggested that I try sculpture as a way of exploring movement in three dimensions. My immediate response was I dont work in 3 dimensions. I realized that this was an inner vow and took it to the Lord that evening, asking what the root of it was. As I journaled, He showed me a number of incidents in my childhood where I had started working with three-dimensional artistic mediums and each time the work I had been doing had been destroyed. The Lord healed the pain of these memories and broke the vows that Id made in response to them in much the same way as He had healed the emotional and mental blocks that had shut down my artistic expression. Immediately I felt an excitement about working with sculpture, as if something inside of me which had gone to sleep had been woken up through the healing process the Lord took me through as I journaled.
The moment I started sculpting, I realized that I had found a medium in which I could bring to life the energy that I had been feeling in the visions the Lord was giving me. I also found, much to my surprise, that the process of sculpting, which had always seemed kind of intimidating to me, was almost effortless by comparison with the struggles I experience while drawing. This seemed odd, given that Id been drawing pretty much my whole life, but had only been sculpting for a few months. I asked the Lord about this, and this is what He told me:
Lord, how is it that this comes so easily to me?
You were supposed to have been doing this your whole life. It is something I have always had in mind for you to do, but you walked away from it when you were younger because of the pain of seeing your work destroyed. It was something you lost, but I did not lose it. I kept it and preserved it for you until you could come back and pick it up again. Now that you are back, I am going to accelerate your progress by my grace. I am going to catch you up to where you would have been if you had not lost all those years of practice.
The first five sculptures which I built were drawn directly from visions which the Lord gave me during worship services at my church. The first, entitled The Keeper was based on a vision of an angel who the Lord assigned to watch over me and to protect His vision of who I am against all of the forces coming against it. The next four were based on visions/experiences in which I sensed rather than saw the power of the Holy Spirit flowing around and through me. In the first (and most powerful) of them I felt a writhing, spiraling flow of power like flames rising from a bonfire, and I saw a figure suspended in the midst of it, twisting and flowing as one with the fire of God. From this vision I eventually built a sculpture called Fire. The picture below shows a larger version of the original sculpture which I rebuilt and cast in bronze in the spring of 2005:
To this day I can still feel the power of the initial vision, and the feeling of it continues to mark and influence the sculpture Im building today. The companion pieces to this sculpture, Water, Oil, and Wind are all named after the physical substances which are used in the Bible to represent the Holy Spirit. They are part of a series which I called Essentia, because the figures embody and release the feeling or energy of the four substances for which they are named.
Several years before I started sculpting, the Lord gave me a vision in which I saw Jesus at the
In the fall of the year that I built the first versions of the Essentia sculptures the Lord reminded me of that vision and gave me the following instructions:
Not long after that I was contacted by the head of a dance organization who had seen photos of my work online and wanted to showcase them at a small dance festival which he was holding the next summer. While a small beginning, I believe that it is the first fulfillment of the vision which the Lord gave me of how He wants to use the work (and more to the point, the anointing in the work) to reach out and draw in people who are sensitive to the Spirit but are turned off by religion. In 2006 the Lord has used the original four bronze sculptures which I built to open doors for me in the artistic community in Pittsburgh (where I live) and to give me opportunities to share the life that Ive received from God with other artists who are viewing my work, or with whom I am working with to get the sculptures built.
It would take too much time to go into all of the challenges that Ive run across while pursuing this dream. I dont have any formal artistic training, and I have to learn everything as I go along, letting the visions which the Lord shows me direct me to the materials and skills which I need to master to produce them. The process of producing sculpture is very expensive, so concern about financial is an ongoing battle. Additionally, there have been instances where people (well meaning or otherwise) and spirits of intimidation have tried to defuse my passion, blur my vision, or drive me back. Every time I go back to the Lord and journal about the obstacles and the original commission He gave me, He gives me visions or messages which strengthen my faith and allow me to push the obstacles aside and move forward. I am also encouraged by the work of a number of other gifted artists in my home church who have a similar desire to see the lost touched by the power of God flowing out through non-religious artistic expression. My hope is that eventually Mysterion Studios (the corporation which I founded to help me finance and promote the work that Im doing) can become an umbrella organization for artists of all kinds who share that desire. http://gallery.mysterionstudios.com
