Painting During the Church Service As Worship

Painting during a church service is something fairly new to the church these days, and I am honored to be part of it. I can understand how it can also be controversial, and I personally hate church services that are too performance like. However, one of my pet peeves is when "worship time" is always assumed to be musical. There are hundreds of ways of worshiping God together, and music is just one of them. I don't want to be a performance, but watching the process can be just as illustrative as a whiteboard note.

Here are the paintings I did during church services. I did all of them in the service, so none of them took me over 45 min to do.

The River Church 

Bride of Christ, 30"x40"

This service was talking about "trash to treasure" in terms of God's grace. That's all I knew about the sermon before I painted. So I wanted to make that quite literal. I had people gather trash before the service and used it in my painting. Her bouquet is made of torn pages of flowers from magazine, the stained glass is melted crayon (melt with a glue gun) and lots of her dress are sheets of old homework. Her veil is a plastic bag I found in the parking lot.
I don't have a very good picture of it, but the bottom is all metallic gold. One of my favorite memories about making this is about the beginning (no pun intended). Pastor Rob started off his sermon by quoting the verse "1In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.…" and just as he was saying that, I was painting drippy black on to white, a huge canvas, that spread out and filled the background. That was rather dramatic, and I liked it. Someone offered to buy it from me, but I felt it was the church's. I also paint vigorously, I needed a bath afterwards. Don't worry, I always put down lots of drop cloths.

The Bridge  Church

Ezekiel, 2010, Clay

I don't remember the sermon for this one, but I do know that I modeled it after Ezekiel 37 (Zombies!) and Pastor Dan mentioned that same story when I was half way done with it. I don't know what they did with it afterwards.

The theme of the day was Pentecost, fire, and the Holy Spirit. This was a worship focused service with no sermon. It was almost all music playing, prayer, and a time to share.

Rain Down, 2014, Acrylic

it's a big one, not sure of the size. At least 20"x something. I prepared the canvas for a particular song that was full of energy. This one I wanted to be dramatic.   Song: Rain Down

Invitation, 2014, 24"x36" ?

There was also a dancer for the song Oceans. 
 I had prepared the background for the beginning of the service, and added the dancer as she started to dance, and the dove last, by finger painting. It was given to the dancer.



The grass is just grass...

Hands On You

I had something else planned, but God put this image in my heart and told me how to do it, even down to when to stop dripping paint, or how far down the sky should go, etc. I love collaborative
art with God. It is a message for the Bridge. And yes, the wings are hands. Pastor Jeff grabbed it mid service to show it and talk about it, and I wasn't finished yet! I'm not sure I even had the dove motif, but mostly I was afraid of it getting all over the non-drop-clothed area, it was very goopey and drippy. I teared up a bit when painting it.











Here are a few links about painting and doing art during worship:

http://manuelluz.wordpress.com/2014/02/27/why-paint-during-worship/

Another really big painting done during the service that I'm proud of:


 http://dabblebag.blogspot.com/2014/09/art-and-painting-for-church-story-on.html

Hoarding and Overspending: When Your Stuff Emotionally Blackmails You

 Money is a tool to be ruled. A system to serve, not to rule you. When your mind is impulsing you to

get something ask yourself who is in charge, and who is giving the orders. Take back command. Run your castle smoothly, let it serve you. When you become a servant to it's desires, it's idolatry. And a  fine line.

If your stuff stops you from doing what you want, ask yourself what benefit does it give you daily? It could be holding you back without giving anything in return, or taking more effort to maintain it than the value it gives you as a tool. And when that object wants you to hold on to it because you wouldn't love it otherwise; it's emotional blackmail. 

The definiton of emotional blackmail from the general internet is

"Emotional blackmail is a form of psychological manipulation, employing a mixture of threats, appeals and emotionally punitive behavior to control an intimate. It may occur between parents and children, husbands and wives, siblings or close friends.

 Emotional blackmail - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia"

 I often hear threats from the objects of my desire that I can't do without it, that I would love this memory less if I got rid of x thing, as if I didn't value it. But that single memory of something, that is over and done with, is holding me back from my future. You cannot live in the past and make a
difference to the world. You can hold on to a memory without the object from the past taking up your present.

When I'm shopping, the impulse to buy something is very strong, for so many reasons. It could be threatening me that I don't value X if I don't "invest" in it. But like I told my brother, "Why invest in an oar if the boat won't float?"

Your impulses are emotional reactions to a situation of something you like. In any relationship, our first reaction to someone may not reflect our priorities with them. We love them, but we want to yell at them. So our impulses react to "cool new stuff" without really reflecting our goals and interests. Experience the feeling, appreciate the cool new thing for being interesting, and put it down.

"If you can appreciate something without the need to 

possess it, the world is yours."

            I have had so much stuff that I didn't have a place to sit. The piles of stuff were literally taking over my throne. I had to move it to have a place to sit. That's when I was serving the stuff. Sometimes I have to get rid of things that I paid a bit for, because holding on to it was taking up more effort than the actual project. So I have thrown out canvases with failed paintings, not because I can't salvage them, but because it's not worth my time.

  I've had enough of overspending and impulse buying to the point where I've become irresponsible. So I asked God to change me from the inside out; no new accounting systems, or banking programs. I know I'm too ADHD to stick to any new plan for longer than a few days. But being changed is something else. So this is what God told me.

Creating Texture On Canvas

 I love texture! This was done for a class, and with my very first hand stretched canvas, so it's kinda wobbly in the frame. Can you guess what I used to texture it? You can stick almost anything to a ground with gesso, except sugary things, which dissolve. Through bad storage some of the lentils have fallen off too. But it was fun! Everyone wants to touch it. I think it's 16"x20", 2009

Old Acrylic Painting I Did

This now hangs on my brother's living room wall. I didn't know what to do with it, and I didn't want to store it, so I gave it to him as a gift for helping me move. His roommates like it too!

I think I did it in 2010 or 2009. Acrylic, 18"x24" or possibly 16"x20" since I did it for a class and the standard required canvas size was 16"x20". I've learned a lot about perspective since then!

When I painted the city on the right, I was listening to a History channel documentary about Hitler, and those buildings will always remind me of that!
I was also living at home, and we didn't have much room. I used a milk crate on top of books on an upside-down chair balanced on a chair to make an easel. Some of the books never recovered.