Draw to God

I recently came across a book called Drawing to God: Art as Prayer, Prayer as Art by Jeri Gerding.  It put together what I have been thinking about art for the last few years.  Making art can be a spiritual activity.  It connects us to God in a different way other than with our words,  we communicate  at a subconscious level.    For a while I have been doing art as a form of prayer,  I find doing an art activity gives me comfort and insight.  It has been refreshing to share faith and art in the class in the PCF church office. 

For this class, I began with a children’s story with beautiful paintings of God’s creation.  I read several quotes from Drawing to God. This was one of them.

“Of course making museum quality art is not our purpose as prayer. Depending on the activity, the art you make is either a record or journal of your experience or it is a gift, unwrapped and presented to God.  You are opening yourself, making discoveries, and sharing all of this with God. Sometimes it will be only the process or act of creating and not the final product. Sometimes its final product that is the focus.  If you find yourself becoming uptight about how well you are performing, stop and remind yourself of the real reason you involved yourself in the first place, which was to pray.  What do you imagine God is thinking about or listening for while participating in this task with you?"  P. 21

Then we did warm up activities with markers and chalk pastels.  We drew free form shapes with markers, then shaded them in with pastels.  Then we rubbed out the pastels with tissue.  I think a warm up activity is important just as in singing with vocal warm up and sports with stretching. I also think it helps with the transition out of our ordinary lives into a more creative zone.  For the activity we did simple illustrations of scripture verses.  We did this for a hour and the pictures were awesome!