CRAFT HANDS.

Art must have many layers. Art is not just about another beautiful painting that matches your dining room floor. Art has to be disturbing, art has to ask a question, art has to predict the future. It has to do all these kinds of things. An art concept has to have so many layers so that every part of society can take what it needs.

“As image-bearer of God, man possesses the possibility both to create something beautiful and to delight in it. … The world of sounds, the world of forms, the world of tints, and the world of poetic ideas, can have no other source than God; and it is our privilege as bearers of his image, to have a perception of this beautiful world, artistically to reproduce, and humanly to enjoy it.”

For every soul, seeing HIm in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. thus, says an old author, is why the seraphim in Isaiah's vision are crying "holy, holy, holy" to one another.

But what’s your ultimate goal, you’ll say. That goal will become clearer, will take shape slowly and surely, as the croquis becomes a sketch and the sketch a painting, as one works more seriously, as one digs deeper into the originally vague idea, the first fugitive, passing thought, unless it becomes firm.

"An illustrator in my own mind – and this is not a truth of any kind – is someone who so falls in love with writing that he wishes he had written it, and the closest he can get to is illustrating it. And the next thing you learn, you have to find something unique in this book, which perhaps even the author was not entirely aware of. And that’s what you hold on to, and that’s what you add to the pictures: a whole Other Story that you believe in, that you think is there."

Only after we stop looking to everyone else for inspiration and ideas will we find our own voice. Not to say that we don’t need each other, that would be foolish, but we don’t need to be a bunch of copies. We each have a unique way of how we view the world around us. It’s through that process of learning how to be comfortable with who we are that takes our work to the next level.