Art that Shapes Me, or Wise Cracks

The man on the front row reared back. "You mean to tell me that artists don't know what the finished product will look like? I figured that making art was just filling in the lines of what you already envisioned."

The words stunned me. This lifelong music devotee and successful businessman exuded a gentle and kind spirit—it wasn't an affront. But before I could answer, a chemist in the group spoke up. "It is like the creative process in science . . . you begin with the raw materials or data and see where they take you."

This exchange erupted during my "art-in-the-dark" slide show at a Laity Lodge retreat. The man's "aha!" followed a sculpture slide of an early, pivotal, porcelain piece that I had modeled after the red Garfield lunchbox my son had toted to grade school. While the image hovered on the wall above my head, I told about rolling out the clay, shaping it into a lunchbox, and firing it. Then the lid needed a superhero, I said. I considered a scene of my husband taking out the laundry. But a stronger and more insistent vision rose up from my childhood: Grunewald's gruesome Crucifixion from the Isenheim Altarpiece. The crucifixion on a lunchbox? What could that mean? Spiritual nourishment? Who's hungry, God or us? I wasn't sure, but I painted on the Grunewald. Then it came: No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. Gads, a cliché. But true—and it evoked Dietrich Bonhoeffer's term "cheap grace" about accepting the freebie without the corresponding discipline and obedience.

Several years later, now, I've learned to trust the unpredictable side of making art. That's the joy of it and where the Spirit is. People who exercise creativity know this. The lunchbox was one-dimensional, and my work has since gained theological complexity, but my pieces can still change drastically midstream, both in form and meaning.

One recent example is when a technical flaw resolved into a "wise crack," a story that begins with the hotheaded prophet Amos:

This is what the Lord God showed me—a basket of summer fruit. He said, "Amos, what do you see?" And I said, "A basket of summer fruit." Then the Lord God said to me, "The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass them by." (Amos 8:1-2)

Had God shown Amos a pretty fruit basket, an image of abundance and thanksgiving? Some Hebrew scholars say that the phrase for a basket of summer fruit is a rhyming pun on the word for "the end," in which case God used an image of fecundity to warn of disaster. So no, this piece would not be a dining room table cornucopia. I carefully shaped a porcelain rendition of a rural market fruit basket, the well-used cheap kind that holds Fredericksburg peaches or Arkansas tomatoes. My basket was full of canned fruit, fruit preserved in its dead end—boiled, sealed, and stuck on the shelf. (Ever had canned grapes?) Grapes and eight other fruit cans fill the basket as the fruits of the Spirit (see Gal. 5:22-23). The obvious omission: no spiritual can opener.

Jammed into the basket, I placed a sign. Again, a painting had jumped out of my image bank—Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus, which features a basket of fruit on the dinner table. The picture taking shape forced more questions: What did the Emmaus story have to do with Amos' vision, and with the fruit of the Spirit? In that post-resurrection story, not fruit but bread had convinced the disciples that their mysterious host was the risen Christ. What's going on with my art piece?, I thought. Neglecting the poor . . . withholding the fruit of the Spirit . . . denying the body of Christ?

Then came the mistake: I'd made the bottom of the clay basket too thick, and in the high firing, that part shattered. Rather than remake the whole piece, I listened to the flaw. The only possible repair would require me to add some new element to the basket bottom. I saw a pair of worn work gloves, the kind worn by fruit pickers, often exploited migrant workers. Molded into the basket, glazed and fired, they did the trick: they held everything together.

An Old Testament professor told me later that what upset Amos was Israel's decadence and harsh neglect of the poor. The back of the sign in the basket now says, "Food Drive." Under all those cans, two gloves face palm-upward, as if receiving the Eucharist. It's that Emmaus thing again: they hold fruit, but not just our fruits. They await the bread. Beyond my original intent, the sculpture had become sacramental. As Bill Moyers might say, it is being "helped by hidden hands."