This Christmas season is like none other, isn’t it?
The studio, and my heart, has been very different this year. The presence of the Holy Spirit has been tangible to me - that, above all, is most precious.
This holiday time finds me disinterested in “making and selling product”. (Making and selling is very important, I am not at all minimizing it. It’s just…my heart isn’t there this year, if that makes sense.) In the face of pandemic, quarantine, riots, injustice that boggles the collective mind, and deep personal loss, this year the Lord led me to “make anyway”. Make for the “heaven” of it. For the healing of it. For the space to breathe that making gives me.
That’s the reason for the name of my 2020 collection. May I introduce:
“A Song In The Night - An Exploration of Pain and Making” collection.
Because beauty defies despair. The Holy Spirit, also called “The Comforter”, gave me a quiet song in the long, loud night that has been #2020. This song came in the form of a willingness to press through and practice my gifts in the middle of profound sadness. My father went to heaven on August 2nd, 2020, after a marked decline in his health that began very early in 2020. The COVID pandemic hastened his decision to stop all treatments and go home where he could be with his family. We “walked him home”, all the way home, and we did it well. My family honored him and loved him and he deserved it.
His death was the thing I feared the most, all my life, since I was old enough to be conscious of the reality of death.
But God.
He gives beauty for ashes! He gave me strength to continue making, and tending, and growing. Not one important relationship has suffered, the ministry has not suffered, my art has continued to grow. In the pallid face of a virus, in the dark light of unrest in our nation’s streets, in the tedious work of pastoring a church through a pandemic, in the stark face of a grief that still (right this moment) threatens to overwhelm me, I still sold out of two other collections this year, in February (“A Celebration of Friends”) and in April (“The Shelter In Place Collection”) - both of them were gone in a day!
(thank you…)
And this, dear friends, is my third full collection this year! Three collections constitutes the most original art I have ever painted and packaged and offered in one year. Jesus gets all the credit, because He is the one who made sure the Comforter could come.
In every single event of this year, I made ANYWAY. Take that, 2020!
So, without further ado, my final collection of 2020: “A Song In The Night - An Exploration of Pain and Making”
Enjoy. (the doors are open - click here to come on in…)
