"The Heart of the Artist"

"Music" by Gustav Klimt, 1895

I've just started to read "The Heart of the Artist" by Rory Noland, which is a worship ministry resource that has been highly recommended to me by friends. Just reading the first chapter alone has been quite a healing experience for me.....it's like "Hey, someone understands!". :)

You see.....over the years I've been asking God in exasperation why I'm such an emotional being, why I am often subject to mood swings, why I aspire towards lofty ideals and abstract ideas, why I often feel displaced, why most people get to lead their conventional lives, but I just don't seem to fit in etc. I understand better now that this is how God has wired me, and I've also learnt how to better manage my emotions. The best part is.....He really understands me, cos He created me!

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Excerpts from "The Heart of the Artist":

"But then, no artist is normal; if he were, he wouldn't be an artist.
Normal men don't create works of art. They eat, sleep, hold down
routine jobs, and die. You are hyper-sensitive to life and nature;
that's why you are able to interpret for the rest of us. But if you
are not careful, that very hypersensitiveness will lead you to your

destruction. The strain of it breaks every artist in time."

- Irving Stone, Lust for Life.

"I believe that God has redeemed the artistic temperament. If you're in Christ, you are a new creature. 'The old has gone, the new has come!' (2 Cor 5:17). In Christ there is such a thing as a transformed, well-adjusted, Spirit-filled artist. Imagine what God could do with an artistic temperament that's completely yielded to Him. He doesn't look at us as 'those strange artsy types.' After all, He made us. He loves us and He understands us.

I'll admit we are a little different, but it's a good kind of different. Artists look at things differently than nonartists do. We notice detail; we appreciate nuance and beauty. Some people might look at the evening sky and all they see is a bunch of stars. But an artist looks at it and sees beauty and meaning. Artists want to sit under the stars and soak it all in. They want to gaze at the moon and be dazzled. They want to paint a pictue of it or write a song or a poem. Debussy was so moved by the evening sky that he wrote Clair de Lune. Van Gogh was inspired and painted Starry Night. King David was an artist who looked at the evening sky and wrote this: 'When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?' (Ps. 8:3-4)

Artists respond differently to things than nonartists do. For one thing, we tend to be more sensitive. And that's okay. That's how God made us." - Rory Noland

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"You have so many extraordinary gifts, how can you expect to lead an ordinary life?"
- Marmee to Jo in the film "Little Women"