All right, everybody, welcome. Welcome.
Somane, we are recording.
Yes. OK, cool.
This is only here to record it for posterity.
Also for Elias's mom. Actually, though, for real.
That's not a joke. She asked us to record it, and
we're doing it for Elias's mom. That's why we're all here sort
of so, so wow. Thank you all for being here.
Just this is so cool that you're all here and we're packing out
the loft for our artist in resident Elias.
Let's hear it for him. So Elias started his residency
back in the fall and you know, we were we were overjoyed to
choose him for this residency. He's he's done so well with it.
He's gone through a faith and arts course with Sumani and he's
been working really hard on his craft.
And there's nothing that I love to see more than someone who is
just an artist who is obsessing over their craft and they're
going as deep as they can go into a singular idea.
And I remember we were meeting, I think back in the fall and
Elias was like, I'm really obsessed with like Magnolia
leaves and also the color brown. And we, and we've been talking
about like all these other ideas of things he could focus and
work on, but he was obsessed with these like detailed things.
And, and we were. And it was just so clear that
that was the way to go. And I think tonight is is kind
of a culmination of that to a certain degree.
But it's also like Elias sharing his gifts of this deep, deep
knowledge with all of us. And, you know, sometimes I'm
sure you felt this in your own life and career.
You get to this point where you're like, you feel like you
don't know anything. And then you have a moment where
you realize you have a lot to teach other people.
And so I know that that moment is happening for Elias tonight,
and I'm so glad you're all here to to take it all in.
So without further ado, Elias. Thanks, Steven.
That was really sweet. Yeah.
Thank you so much for being here.
I'm really grateful for all of you.
I do want to say that I'm not an expert.
I am also not a pastor, so this is not a sermon and it's
definitely a work in progress. But I'm glad that you're here
because I wanted to invite you in and just hear your thoughts,
hear what you had to share. All right, and we'll see if this
clicker works. All right, So I, I am an artist.
I have been mixing colour with clay and paint and pencils ever
since I was a child. When I think about colour,
oftentimes something like this comes into my mind.
Still, I think about something that's kind of childish.
I might think about crayons or construction paper or play DoH,
and if you're like me, you will think of these things too.
But as I look at this screen, I cannot help but wonder, is this
really the level at which I was meant to think about color?
Otherwise, as Christians, we love to talk about stewardship.
We mostly talk about stewardship with money, but we also talk
about it in terms of relationships and skills and
spiritual gifts. A few years ago I was studying
theology at La Brie, which some of you might know, but it's a
ministry and this one is in England.
And I was wondering how Christians might consider color.
And just a series of simple questions.
One, does the Lord command us to steward all of his gifts?
2 is color a gift? And three, if yes to both, then
how are we commanded to steward color?
What does that even mean? Is that a stupid question?
That's kind of just been, I've kind of been sitting with this
for a while. So since England, I had a good
conversation in England over this lunch discussion.
I've returned to DC where I've set up a art studio and have
been working on my oil paintings.
As you may know, I've read some books about theology and art.
I have mixed colors and paints, and for this project I really
just wanted to see if I could try to have an answer for this
question of why does God make color?
So I'm going to define color first by just how I think of
color as an artist, and then I'll be citing some theologians
and professors and a few pieces of scripture to try and answer
this question for us. We'll talk about color as a
language, a tool, and 3rd an invitation.
And I'm going to try to keep it quick so that we have time for
discussion because I do want to hear your thoughts.
So what is colour? This might sound like kind of a
silly question, but it's something that I had to learn.
I mean, I guess we're, I'm still learning because I definitely am
limited on my scientific knowledge.
Artists talk about three things. They talk about value, which is
the grayscale. So when you're editing a photo
on your phone and you just turn the saturation down, you're left
with black and white. That's value.
They talk about chroma, which is kind of like the quantity of the
color that's present. And then they thirdly talk about
hue, and that's what we think of as colour.
For the sake of this talk, I'm going to say colour because I
don't want to sound snobby, but you'll know that I mean hue.
So this is the colour wheel. We love the colour wheel.
We've seen it since kindergarten.
I don't know about you, but I never had someone explain the
color wheel to me in a way that was actually in any depth or
felt useful. I always just saw it as a pretty
picture. This is called the Munsell color
wheel model. There are a lot of models, but
this guy, his name is Albert H Munsell and he was an American
color theorist in the 19th and 20th century.
But he basically devised this way for us to think about the
three things that I defined value, chroma and hue.
So we have value is a vertical axis.
You can see hue is kind of this flat plane that all of the
blocks are on. And then chroma is the intensity
in, you know, one of these color strings going towards the center
and in the center is like this theoretically neutral Gray.
It's kind of weird. It's, it'll come up later.
So here are some color schemes that people use to arrange
color. I'm sure you all know these as
well. You, you might even know them
better than I do. But if we look at these colour
schemes, we can see some interesting things happening as
far as order. So we have a straight line
that's complementary. We've got a, what's the name for
a triangle that's not equilateral, Thank you.
Isosceles triangle that we have just in a row that's analogous.
And then we've got our triangle, rectangle and square.
And the monochromatic 1 might be harder to like visualize, at
least it was for me. But if we go back to this one,
you can think about it, it's like one of these little blocks
just on a vertical axis, if that makes sense, starting with
complementary. There is this idea of semi
neutrals in art. So there is a 19th century
American physicist named Ogden Nicholas Rude who writes about
this in his book on color theory.
I have yet to figure out if he's the first one to come up with
this, but it's generally accepted that in order to create
colour harmony, if you take colours that are opposite each
other on the colour wheel and mix them together, you'll create
a string of colours that are all kind of beautiful together.
And I think what's interesting here is you can see, if you are
attentive to nature, you can see this happening in things like
fish and plants and birds. So there's a lot of order in
color that we see keep getting. It's wrong, it's down.
Here's another example of color harmony in nature.
We've got the monochromatic and I actually pulled these.
I used the little ink blotter to pull these from the images to
like be legitimate, not just making this up.
You've got analogous here in this parrot and Tri attic in
these pansies. So it's fun to think about.
It shows something about our creator and artists use this all
the time. It's called, yeah, complementary
muting. So this is Irises by Vincent van
Gogh. I'm not sure.
I'm not sure which paints he's using here.
I'm guessing it's like cobalt blue and cadmium yellow that he
mixes together to create this more muddy or muted, not muddy,
muted green in the background. Another thing that artists think
of is just the ratio of color. And designers think about this a
lot. There's a common design ratio to
balance kind of the presence of different elements called the
603010. So we have, if you're thinking
about it in terms of hue, you can have 60% of your painting or
artwork be a dominant hue, 30% be secondary and then 10% is the
color that you want to make pop. So in this 160% green, 30% red,
10% flesh, and you can notice similar things in these other
paintings. I think that's a drawing.
Here we have a combination of the color schemes applied and
the 603010 ratio. So whether or not this living
room just kind of strikes you as too loud, you can kind of see
the harmony in using this color pattern and then just using it
as a guide to create something that hopefully feels homey for
this person. So humans are sensory beings.
We have three cone cells. We are made to see color.
And this also makes us different from the animals.
Some people, this is a side note, but some people say that
color exists on its own outside of perception.
Other people say that color only exists because we see it,
because that's how our eye is processing light.
But there is an article from the NIH that says people who are
depressed might not see color as vividly because they have what
scientists call less contrast sensitivity.
So it's interesting. How can we think about color as
Christians though? This was my question and for our
answer 3 categories have come up with that are that kind of stood
out to me. Color is a language, it's a tool
and it's an invitation. How can color be a language?
Don't we all experience it differently?
Well, I got to talk with Doctor Rachel Smith, who is our very
own Jared's mother from from Taylor University, and had a
great conversation with her. She was so helpful and I asked
her about how people experience color.
She's an art historian. And in response, she cited this
Israeli American psychologist named Daniel Kahneman, who wrote
this theory in he published this theory that basically has two
categories or prompts for how people interpret or react to
color. The first system prompt, he
says, is innate. It's it's system 1.
So we might have kind of a an innate response to the color
green as associating it with life, for example, because of
nature, because of all the green that we see.
Or we might have an instinctive aversion to the color red
because of blood. But those are not the only ways
that we respond to color because we're also seeing color, excuse
me, in our culture. So that's why we have system 2
prompts, according to this theorist.
And these are culturally programmed responses.
So we might think of red as symbolizing love if we see a red
rose. And then Doctor Smith also said
that individuals might have traumatic experiences with color
and we might have good experiences with certain colors
too, so that that changes how individuals respond to colours.
But regardless of this theory, I think people have pretty strong
responses to colour. So if we pay attention, colours,
tell us stories, we might notice that people are not feeling well
if they're the wrong color. Or when we're a giant looking at
a watermelon, if there's kind of a mustardy tint, we might avoid
buying it because maybe that means that it is rotten.
When I was a teenager, just I guess to make it a little bit
more personal, I had a a brief period of mild depression.
And I remember 1 moment that really struck me was when I was
folding laundry in my room and I looked in my drawer and I
noticed that every single T-shirt was a type of grey.
And I had not planned that. I wasn't, I didn't think that I
was trying to be Moody, but it it told me something about
myself. So this is something that I want
to ask you about at the end. But for now, I guess I think
colors communicate. People communicate through color
is my second point. Now I understand the risk in
commenting on what a painter is trying to do.
With a painting, so I won't try to do that here, but we have
this painting by Kupka, his Czech painter, and it's called
the yellow scale. Our, our, our cultural
connotations with yellow are that it's cheery and light.
We think of the sun maybe, but in this painting, to me it's
kind of overpowering the, the, I think this is actually a
self-portrait, the painter's face and it it actually does
make him look kind of ill. So to me it's kind of upsetting
to look at. But regardless of what's going
on here, we know that something is being communicated through
this use of yellow. Am I going too fast also or.
OK, cool, thank you. So the other thing that Doctor
Smith helped me out with was talking about colors importance
in our traditions. So we tell stories through color
and when we when we make a wreath at Christmas, we can
think about the evergreens symbolizing the everlasting life
that we will have in Christ. When we look at the red of the
holly, we can think about the blood of Christ that he gave for
us. Same with Easter.
We think about using white to symbolize purity and to make us
remember, help us remember the resurrection.
And we think about the purple just meaning Christ's royalty.
We also use colors Don pointed out in Oh, She's Not Here.
We also use colors in the Wordless book to tell the
Gospel. And we use colors in our church
calendar to keep time. So it's a language.
All right, my second observation.
Color is a tool. So color is a tool that we can
use for good or evil. There is there is a marketing
professor, I'm going to butcher his name named Satyendra Singe,
who says that McDonald's is probably red and yellow because
red simulates appetite, because we associate it with energy and
excitement, and yellow we associate with happiness.
And it's also the same colors as ketchup and mustard.
So watch out. You might be manipulated, be
being manipulated through color. If you're not attentive.
Drug advertisements will also use color.
They might start out kind of Gray and then get colorful to
try to get you to get on their drug.
So. So color is a tool that affects
us psychologically. How else is color a tool?
Well, color can help us. So appreciating color can help
us to slow down and reconnect with our embodiment.
I'm not sure about you, but I feel I spend way too much time
looking at screens and it makes my head hurt and I feel tired
and it also makes me feel disembodied.
We really call it virtual reality for a reason, right?
This can come with serious issues, and I think it's
important to be physically present and to work work for
that in light of today where we have so much technology.
Some of you will know this is a beloved professor of art at
Covenant College. Her name is Doctor Alyssa
Weichbrought, and she wrote a book called Redeeming Vision,
which you can see pictured here in 2023.
It is about art, specifically, it's about how to view art as
Christians. So she's writing about going to
an Art Museum, but I think it applies to us for the sake of
this talk. So Doctor Wiper has this idea
called embodied vision, and she starts out by this will take me
a little while to walk through, but I think it's worth it.
She starts out by saying that God meets us materially.
He meets us through Jesus, through sending Jesus to us.
But we also can encounter him physically, she says.
And the example that she says might be most powerful is
through the Lord's Supper. So when looking at art, Doctor
Weichbrought has a few steps. The 1st is looking with
intentionality, she says in her book.
Get up close, take a step back, walk around the art and pay
attention to how your body responds.
Her second point is to acknowledge our place in a
culture. She says that anytime we are
looking at something, we are looking through a lens of our
time and our place, and we can remember this and see it as a
symbolic of our finitude. And she says that we can we can
praise God that we are finite beings and we can approach the
things that we look at with humility, knowing that we might
not understand all of the cultural nuances.
But her Third Point is to begin from a place of love.
And she says that if we adopt A principle of looking to look
from a posture of love, then we can expect to be changed.
She cites James KA Smith, who says that we are what we love,
and our love is shaped, primed and aimed by liturgical
practices that take hold of our gut and aim our hearts to
certain ends. That's that's James KA Smith's
quote. So these are habits and
practices and rituals that we can adopt of looking that will
form our identity. One way that we could apply
this, according to Doctor Weichbrought, is to take what
she calls a color walk. So she started a few years ago
going on a walk and looking for a specific color in the wild.
She would say, I, I think it might have started out with
just, I'll look for blue. But eventually she started
saying I'll look for teal or coral.
And just doing that practice helped her to be more aware of
her surroundings and of how she was feeling.
How else is color a tool? We can know and care for each
other through color. A few months ago, I had coffee
with Dawn Luke. I just said her name wrong.
Luke, thank you. And she let me know that she was
seeing a friend and she was buying her friend purple flowers
because she knew that her friend loved purple.
I have a few. Well, I have one color that I
can think of that I know is a favorite of one of my friends.
And then whenever I I see that color, I will think of this
friend. So you might be able to do this
and just use it as an opportunity to think of people
and to maybe pray for them when you see that color.
I this doesn't really fit into the presentation here, but I
also want to say that the more I think about color, the more I
see it. So I've been thinking about
color a lot this last year. And I notice even on just like
my morning run, I've just noticed myself being kind of
struck by the beauty and the harmony in the lighting and in
the green of the trees and the, you know, the overcast sky or
however it looks that day. So we can use color to just
appreciate individuality of other people and appreciate how
different we are, our different responses to color.
And it helps to be sensitive, which is useful in general to be
aware of our surroundings. OK, My Third Point is that color
is an invitation. This is the most kind of
abstract. So I'm asking you to bear with
me, but it's an invitation to marvel our Creator, worship God
and imagine heaven and become more like the Lord.
OK, first one, our Creator pays attention to the sparrows that
fall on the ground. I took cohort recently through
this church and I think I mentioned to my small group that
when I read Jonah, I was really struck by God's care for the
animals and Jonah. He when God is talking to Jonah
about his compassion, he says, quote, should I not pity Nineveh
in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know
their right hand from their left and also much cattle?
Isn't that so sweet? God loves the people of Nineveh,
but He also loves his cattle and he pays attention to them and He
expects Jonah to respect them and pay attention to them too.
He cares for all the animals that he makes, and we don't know
how many animals there are, just like I don't think we really
know how many colors or hues there are.
But I think the animals and the colors show his delight in what
he makes, and it shows his care in sustaining so many colors and
so many animals. I think they just show his
extravagance toward us. The second thing that color
invites us to is to worship and imagine.
I had no more pictures for this. In Matthew 26, there is a story
of a woman, you know it, who anoints the head of Jesus with a
very expensive ointment. I called Soleimani today to ask
if I could double check this language to make sure I was
speaking truth about this passage.
But she worships Jesus through the senses of touch and smell,
and Jesus in that story calls it a beautiful thing.
The psalmist in Psalm 34 eight says, O taste and see that the
Lord is good. Music is really important for
Christians, and we know that the Lord delights in hearing our
music and we know that we can praise Him through creating
harmony and beauty and the sounds that we make.
I think that we can worship Him through color as well in the way
that we arrange it and create harmony according to the
structures that He has built for us.
The second point, I'm sorry that I don't have more interesting
slides for this point. It's just the same.
But the second point here is that color can help us imagine.
Doctor Wyck Bro talks about how the Holy Spirit allows us to
imagine heaven through the art that we create.
I'm reading another book called Heaven that's written by Randy
Alcorn. I'm sure you know him, but he
wrote this great paragraph about imagining heaven that I wanted
to share. He says we cannot anticipate or
desire what we cannot imagine. That's why I believe God has
given us glimpses of heaven in the Bible to fire up our
imagination and kindle a desire for heaven in our hearts.
And that's why Satan will always discourage our imagination or
misdirect it to ethereal notions that violate Scripture.
So color is an invitation to worship and imagine.
Lastly, color is a way that we can know and share the love of
God. God has been watching His people
since the beginning of creation, and He continues to watch us
today. Seeing is integral to His nature
now. Doctor Wiper cites a lot of
examples of God seeing in Scripture, but one of them
struck me as really powerful that I wanted to share, and I'm
just going to read a direct quote because she tells the
story better than I could. In Genesis 16, the Egyptian
maidservant Hagar is on the run, pregnant by her Master Abram and
abused by her mistress Sarai. Hagar desperately flees into the
desert, but as she rests by a spring, the Angel of the Lord,
speaking as God in the first person, addresses her directly
he tail. He tells Hagar to return to
Sarai and promises to bless her offspring, making them too many
to count. The son she carries will be
called Ishmael. God hears because God has heard
her distress. Then, for the time in the
biblical narrative. For the first time in the
biblical narrative, Hagar speaks.
You are El Roy, the God who sees me.
Weichbrot says it like this. God seeing Hagar changes
everything. It makes her feel loved.
And from that knowledge, Hagar steps into obedience, confident
that her longings will be fulfilled.
So folks. Why does the Lord color
everything? I think this is a very
mysterious question and I don't have all the answers, but I
think the answer that I am most confident to give at this point
is because He loves us. Thanks for thanks for listening.