A Life Around Art

page in progress

Do you make journal pages like you mean it?  When your pencils and brushes slide along top the paper, is it a holy act? Or, do you swish paint around and glue down an image and as long as the white page is gone you are happy enough.

Maybe you live the rest of your life this way too, giving haphazard mediocre attention to everything and everyone. Making excuses, "Oh, it's just a journal, just a hobby." But secretly you want more. 

Art is not my hobby, it is my form of prayer. Every day I sit at the alter of my table and the images I create are on ongoing conversation with God.  My entire life is built around it. Around painting.

"I believe that - if you are serious about a life of writing, or indeed about any creative form of expression - you should take on this work like a holy calling. I became a writer the way other people become monks or nuns...I was writing's most devotional handmaiden. I built my entire life around writing." - Elizabeth Gilbert