Transcript
Ben Fallon: Well, if you don’t know, you’re about to find out. Paul Tripp loves to paint. I’ll not spoil his answer for you, so we’ll jump straight into today’s question. Paul, why do you love to paint?
Paul Tripp: Well, a lot of you won’t know this. I’m a painter by advocation. If I weren’t doing this ministry that God has called me to, that’s probably what I’d be doing. I don’t even think of it as a hobby. I think it is an expression of the gifts that God has given me that I need to be a good steward of.
I paint large abstract metallic paintings. When I get done with the painting, it looks like a beaten-up weathered metal surface. There are no objects in my paintings. I’m not painting a tree or a horse. Its non-objective painting and there are people who think that the rise of abstract painting is a denial of creation and only is the result of the flossy of secular humanism.
Let me tell you how I think about that. I think the glory of God in creation is so deep that it’s not just a tree is glorious, or a bird is glorious, but the individual elements of creation are glorious. Shape is glorious. Color is glorious. Texture is glorious. Light is glorious. And so, you can work with just the elements, juxtapose those in a way that creates interest and beauty, and honor the glory of God in creation coz those elements are glorious.
There’s a dynamic that artists talk about and it’s the dynamic of visual lethargy. Lethargy, meaning laziness, that if you’re seeing something over and over again, you quit looking, you quit seeing it. You know, you may be driving by a beautiful tree for the first time on your way to work and you’re just blown away by the beauty of that tree. Six weeks later, you don’t even notice that it’s there.
And so, one of the things that abstraction can do is yank you out of your lethargy. Because you’re not seeing familiar things, force you to look at things in a different way, force you to notice just how amazing texture is or how amazing color is by itself, how amazing shape can be interesting, and how you see hose things uniquely when the object is gone and you place those next to one another.
I think when you do abstract painting, your heart gets on the canvass and in that way, my paintings are a celebration of the glory of God in creation. I’m blown away by the chemistry of the interaction of various elements. I’m blown away by gradations of color. You pull off a piece of bark, it’s not brown. It’s 700 shades of brown. It’s amazing. And I find myself, as I’m painting, remembering how that no one could have created these elements but a God of glorious grandeur. And that God is my Father, and that makes painting such a wonderful thing for me.
BF: This next question follows the same thread of creativity. Someone asked Paul to help them understand how the cultural mandate, or the creation mandate, applies to everyday life.
PT: There’s an amazing psalm that says the heavens belong to the Lord and the earth; He has given to man. We’ve been placed by God’s governing economy to be the resident managers of earth. We’re meant to steward the creation, to enhance its beauty, to protect it from danger, to nurture it. And I think one of the ways that that gets expressed is if we’re made in God’s image, in His likeness, then there is creative potential in every human being.
I was talking with Luella. My wife, Luella, is a gallery director, an art dealer. She’s been in the art world for many years and we were mourning the fact that the bulk of humanity never realizes their creative potential. And I think a lot of that is just fear. Fear of it not working, fear of my being made fun of, fear that I don’t have any creative potential. Everybody has creative ability of some kind in you. Maybe that just means you’re a mom and you’re going to make a beautiful meal for your family, and you want to be creative as you do that. Maybe it’s the way you decorate your house, maybe it’s music, maybe it’s your garden. There’s just an endless range of how you express that creativity.
I just want to ask the question. “How in my life do I image God as creator? How do I steward the creative gifts that He gives me? How should those reach expression in my life, so that even that becomes a hymn to His presence and His glory?”
BF: If you love art, or if you want to be inspired to be more creative and use your God-given gifts, Paul has interviewed some amazingly talented artists, painters, sculptors, and musicians on our Connecting Podcast. David Kim is a concert violinist—he’s Episode 20. Mako Fujimura is Episode 26. And two more, Ross Wilson and Joey Tomassoni are Episodes 28 and 29, respectively. Go to PaulTripp.com/Connecting for these and many more gospel guests that we have invited on The Connecting Podcast.
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