Lent day 37, the artist’s sketchbook

I love artist’s sketchbooks. I often think you learn more about the journey towards art – the ideas, the exploration, the mistakes and the little fragments of beauty -from sketchbooks than you do from the final pieces. Each sketch is a moment of pondering, a little spiritual room into which we are invited.

Yesterday I persuaded Michaela, my wife, to let me take a look in some of her sketch books. We work together, so you would think we have no artistic secrets, but I had not seen many of these images. We are very different in our approach to art, she and I. The idea-plates that spin in my mind constantly pour out in words and poems. She thinks with a pen (or clay) in her hand.

Like many artists, this art does not come from a place of confidence. Michaela carries that same self doubt and hatsh inner critic that most artists do -perhaps even more so. There is no doubt in my mind that there is beauty here – that these little sketches are moments of divine connection.

We have spoken before about something called theopoetics, which might be defined like this;

Theopoetics is what happens when art/form/style comes into intersection with spirituality, with a focus on community, change and embodiment.

It is about seeking to make the practice of poesis – the meaning making – one of the central parts of life.

It is not new. It is not ‘another way of doing god-stuff’ – rather it points to things that have always happened and always been part of religious practice.

Here are a few of them.