Here are the results of the image survey..it includes which were chosen most often and why:
http://breathe-in-art.livejournal.com/

+ Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. Oscar Wilde

On Sunday, I will turn east and start driving to New York City for the summer once again.

I will be directing a project of art students from around the nation. We have been preparing for several months now across the college campuses from which they represent. Each student is interviewing 16 peers. Their peers are asked to look through a stack of photographs and choose images for:

What is your life like right now? What three images represent unmet desires in your life? Chose images that represent what you think the spiritual realm has to offer. Choose an image that you would use to decribe God. Choose an image that represents your desire to know God.

This process not only opens dialogue but also gives us more understanding of the culture we live in and what is occurring in the hearts of those around us. In the art capital of New York, we will create a collaborative show and installation (basically a 3-D poem) , reflecting both the results and what we find with the students...and then what we see that the Heart of God is concerning those things and possibly representing how those things are represented within the Kingdom paradigm that Jesus told of through His stories, teachings, parables, and life. These students come from backgrounds of film, photography, painting, graphic design, sculpture, and marketing.


Why is this important?

+ Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact. William S. Burroughs

Artists are those who write into the society in which we live...painting a vision for the values that we hold to be worthy, creating paradigms of truth within movies, art, music, even broadcast journalism, and the clothes we wear. Often, it is the artist who subtly changes our desires...glorifying what they deem worthy and thus transferring those values to us.
We truly need to sow into the hearts and lives of this cultural influencers today that we may reap a harvest for the generation to come, for the sake of our global community.

What is important about this to me?

First, I am excited because I believe what we will be doing is honest. We are not creating artwork that is merely Christian propaganda. I believe we will truly be listening to the needs of the culture around us and seeking to listen to God and to the teachings of Christ concerning His Kingdom. Our visual language will mediate the dialogue between the two, speaking to the souls of those who encounter it.

Second, I believe that as we seek to impact future generations in expanding the family and ways of Christ, visual and web-based communication is and will be indispensable. As cultures merge we will rely more and more on artists to communicate. As we seek to reach not only a post-modern people in the west but also unreached peoples of the world...in both cased we must reach them with the language of art and story.

We are preparing a generation of artists who realize that what they speak in their art is just as important if not more so than what they say with their mouths. May we speak often of love of God and love of our neighbor...even in the most simple and subtle ways.

~Melinda