Art Gallery
Sight + Recite: Artists, Stories, & Time
God Creating the Stars, BL Royal MS17E.
In the very act of artmaking, artists must grapple with time. Creating art takes time and, therefore, artists must believe that the subjects that they create are worth the time it takes to render them.
God, the Prime Mover, Creator, and Artist, saw fit to turn an idea and expression of His being into matter conceiving our world. Artists, as God’s image bearers, are also charged with this task. In the very act of creation, artists recite the creation process and the first creation. They retell the importance of taking an immaterial idea or feeling and birthing it into the material world and into time. Just as God created the world, just as God incarnated Himself in the form of Jesus, and just as Jesus incarnated the being of God through stories and acts of love, artists engage in this holy calling to sing the themes that God’s nature has imprinted upon our world. Whether artists imagine the attributes of God onto canvas, reiterate His stories through illustration, exalt His creation in sculpted form, rejoice in the expression of color, form, texture, line or rhythm, artists echo the glory of God and His story.
Sight + Recite focuses on the ways that artists engage with time. Each piece exhibited confronts the viewer with the intersection of the temporal and eternal. Some of the works explore time through the use of commemoration and memory, that unique gift that takes time and iterates it through the use of imagination.
Dan Baldessari, The Blessing, 2020, Oil on canvas, 24 x 36 inches.
Erica Eyre, Walking on Her Own Two Feet (2017), 2021, Oil on wood panel, 8 x 10 inches.
Other works invoke our knowledge of the finite part of our being and ask us to grapple with the coexistence of our mortality and immortality.
John Bergmeier, Confession and Mercy Suite: In a Jar (L), Section A (C), Skating (R), 2020, Monotype, 8 x 7 inches.
Some artists explore God’s entry into daily life or seasons of life and the ways that God calls us to see the eternal in our seemingly time-bound lives.
Emily Verdoorn; Gloaming; 2022; Mixed media on wood: india ink, pen, pencil, marker, watercolor, colored pencil, charcoal, acrylic, coffee, paper, sheep wool yarn, thread; 22 x 24 inches.
Christa Issler. In the Deepest Night, 2022, Watercolor on hot pressed paper, 16 x 20 inches.
Please feast on the gift of beauty that each of these artists have brought into being while reflecting on images that encourage us to weave God’s eternity and story into our time and stories.
Christa Issler
Gallery Director
