Childhood Wonder and Becoming what you Gaze upon
Gatlinburg, Tennessee in the late 1960’s was a magnet for tourists, artists, musicians, craftsmen and flatlanders from the Southeastern U.S. For my family, it was an ideal spot for a week-long summer vacation every other year. In the alternate years we enjoyed a beach vacation.
Gatlinburg’s main thoroughfare was booming with pedestrians making their way in and out of craft shops, restaurants, specialty shops selling taffy, ice cream, snow cones and chocolates. The air was filled with the fragrance of sweets, hot dogs, and the fragrant aroma of wooden treasures in the woodcarvers’ shops.
From the Space Needle you could see it all – the gorgeous blue haze over the Smoky Mountains, the cable car lift that you could ride to the peaks, and the bustling crowds touring the shops below. Two streets over was the imposing mountain of white concrete with one entrance and one exit, identified by the huge sign out front beckoning tourists to enter the “Tour through Hell”. Inside was a huge, dark cave with blacklight illuminating neon scenes of sufferers who had rejected the Lord. By the time you exited, you had heard the Gospel, received some literature and the opportunity to avoid the real version of what was depicted there.
Childhood Art Education on the Street
But for this ten year old, the whole week was about the Artists’ Colony, a conglomeration of open-air booths arranged around the perimeter of a central building. Each booth housed an artist, painting in full view and exhibiting completed works on the brightly lit walls of their booth. I remember mostly the landscape artists, who specialized in oil paintings of typical mountain scenes, and pastel portrait artists. These would capture the likeness of tourists who sat for 30 minutes to an hour.
This was my “art school” for one week. Those were safer times and I would persuade my parents to let me stand and watch – for hours! They would go up the street, visiting the shops of their choice, then they would come back to check on me before heading off in the other direction.
Each year I could hardly wait to get back home and practice implementing what I had learned as I watched the artists there.
As the years passed and I grew in my understanding of painting, I came to realize that much of what I had seen in Gatlinburg were gimmicky paintings of romanticized scenes. They had found a few scenes that they were good at and were producing them repeatedly. But this revelation never caused me to lose my cherished memories of those hours when I stood transfixed by the skill displayed as they produced these wonders of color on canvas right before my eyes.
Somewhere, deep inside, those times of absorbing what I saw, are still part of my formation as an artist.
The Spiritual Connection: Becoming What We Behold
I am grateful as a believer, that I also had times of being transfixed upon the “things of God”, spending time seeking answers in the Word and growing as a believer. There is a principle in the Bible that “we become the things we gaze upon”. As I was glued to these artists, I became like them; And as I also gaze upon the Lord and His Word, I become like Him in spiritual reality.
The thing we must constantly guard, as Christian artists, is the realm of priority. Our gaze must first and foremost be upon Jesus. It was He who said, “Seek first the Kingdom of God, and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you”.
Artists, by their very nature, are consumed with (and by) their gift. And they certainly need to see their art as a calling and a priority. But putting Christ first and gazing upon Him will not diminish your artistic expression or hinder your growth and skill. It will only enhance it and bring down God’s blessing upon your work…for He is the source of all creativity.
Blessiings,
Mark