As my son and I sat at the stoplight, he pointed up through the windscreen to the clouds above us and said, “Look, it’s like a painting—you can even see the brush strokes!” Which was a good description, because these were not the common heavy grey or even puffy white variety of clouds, they were streaked and lined and spotted as if an artist had come along and dripped and wiped the last remnants of white from his paintbrush against a deep blue drop-cloth.
The sky really did look like a painting that afternoon—but wouldn’t it be more proper to say that some paintings really do look like the sky? The sky was first, after all. The fact that some painters have mastered the ability to capture its expansive beauty exceptionally well does not give their work supremacy over the original. Far from it. The actual sky brings every painting to real life, and more besides. It continually shifts between red mornings, blue (or grey) afternoons, golden evenings, and pin-prick nights with an endless variety of nuance in tint and tone and occasional surprises like rainbows and northern lights and yes, brush-stroke clouds, as well. I love the paintings, but I’ve never seen a painter who could do all of that on the same canvas, endlessly. God is the original creative, with a palate and skill far beyond the greatest human masters. If they deserve praise for their artistry (and they certainly do) doesn’t he deserve more? Every human work of art that exists is a remix of the wonders he gave us.
Every colour bursts from his imagination.
Every material and texture is his invention.
Every sound wave moves to the rhythm of his innovation.
Every human mind and heart and talent is a reflection of his image.
Try as we might, it is impossible for us to create anything without drawing on what God has already made. Every ounce of human creativity is a subset of God’s, like a beautiful painting that only captures one fleeting moment of the ever-changing glory of the sky. Still, as small as our efforts may be compared to his, there is beauty and meaning in the painted moment, the captured glory, the remixed wonder. As art critic John Ruskin once put it, “all great art is praise.”
It was God who put us here and gave us these hands. It was God who planted imagination and creativity in our minds and hearts. It was God who invited us to join him in the joyful work of shaping and reshaping, mixing and remixing, cultivating and constructing on the canvas of his creation. He invites collaborators. He delights in his children learning to create with his materials, when we do so for his good purposes. In such cases I believe he is like a pleased Father, putting pictures on the fridge that were made with his paper, and his colours—by his children. And as a father myself, I know that even an awkward doodle from a genuine heart can be fridge-worthy. I’ve put up barely-recognisable pictures of our house and our family, oddly-shaped love-hearts, surreal landscapes and impossible imaginations, and I’ve enjoyed them all. I know that no human effort, no matter how skilled and masterful it may be, can ever compare with God’s artistry. That’s ok. It doesn’t have to. It’s enough to capture the moment, to remix the wonder, and to give it back—with love and thanks—to our Father.
