Formless to formed
A quiet time sketchbook practice
Hi folks! My name is Kristin - I’m a Pacific Northwest artist, farmer, & mom sharing art and reflections inspired by the sacred & the seasonal, place & past. I explore the agrarian heritage of the liturgical calendar and how our varied homes, landscapes, & lives reflect it.
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Our faith is an embodied one.1 Imbued with both the physical and the spiritual, our humanity can feel so paradoxical at times, as if these two natures are somehow incongruent – and yet, God comes to us through the very same flesh and bone, participating in our physical frailties and concerns.2
Attentiveness to God’s presence and activity in the world is a practice I’m constantly trying to lean into. If you’ve been reading with me for awhile, you know that in my art & in life on our farm, I look to the rhythms of the Church calendar, so unified with these natural seasons…and I learn best through experience: enfleshing scripture with tastes, sounds, scents, memories, and my art practice settles it deeper into my heart. The stories of the Magi visiting the infant Jesus, for instance, are now imbued with the taste of King’s Cake, the smell of frankincense, the laughter of family & friends gathered to celebrate the feast of the Epiphany, and the paintings I created during that season.
Even with this heart for embodied spiritual formation, though, I’m forgetful – and I tend to stay in my head too much, neglecting incarnational lessons. A laundry list of art ideas will swim in my head, safe & sound, without the risk of putting pencil to paper. Translating our ideas, our emotions, our prayers and concerns to physical reality, after all, is risky business – the painting won’t come out how it appeared in my head. So, I often err toward theory: a place where these things can stay unspoken, and therefore seemingly safe from the risk of truly entering the world.
And so, even though I’ve been painting and drawing my whole life, a blank page in a sketchbook still feels intimidating to me. When I open to a fresh page, it’s often as if I’ve never had an idea for a painting in my life – my mind is a total blank. If I take the leap of faith and put pencil to paper, though – even if I begin without a whisper of an idea – an alchemy almost always begins to happen. The act of physically drawing or painting begins to reveal ideas that would have probably never appeared had I continued to just think about art rather than do it; it's like walking through the mist, with each next step becoming apparent only as you put one foot in front of the other.
Embodiment of my ideas and questions – manifesting them through creating art – helps my thinking to flourish in unexpected ways. That incarnational approach to thought and to prayer (hard though it may be!) clarifies murky questions and makes space for new insights. That doesn’t mean I come away from my quiet art time with all the “right” answers or perfect clarity…but it does mean that my thoughts, prayers, and questions have undergone an incarnational process that takes them from formless to formed, and as Christ has shown us, that’s a process that can produce beautiful fruit.
When I add art into my quiet time habits, I don’t need to struggle finding the words to shape a thought or reflection – instead, something really organic can happen, if I allow myself to play. Now, journaling by writing is hugely helpful and offers its own unique boon to our souls – but tapping into the artistic side of our brain during quiet time allows another piece of us to light up during prayer and reflection, too. We’re not concentrating on words & cohesion, but instead reflecting through shape, color, texture, symbol – and this can allow us to relax the analytical side of our minds. For a research-loving mind like mine, bearing myself into that loose, intuitive space is a leap of faith – and intensely helpful to balance out my tendency to want to put everything into an orderly flow chart of thoughts.
The beautiful thing about folding art into our quiet time is that it’s so flexible – as I tell my kids regularly, our art doesn’t have to look a certain way! We don’t need to create a painting that looks like a photorealistic rendition...when it comes to sharing our thoughts and prayers through visual art, the sky is the limit. The blank page of a sketchbook – intimidating though it may be – is an invitation to play and to listen. I often like to get really mired in technical drawing, but sometimes just a simple color wash on a crisp page says everything I can muster, and somehow perfectly expresses what I’ve received from my quiet time in scripture that day.
I’ve found that the way I can dip into this practice regularly is to take down all the barriers to it, making it as approachable as possible. Allowing myself the time and space to loosen up & journal through art is hard enough, so setting myself up for success is crucial – and that simply means showing up and taking the risk to create and to listen.
So: where do we begin?
Keep an art basket in your quiet time area and stock it with some go-to supplies – a sketchbook, colored pencils, watercolor paints, pencils, crayons, glue, clippings for collage, etc. Maybe a sketchbook isn’t the right fit for you – you could always create art in your writing journal, your Bible, inspiring books, or some scrap paper!
Drop all your expectations. Your art doesn’t need to “look” a certain way…it’s just there to help shift your mind into a posture of listening and expressing. You don’t need to consider yourself to be an “artist” in order to create art.
Find the timing that works for you. Maybe you want to begin doodling or painting in your sketchbook before you read scripture, or maybe you feel the pull to paint along as you read. Or, perhaps your art practice is a fitting way to reflect afterwards.
Prompts
Once you’ve found the rhythms that work for you – and those may change daily – it can be helpful to have a “toolkit” of prompts to spark our creative quiet time. Here are a few ideas that help me, especially when that blank sketchbook page is looking especially blank: