Some background…  I used to have a career in the arts.  Such a career was a natural outflow from my first conscience push around age 3-4 toward embracing the discipline and grueling work that art can be.  I could see a picture in my mind of an apron in pencil shaded to give the perfect illusion of a 3-D object on a 2-D page.  How I labored to get that image onto paper.  But that kind of drawing wouldn’t come until (and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say) hundreds of miles had been put onto pencils.

The summer after getting my BFA at Appalachian in 1994, I was selling enough work to pay off a loan for a sculpture studio.  This only emboldened me with enough ego and stupidity to load up all of my belongings and a Siamese cat and head to Atlanta, GA, what I was certain would be the launch pad for my career.  I had gotten an acceptance letter to the MFA program at GA State to study with George Beasley, a crazy testosterone-ladened Scot who spent his New Years’ sending crucibles of molten iron flailing across Scottish seas by way of catapult. He was one heck of a sculptor, gutsy in risk required to make great art combined with the skill to craft with excellence.

I rented a warehouse in the worst part of Atlanta, set up studio and got to work.  And I mean I worked.  All of my life was oriented toward this one goal: art-making.  The sacrifice of living in a space too big to cool in summer or heat in winter, so dangerous I had to sleep with one eye open, wasn’t given second consideration.  And because I had the space, scale became an important element for conceptual expression which I carry with me to this day.

Three years later, I had become a prolific artist, showing regularly and had been picked up by a nice spread of galleries and participated in some blue-chip venues.  I would wake up in the morning with excitement for what I would make that day and stay in the studio until late at night.

So what was the problem?  It was just a question posed in Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Successful People… “Ever feel like you’re climbing a ladder up the wrong wall?”

Granted I was in my 20′s and like most artsy adolescents, was a rather self-tragedizing youth.  I had given in to darkness.  It’s too bad that in our college years we are exposed to so much knowledge without the wisdom to discern between truth and trash. For me it was a slow slip in my inner life. The fashion was to diminish beauty to a frivolous thing, and elevated darkness as powerful. Anyway, I bought it, and it that manifested powerfully in my art, the arena where I mull things out that later become my voice to the world through finished pieces.  I didn’t like who I was becoming.  I was attracting some rather famous artists, writers and musicians who were anxious to help my career.  But they inhabited a topsy-turvy world where good was bad and bad was good.  I knew if I stayed on this road, I would be like them.

Further, my life had been so out of balance that I was like tree with a small trunk straining to maintain one overgrown limb: my art career.

I was not a religious person and still wouldn’t consider myself as such.  It was just a time of convergence points.  For me, a quote by Bishop Newman appropriated by C. S. Lewis has served as a gauge:  We are not bad men in need of being made good; we are rebels who need to lay down our arms. I just couldn’t produce another art show where visitors would say the work made them feel like they were in hell;  where children called it evil…  So I gathered up all of my works, filled several dumpsters around Atlanta, and shut my studio down.  I needed a time to have mind and imagination set apart and purified.

Can you make art that is uplifting AND true AND powerful?  That has been the question I have spent the last decade pursuing.

I came to see in 1999 that art had become my idol.  It was no longer a tool or a means, but the end in itself.  So I laid it down completely – placing it all on the altar to God.

I was called to ministry later that year, and Ken Hardin (who was the Senior Pastor at Citadel Square Baptist Church at the time – a man who I greatly respect) invited me to come on staff to grow in faith and find my place. Going from the arts in Atlanta to a 150 year old Southern Baptist Church was beyond culture shock and those years proved to be among the most difficult of my life.  But I believe I was brought there to learn to love people who are very different from me, and I did grow to love that church community and serve it as faithfully as I knew how at the time.  But how I missed the arts.  I left the thing that I was best at in life, and spent many times in tears in my church office asking God to put it back into my life someday.

So fast-forward to 2011, sometime in February or March…  I was considering the brevity of life; having turned 40; having had health problems and scares.  And I just asked – I asked God if I could make art again.  And in my spirit was the impression, “Commit it to Me“.  And so I did.  And then Alex Radin called immediately thereafter inviting me to participate in this show.

What is so ironic is that this new work is being shown in none other but Citadel Square Baptist Church, the very place of surrender over a decade ago.  I laid down my career in Atlanta to come to this place to serve and follow and grow in God.  It was a sacrifice.  And now I know that He has seen.  And now I know that He is a God who restores, who keeps His promise, who is faithful to keep what we have entrusted to Him.  This work is indeed new.  It has power.  It speaks truth.  And I hope that the viewers will find themselves as uplifted as I have been in the journey of making it.

Opening and Artist Reception:

Thursday, May 26, 5-8pm

Encore Artist Reception:

Friday, May 27, 5-9pm

Finale with closing Artist Reception:

Sunday, June 12, 4-6pm.

Other Open Hours (May 28-June 11):

Monday thru Thursday 11am-5pm
Friday & Saturday 11am-6pm
Sundays 2pm-6pm

The exhibit is free and open to the public at Citadel Square Baptist Church on the 3rd floor from the Henrietta Street entrance (view a map). Free Parking is being provided by Citadel Square Baptist Church in their lot on Calhoun Street for those attending this event.

Here is the show summary from the Artist on Fire website:

Sir Isaac Newton states it best in his first law of motion: Every object persists in its state of rest, or uniform motion unless, it is compelled to change that state, by an external force. In every situation in which there is chaos, pain, suffering, disorder, or the monotonous and mundane, a force is required to bring about change. Though we may endure pain for many years, everything can change in an instant with the right force applied. What was painstaking, laborious, broken, groaning, and rumbling is changed into something unexpectedly remarkable, astonishingly  beautiful, miraculously perfect. And, we know, see, perceive a glimpse of reality we have not yet known until that point in time.

During the internationally acclaimed Piccolo Spoleto Festival, from May 26 to June 12, Artist on Fire will present “Infusion: The Laws of Force & Motion”, a multi-media exhibit that explores the cycles of life, forces of change, and what results from active, purposeful interaction with our world. Fourteen artists unravel the different aspects of this theme through works in photography, film, installation art, sculpture, music, poetry, and painting…

The visual artists will be accompanied by several musicians performing live during our opening, encore artist reception, and finale, as well as other various times throughout the 17 days of the festival…

The exhibit is free and open to the public at Citadel Square Baptist Church on the 3rd floor from the Henrietta Street entrance (view a map). Free Parking is being provided by Citadel Square Baptist Church in their lot on Calhoun Street for those attending this event.

Opening and Artist Reception:

Thursday, May 26, 5-8pm

Encore Artist Reception:

Friday, May 27, 5-9pm

Finale with closing Artist Reception:

Sunday, June 12, 4-6pm.

Other Open Hours (May 28-June 11):

Monday thru Thursday 11am-5pm
Friday & Saturday 11am-6pm
Sundays 2pm-6pm