Instructions based on our Creative-ish experiment on zoom together.
You’ll need a picture to look at that you’re happy to spend some time with, and some simple creative supplies. That could be as simple as a pen and paper, or it could be crayon/paints/pastels/felt pens, or it could be technology that will let you write or draw. Choose whatever you enjoy using and feel comfortable playing with.
You could choose a picture directly based on a Bible story or one that isn’t. You could choose an icon or photograph, something with figures in, or a landscape, or something entirely abstract. You could choose something that’s already very familiar, or something that’s completely new to you. It would be interesting to experiment with any of those.
Here’s the picture we used for our trial run. It’s called First Steps, by Vincent Van Gogh
We went through a series of stages together, with the understanding that they were a guide, not a hard and fast process. So if you find a train of thought that you want to follow that doesn’t fit with this structure, then see where it takes you. Give yourself a few minutes pause after reading each stage, to see what you notice and where your thoughts take you.
1. Get yourself settled. Make yourself comfortable in your chair. If you find it helpful, spend a few minutes following your breathe in and out, or grounding yourself by paying attention to your body and how it feels. This could be a form of prayer, so you might want to invite God to be part of this time.
2. Look at the physical details of the picture you’ve chosen. What colours and textures can you see? Where are the light and dark areas? What shapes or objects can you see? How does your eye travel across the picture? What catches your attention? Try to look at the whole image, a little at a time, the background as well as the foreground.
3. Notice your initial reaction to the picture? Do you love it or hate it or something else? What emotions does it bring up? What might lie behind that response?
4. What memories does this picture bring to mind? Are there particular experiences or stories that come into your head as you look at it?
5. Are there Bible passages that the picture makes you think of? Or is there a hymn or poem or something else connected to your faith that it reminds you of? If you chose a picture that is directly based on a Bible passage, it’s up to you whether you want to spend some time reading the passage or just go on your memory of it. Go with what seems most helpful at the time.
6. Where is God in all of this? If you were having a conversation with God about this picture, what would you say? What do you imagine God might say in response? Or how might you talk about your response to this picture to a good friend?
Now, have a bit of a stretch and do something creative in response to the picture you’ve been looking at. If you’re inspired and know what you want to do, that’s excellent. If not, I’d encourage you to fill a page with something anyway. Sometimes we don’t know what’s there, until we actually start doing it, so fill a page with random shapes and lines that somehow seem to fit your mood, or write a page of nonsense that captures something of what you noticed in the picture, and see how it turns out. Maybe you’ll just end up with a page of scribbles and nonsense that don’t mean much, but maybe something interesting or helpful might emerge. The process of doing it is much more important than the finished product. On zoom we spent about half an hour on this before coming back together again.
If you give these instructions a try, I’d really love to hear how you get on. For our initial trial on zoom, we went through it as a group, and stopped at a couple of points to chat about what was catching our attention and it was fascinating to see what very different directions people have gone in, from the same starting point.
Ragbag Mending 