Creating for Sheer Joy
Photo: Clint Fisher
Marla Olmstead is eight years old now. An abstract artist, her first painting sold when she was two; by the time she was four, she was at the center of an international fervor, and her works were outselling her adult counterparts' in Manhattan.
I first heard about Marla through the 2007 documentary My Kid Could Paint That, a film that shows the height of her popularity and the controversy surrounding her paintings, including questions of worth and even authenticity. While some argue about whether her works can even be considered art (reviving perennial questions about what constitutes art in the first place), others accuse her parents of helping her, which they contend invalidates Marla as an independent artist.
These issues are fascinating and worthy of consideration, but when I watched the film, I was struck by something else. When the filmmaker asks an art critic why Marla's work is so appealing, the critic acknowledges the pure aesthetic power of the paintings— but he suggests that they possess a still more potent quality. He points out how cynical and aggressive a lot of contemporary art is, almost attacking the viewer. The film, as one example, pans across a florescent display spelling the word "Holy"; a moment later, the lights spell out the f-word instead. With Marla, he says, she "paints for the sheer joy of it." He thinks that's what viewers are responding to.
Certainly a great part of the allure of Marla's work comes from the charm of its story: every finished painting is a testimony to a child's sense of play. Her official bio, from her Web site at marlaolmstead.com, ends by affirming that she "is at her most joyful and expressive before the canvas." Whether or not Marla is the sole creator of her work doesn't change that people want her to be; people want to have a piece of her joy in their lives. This strikes me as a beautiful thing to want.
As Christian artists, what do we have to offer a world that longs for such pure joy? I do not wish to oversimplify, pretending that the only Christian life is one that is constantly joyful, or that Christian artists ought to limit themselves only to joyful subjects. Many of the most moving Christians over the years have embraced brokenness, frailty, and darkness. As a writer, I think of Hugo's Les Miserables, Greene's The Power and the Glory, Augustine's Confessions, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. As a Christian, I think of Jesus.
Perhaps I am riveted by this idea of artistic joy precisely because I see such tremendous examples of artists who meet darkness bravely and sincerely, but I have more difficulty finding artists who are engaged in fresh celebration. I realize that a lot of so-called Christian art errs on the side of the superficially pretty, the sanitized, the saccharine. I am not advocating such work. But as Christians, we are a part of a tradition of rejoicing that goes back, if we embrace the vision of Job, at least to the beginning of our world:
"Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? . . . while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?"
(Job 38:4, 7, NIV).
If we believe that God is the source of joy, and if we are intentionally living in dedication to and relationship with God, then it seems to me that we ought to have some distinct experiences of joy worth sharing. And apparently, there are a lot of people who are anxious to share it with us. So how can we communicate this joy through our artwork?
I believe the answer will be different for each of us, and that offers a worthwhile challenge. But for me, I find models from whom to learn in several favorite authors. Both Madeleine L'Engle and the oft-referenced C. S. Lewis speak explicitly of joy in their works, but the moments that haunt my memory come from their young adult novels. I listened to the Narnia chronicles before I could read myself; I read the Time trilogy in elementary school. They linger in large part because of their inherent wonder and celebration.
As an adult, I find myself turning to Marilynne Robinson to learn how to steep joy into writing, since her Gilead is suffused with light. Described as "radiant" (Chicago Tribune), "incandescent" (Entertainment Weekly), a book that "glows with brilliance" (Philadelphia Inquirer), and "having an unusual radiance and innocence" (Atlantic Monthly), Gilead challenges me as a writer because it so deftly moves through mature scenes and subjects—it manages to evoke startling anger, wrenching sorrow, and intense loneliness, yet always with nuanced luminescence.
For the reader's convenience, brief excerpts from all of these authors are available below. Yet I don't think I can or should try to capture a formula for succeeding in such an endeavor. And while the examples I've included here are fairly straightforward in their celebration, Marla Olmstead's paintings are not explicitly "joyful" in the same way that these particular texts are. If you visit her Web site, you can view a gallery of her works. As her site attests, she "uses acrylic paint, brushes, squirt bottles, spatulas, and the ideal child stand-by: her fingers," to create her vast canvases drowning in bright paint and dizzying patterns, with titles like "A Muddy Day," "Mosquito Bite," and "Darlene's Bikini."
Pieces that are visually interesting, but that gain tremendous allure from their association with a child's playtime. So perhaps the most important element of giving joy to our audiences is not subject matter but something more fundamental. Just as the appeal of Marla's paintings comes in large part from the story behind them, maybe we would do best to infuse joy into our work by cultivating joy in ourselves, and by taking real delight in the creative process.
[W]here morning dawns and evening fades you call forth songs of joy.
— Psalm 65:8 (NIV)
Passages from L'Engle, Lewis, and Robinson
In this passage from A Wrinkle in Time, the child protagonists find themselves in a strange world, with foreign creatures singing a psalm of praise to God. The celebration of this scene serves to strengthen the children, who shortly afterward find themselves facing the "dark Thing" they must fight for the rest of the book:
Throughout her entire body Meg felt a pulse of joy such as she had never known before. Calvin's hand reached out; he did not clasp her hand in his; he moved his fingers so that they were barely touching hers, but joy flowed through them, back and forth between them, around them and about them and inside them.1
In this creation scene from C. S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew, Aslan sings Narnia into existence:
In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. . . . Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. . . . The voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices. . . . The blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. . . . The new stars and the new voices began at exactly the same time. If you had seen and heard it . . . you would have felt quite certain that it was the stars themselves which were singing, and that it was the First Voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing.2
The whole of Gilead is a letter from a dying John Ames to his young son, and a good portion of the book is episodic stories and reflections for the boy to read when he's older:
[That] reminded me of something I saw early one morning a few years ago, as I was walking up to the church. There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn't. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something out of a myth. I don't know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash.3
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