Christ and the artist

Charis-Kairos (The Tears of Christ) by Makoto Fujimura

Contemporary artist Makoto Fujimura is a Christian and well known in both Christian and secular artist circles. In celebration of the 400th anniversary of the King James Version Bible, he was commissioned, in a sense, to present abstract art alongside the four gospels. It is the merging of modern art with Scripture and is carefully crafted to illuminate the Bible in a creative way while still staying true to God's word. The typography and layout are beautiful as well, and I'm surprised something like this wasn't done earlier. It makes me really excited. Fujimura speaks beautifully about being beauty, the artist's place in the church, and being an artist and Christian, and how these two worlds came together to make the artist he is today. Some excerpts from his interview which can be viewed in full here:

On becoming a Christian and what changed before and after in his art work

"I knew that I had this awareness of brokenness that I didn’t have a solution for. The problem of an artist is that you create beautiful things and the beauty of it can haunt you because you don’t have a place inside for that transcendence. So an opera singer singing the best performance of her career will go backstage and weep because you know that you’ve been touched by something, but you don’t know what that is. I had this profound awareness that the beauty I am able to create, I’m alienated from. How do you bridge that gap? I felt that in that passage by William Blake, and the Gospel, this reality that was literally a bridge between heaven and earth, between my sense of alienation and what was happening inside and outside. That allowed me to hold everything together, to see that Christ indeed could bring those things together in my life."

What do you say to artists who feel a tension between creed and creativity and feeling like their creative artistic gifting prevents them from being boxed in with orthodoxy? How can you encourage artists that there is great joy and freedom according to the standards of Scripture?


"We take the word ‘discipline’ to be negative, but there is training that goes on in any form and you really have to deal with limitations of expression and those who make it are the ones who have recognized and began to create out of those limitations. So these boundaries actually have become your friends rather than your enemies, and that’s when your artist journey really begins. This idea of total freedom, untethered free expression is really a myth, and every artist knows that. I talk about all these words, ‘discipleship’ or ‘authority’ that have negative connotations because we’re so immersed in this freedom language, but are actually there to give us the ultimate freedom. You know the word ‘authority’ has the word ‘author’ in it. It’s authorship. When we realize that we have authority over our artwork because we’re the authors, that makes sense. On the flip side, if there is an author who authors our lives for the better, then it makes sense to allow yourself to accept the limitations given so that we can be liberated from ourselves. And so part of this discipleship is also this ability to understand from the macro perspective that we’ve been given the limitations, and even suffering that we go through, are ways in which we can become ourselves in the purest sense be sanctified to reveal what we have been given to do."

I'm still trying to understand what it means to be an artist, to be immersed in an artistic community, yet be set apart and have my work be glorifying to God. How to be a witness and show that my faith is not a limitation, but rather a liberation of the standards, limitations, and ugliness that sin has entangled the world. And to be all this while being relateable and genuine, honest, and steadfast. I guess that's kind of every Christians struggle. Gosh, it's difficult.