Creating: Bulletin Boards and Blank Canvases

As much as I dread taking down bulletin boards and putting up new work, there is something really wonderful about seeing all the artwork on display.  I watch my kids every day making their projects step by step, but hanging up their art gives me a chance to really look at the finished product and to see them all together.

But I think the thing I love about it the most is the fact that we are creating something where there was nothing before.  We are taking blank canvases, white paper, a few materials, and making masterpieces.  We start with a blank slate and week by week we turn that nothing into something beautiful.

I stare at the dark blue bulletin board empty, so similar to the dark empty nothingness that was before creation.  And then we create; we make art.  And I hang it on that bulletin board and where there was emptiness there is color and life and image and beauty and uniqueness and so much creativity.

I think that's what fascinates me so much about art and where I really see myself, and my students, as made in the image of God.  While God created an amazing universe out of nothing, we, on a much smaller scale, take the raw materials God has given us and continue to create.  We, like God, are creators.  We love to take nothing and make it something; we give life to emptiness.

Recently I've been doing landscape paintings with my middle and high school students and it is so amazing to see how lots of colored brushstrokes can take a blank canvas and give it form and life and beauty - like the picture is coming to life before our very eyes - that we have created a mini world on this canvas, a world that didn't exist before and would never exist unless we created it.  And I can see each student's art as their own, each unique and different.  Each one reflecting the artist who made it, just as creation reflects the master Creator.