"Giraffes" is a 4 ft by 5 ft acrylic and mixed media painting on wood. It is for sale. $500. Presently it doesn't have a hanging apparatus on it. Was planning to frame it like a gallery-framed canvas but will work with buyer on buyer's preference. I will deliver painting if within a day's drive for me. Message me here if you are interested.
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Okay, this post is a bit strange. I will admit. At our home we have three TV channels: PBS 1, PBS 2 and PBS 3. We also have Netflix and Amazon Prime. So, often, when we sit down to watch a show together as a family we watch Netflix (will we get more channels? I am not sure yet). Finding a TV series to watch with the family has been an interesting journey back to my childhood. I try to remember shows I watched and then we search to see if they happen to be on Netflix or Amazon. We watched every single episode of The Munsters last summer and fall. I fell in love with Herman! That show is really really good -- and great family entertainment. The kids and I laughed out loud often. Boy, I'm getting off a tangent. Maybe because it's Friday! Or maybe because it's me writing and my brain often shoots off on tangents. Hey, here's another tangent for you: for years I tolerated my brain. I didn't like it but you can't really get a new brain so I had to learn to live with it in some way. But you know what -- God wasn't content with me having just a tolerance for my brain. He wanted me to realize He created it the way He did to make me the way I am. We each our wonderfully made, incredibly and purposefully crafted to shine for Jesus in this dark world (check out Psalm 139). And now I embrace my brain in all its wackiness. Sure, it has weaknesses. Sure, I had to up my crazy meds. Sure, sometimes it can get really dark in that brain. But, it is beautiful in all its strengths and creative powers and weaknesses for God created it. Wow -- tangent day this is! Back to the silly foil ball pictured above. That is my foil ball I have begun to create. I got the idea from PeeWee's PlayHouse. The kids and I watched the first episode on Netflix. We watched it once when we were searching for a new TV show to watch. Anyway, PeeWee has a foil ball he adds to when a friend brings him a piece of foil. And not because of PeeWee but just because I think it would be fun -- I have started a foil ball. I told the kids we could see how big we can get it. If you want to send me a piece of foil I will take it! Here's my address: Jane Hinrichs P.O. Box 34 Lantry, SD 57636 Besides seeing how big it can get, why am I doing this? First, it is fun. It is okay to just do something for the fun of it. God loves to see us laugh. God loves us to have that sense of wonder and play in our attitude toward life. Remember, Jesus said those who enter the Kingdom of God must be converted (or turned) and become like children." (Matthew 18:3) And one thing little children can do well is be in the moment and just enjoy whatever is before them. Second, it is a great thing to have a goal with your family. It reminds family members that we all can work together for a common goal. That a family needs to be a team, not a bunch of individuals just living in the same place. I guess those are the two main reasons -- also I can recycle foil into a piece of art! Yes, a foil ball is a piece of art. So, send me your foil if you feel like it. All you need is an envelope and a stamp. If I start getting a lot of foil I will have a very interesting conversation with my postal lady! Oh, glory to God! I have so much to praise God for! You do too! Thank you Jesus. Thank you Jesus. Thank you Jesus! I love elephants. I love to watch them. I love to touch their wrinkly hide. My son and I are even reading a book on elephant communication which is making me love elephants even more! So, because I do a lot of drawing and painting, I decided to do some elephant sketches yesterday. I plugged in "elephant comic pictures" into the search engine and found several. I copied some of them and made some up. Here's one of my favorites: I wish I could say he is entirely my creation, but he isn't. I copied most of him from someone else's sketch. I love him! I'll cut and paste one that is uniquely mine. See below: For those who want to know I used pencil and crayola crayons to draw these elephants.
OK, why am I showing these pictures to you? This isn't my Illustration Blog. Because I want to share something I learned while drawing and copying and creating elephants. If you draw some kind of trunk and two flappy ears most people will be able to figure out it is an elephant. The trunk and ears can be misshapen and look nothing like a real elephant's trunk and ears, but the viewer will still be able to guess the drawing is an elephant. How does this relate to us spiritually? I don't know really. Maybe it is that there are marks and clues that are left by God when He works -- that if we notice His touch we will know it is Him. If you don't know what His touch is like though you won't see Him. If you don't know an elephant has a trunk and two flappy ears you won't be able to tell a picture is an elephant (even if it is a photograph of one). So, I guess here's what we gotta do -- get to know God and how He works. Then, we will notice Him in our daily lives. Because He's there. He's all around us. "in Him all things hold together." Colossians 1:17b "in Him we live and move and exist" Acts 17:28a I love this garden wall. I found it online when looking for a creative way to make a path through my yard (which is an entirely different story I ought to share someday). I love it. I love how the artist took old ceiling tiles and pieces of tin and made it into a beautiful piece of functional art. It is a wall plus it is lovely to look at. I love functional art.
(OK, that might be a tangent but it will relate in the end. Just keep reading) Let everything, absolutely everything that comes into your life make you better. We have a choice in this. When bad things, sad things, rough things, stressful things come into our lives, we can let them make us more into the people God created us to be or we can move farther away from who we were created to be. I've seen people choose both options -- people who've experienced sorrow who have allowed God to use it to deepen them as people in a good way, And people who've experienced great sorrow who have become less than who they are meant to be. The former is so much better. Apostle John quotes Jesus in John 12:27-28. He writes, "what shall I say? 'Father, save Me from this hour?' But for this purpose I came to this hour. 'Father, glorify Your name.'" In My Utmost For His Highest, Oswald Chambers writes, "Sorrow removes a great deal of a person's shallowness, but it does not always make that person better. Suffering either gives me to myself or it destroys me. You cannot find or receive yourself through success, because you lose your head to pride. And you cannot receive yourself through the monotony of your daily life, because you give in to complaining. The only way to find yourself is in the fires of sorrow . . . If you will receive yourself in the fires of sorrow, God will make you nourishment for other people." What a great thing -- to be nourishment to others. Nourishment is healing. So many need healing. Back to that garden wall -- that's what God can do in us -- use the discarded and apparently worthless and awful parts of our life and put it together in such a way that it adds beauty and healing to our worlds. Will you let God do that in you? Someone desperately needs you to. Nothing we do is wasted when we let God be part of it. Nothing -- no interaction with others, no creative act, no work even if no one else sees it. I don't know how this works but God can even use household tasks for His glory. Do dishes and clothes for Him. Cook and clean for Him. Paul writes in Colossians 3:23, "Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord rather than for men," God will give meaning to the most mundane task. And when given to Him, the mundane no longer is mundane. Since last November I've been sketching almost daily in a large sketchbook a friend of mine gave me. I began doing this because I desired to find my own style of drawing. I dream of being a professional illustrator. I am pursuing that dream -- no credits yet for me but I am working on it. I've sold paintings but that isn't the same. And with my sketches I wondered what I'd do with them besides just looking at them. That is enough in itself but I wanted more. My sketches now have a purpose too - - I look through them and reuse them if something strikes my fancy. This weekend is an art show at the Pierre Chamber of Commerce in Pierre, South Dakota. Four of my paintings are in the show. Two paintings are patterned after my sketches. Here's one of them: I enjoyed doing this watercolor and pen and ink above. It brought me joy. It isn't a Rembrandt or daVinci, but it's cute and full of life.
God will do the same with anything we offer Him -- use it to create something that adds beauty to our lives. The cartoon on the left always makes me laugh because it's so me. Once it starts getting a bit chilly I bundle up until June (by the way the cartoon was drawn by Harry Bliss. You can go to his page by clicking on his cartoon and on his name). I was writing on my illustration blog and I was getting a bit down on myself. I was questioning why I am spending so much time on the illustration thing. It doesn't make me any money. It looks like a waste of time to anyone looking from the outside in. It is just me and paper and pen -- when I draw or paint I'm not blessing my family or taking care of their needs or cleaning my house which always needs cleaning or doing dishes or cooking or anything that benefits anyone else. But then I remembered -- I am pursuing a dream and that in itself is enough. Why do I (or maybe you too) think I have to make money at something for it to be successful? Why do I have to think it has to directly benefit others for it to be worthy my time? Why do I think it has to be industrious, meaning it has to directly benefit others for it to be worth my time? Where do I get these ideas? Why are they there? I love being an American and I am always always thankful for being born in this country, but I wonder if this is uniquely American - -the need to use all my time in a practical way that benefits my family and our bank account? That the stuff I spend my time on has to a be worth something in these kinds of ways? This isn't God's version of success. It shouldn't be mine. I should quit feeling the need to explain to others the way I spend my time. I don't even think anyone else has a problem with me drawing or writing or anything -- it is just me after I see the time I spend on it. There is benefit though in us enjoying what we do and getting lost in it. As I write right now, I think these kinds of moments are straight from God. He wants us to enjoy life, enjoy what we do each day....We Americans sometimes see this kind of thing or pursue this stuff as escape from life rather than as life itself. Maybe that is the problem in my thinking. Creating isn't an escape from life. It is life and you know I think that when we are really living, we are living successfully. A guy at Shannon's work has started a blog and he is all gungho (not even sure if I spelled that right -- if you know the term you can probably figure out what I meant to spell...if you know how to spell it put it in the comments section for me please) about how he is going to make tons of money on his blog soon so he can quit his job. He's been rubbing off on my husband. Shannon tells him how many hits I get on this blog (sometimes quite a lot) and he says, "Wow, that's great!" but the thing is is that I don't make any money off my blogs. None. At All. Well, that's not true. I think I have about $40 in my google ad account from this year. I guess if I sign up for direct deposit I can get that....but all this talk, and especially my husband kind of trying to get my blogs to make money is rattling my brain. I've really been blogging for 13 years now. My original site was LittleBigHeartranch.com (that link is no more so don't click on it -- though Little Big Heart Ranch is on Facebook so I'll give you that link ...just click on the name). If you go to that Facebook page you can see some of my past artwork. I looked in my Bible concordance for verses about success. There isn't much -- at least not in the way we are taught to view success. I put the word success into a search engine. Most of the links that came up was about financial success (see -- we are so geared to equating success with finances). One link said it had 27 verses about success. I'll cut and paste the first one below: “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. ... " Matt 6:25-33 You know what i think a truly successful life would look like? It would be free of worry, full of joy and peace and loving others and God and enjoying life too, operating in the gifts and talents a person has and enjoying the process...... One more thought -- I truly think the artists, the writers, the actors -- all the branches of the creative arts -- are today's prophets if they use their gifts wisely. That doesn't mean they have to just talk or write or act about Jesus, but it means they use them to touch the hearts of people so God's work can be done. Sometimes that is through a fairy tale or through an abstract painting or through even a Hallmark movie. Have a lovely weekend. Any thoughts you'd like to share with me? I'll listen. Be successful today. "And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good." Genesis 1:31a
We all were made in God's image, the Great Creator.This means we are all called to be creators in some way. It is a huge part of who we are meant to be. Think of how often God creates -- all the time! Babies are conceived and born. Flowers bloom. He creates in each of His kids lives every single day if they let Him. And the sunrises and sunsets! Different every day and different in every part of the world! I have begun to read the book that is pictured above, and it is making me think. Being an artist, a writer, a dancer, an actor -- all the artsy kind of professions -- can very much be used by God. In fact, if we are led in this way, it is calling. We are to use our gifts to add beauty and joy and truth to this world and to the church. But do we? How can we open up the church and share these kinds of gifts to help us worship? I want to share a few passages from this book. It is a collection of essays written by different Believers. The first chapter is written by Andy Crouch and it is entitled The Gospel: How is Art a Gift, a Calling, and an Obedience? I'll just copy down what I underlined last night. I hope it makes you think and consider how the arts can be part of your church worship experience. Crouch is focusing on culture here and the reason for it and the gift that it is. Art is unique to a culture. We learn a great deal about a culture by looking at its art. And as I quote later, our attitude toward art is often very similar to our attitude toward worship. Crouch uses the word "unusefulness" which does not mean useless. Instead refers to something or someone who priceless because they just are, because they are creations of the Great Creator and that is enough.... Crouch writes, I hope to convince you that the gospel is more truly and deeply about culture in general, and the arts in particular than we have yet imagined. culture is what we make of the world, in both senses. A garden (and he was talking about the first Garden in this part of the book) is nature plus culture. . . Culture is God's gift to Adam. . . God begins the work of culture before he gives the work to Adam. Culture is God's creation as much as nature is. God has placed primordial humanity in a world that will only reach its full potential for beauty when it is cultivated, explored -- where more goodness waits to be unearthed. The world is even better than it appears. The gold of that land is good (referring to Genesis 2:12). Then he begins to talk about Genesis 3, the fall: The man and the woman try to use the world for something more than it could ever be -- to replace relationship with God, relationship with the only true source of wisdom, with a created thing. It is not enough for the world to be beautiful and good -- we want it to be self-sufficient. We want to be self-sufficient within it. Culture is no longer the good, gracious activity of tending a good, gracious world. It is a defensive measure, an instrumental use of the world to ward of the world's greatest threat -- the threat, suddenly a threat, of being known, of trusting one's fellow creatures and one's Creator. The fig leaves are useful -- barely -- but they are not a delight to the eyes. They are strictly instrumental, hastily assembled to solve a problem and secure a measure of protection. . . (Now he refers to the tower of Babel) We will steal back enough of the world from its Maker to be able to eke out life ourselves, self-naming, self-contained. Bread and wine are culture, not just nature. . . Taken, broken, blessed, and given, these cultural goods, these 'creatures of bread and wine' as the old prayer book had it, become sign and presence of God in the world. Art is, perhaps, one way of naming anything we as cultural beings do that cannot be explained in terms of its usefulness . . . That which cannot be turned into a means to an end, but asserts itself as an end -- intrinsically, and in some senses inexplicably, worthwhile. Art and worship stand together on the common ground of the unuseful (not useless). And this is why our attitude toward art ultimately has a great deal to do with our attitude toward worship. Who will be the people who can play gracefully, unusefully, in the world? Who will be the people who turn unafraid toward pain? Who will be the people who believe in beauty without being afraid of brokenness? Who will be the people who champion that which is not useful? Without a reason to believe in the unuseful, who will be left to champion those people who are not useful? "But the vessel that he was making of clay was spoiled in the hand of the potter, so he remade it into another vessel, as it pleased the potter to make." Jeremiah 18:4
We need never lose heart. No matter how much we believe we've messed up our lives, God can make something new and exciting and creative out of who we are right now. Some things people might regret are: missed opportunities, bad choices, sin, bad behavior, things that have been lost. God can use all that! It might seem like garbage to us but we give it God and He will recreate it to something incredible, something that actually adds to our life. Some of the neatest works of art are pieces that are created from trash. And how cool is it when we hear some smart scientist figuring out how to take useless trash and using it for energy or for the solution to some huge problem! I am waiting for someone to make something great out of all the disposable diapers around the world -- when that happens, wow, think of the possibilities! |
Who is Jane Hinrichs?Jane is a wife, a mom, a writer, an artist, a lover of the Word of God. She has been studying the Bible since 1987 and has been writing about it almost since then. She loves to hear from her readers. Email her at: Categories
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