Calling: Art and Signage

Ginger Henry Geyer

A FRIEND caught me in the grocery aisle staring at an array of canned fruit. I had just had an idea for a new sculpture and was doing research. She arched an eyebrow and continued shopping.

It took four stores to find the nine kinds of canned fruit I needed as models for a new piece that tangentially deals with the fruits of the spirit. The cans will be jammed in an old basket like ones in rural markets, along with a cardboard sign bearing a rendition of Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus. The whole contraption will be made of porcelain. Even with all this pre-visioning, there is no telling how it will come out. There are two reasons for that—the medium of porcelain changes shape and color when it is fired, and the meaning of my pieces unfolds during the working process.

On one level, in the aftermath of the terrorist strikes the whole idea now seems frivolous, but in another way the fruit basket is fitting, since it zigzagged out of a prophet’s warning to a decadent culture. Amos, one of the harsher prophets, was shown an omen, a basket of summer fruit, a warning of disaster for Israel. Some translators say the Hebrew phrase for basket of summer fruit is a rhyming pun on a word meaning “the end”: an image of abundance warns of destruction. I delight in wordplay, in the way it can juxtapose images to defamiliarize the familiar, and I use clichés shamelessly. I don’t always understand what’s brewing in my work, so I quiz friends for theological clues: Caravaggio’s dinner includes a lovely basket of fruit about to tip off the table—its precarious position makes us want to rush into the picture to prevent it from falling. We have to enter in. At Emmaus it was not the fruit but the bread that convinced the disciples that their mysterious guest was the risen Christ. If the fruits are canned, what does that say about the fruits of the spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, and so on? How should the cans be priced, or should they appear to be donations? (I could title the thing Amos’s Food Drive.) And which metallic overglaze will look most like aluminum? That is, assuming the piece makes it through the next firing....

About twelve years ago, my timid re-entry into art-making resulted in plates—wobbly, round, two-sided paintings. One of the best was called Acquisition Neurosis at the Grocery Store, and dealt with the numbness I still experience when faced with too many good choices. The Amos basket shows how ideas, such as the grocery images, are recycled in my art. Legend has it that when Johann Sebastian Bach was quizzed about his prolific ideas for compositions, he replied, “I have so many ideas that I’m lucky if I don’t trip over them each morning.” The image of the portly Bach yawning and kicking light bulbs in his nightshirt and slippers thus inspired the piece Bach Tripping Over Ideas [see Plate 7], a porcelain replica of a music book open to “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” adorned with whole and broken light bulbs and inscribed with Bach’s Latin dedication of his work to God: Soli Deo Gloria. We idolize ideas—in academia and in conceptual art—and objects—in museums, galleries, and through the perfectionism of the craft ethic. Is this because, unlike Bach, we can’t recognize their source?

Since September 11, the questions about art have changed. People want to know if we artists have come up with a way to express these times. Five months later I have begun a new piece, but it took a pilgrimage to Ground Zero to prompt it. Old ideas are connecting with new ones, and my yearning to connect with a wider community has fresh urgency. I count myself fortunate to have already developed an artistic search, and to have an anchored, evolving faith from which I can lean into this smoldering pain.

My work is hand-built, not-quite trompe l’oeil porcelain sculpture, each piece meticulously painted with underglazes and metallics. My forms are mundane. Most of them are ordinary household objects, the stuff that tragedy makes us appreciate anew. For the viewer, getting fooled by hyperrealism can be fun, but trompe l’oeil quickly becomes a gimmick if there is nothing beyond the cleverness. If the eye catches a quirk and registers an incongruity, then the mind is momentarily disarmed, and a space is cleared where the Spirit can do the real work. The quirks in my pieces are not planned. I know that my intentions might snarl up the encounter, so instead of trying to choreograph the viewer’s experience, I offer some gentle foolishness and hope the collision of incongruities is fruitful.

The “Queen of Clay” announces its limits like a prima donna, white and bitchy and sensuous. There’s nothing fancy about porcelain technique. The clay is composed of natural materials, but it is not dug up out of the earth as are other clays; it has to be made. Jealously guarded recipes for porcelain have existed since the eighth century, but I just buy mine in a bag. A piece will warp, crack, and shrink up to ten per cent—and usually in the final firing after most of the work has been done. I would get better results if I used something more practical. By observing its flaws, I have learned that perfectionism is not what carries the meaning in my art. The direct link between the spiritual and technical processes here is in the transformation by fire. I’m sure people wonder why I don’t just buy a vanity mirror at a garage sale and glue a picture of an icon to it—and that would offer a tempting degree of control. The crafting of a piece against odds honors the idea as not entirely mine. It leaves room.

My technique doesn’t lend itself to prolific production. It takes patience and resilience of ego, which I have in short supply. I feel defeated whenever I open the kiln to find severe flaws. Sometimes the piece is not redeemable, but often the flaws function as revelation. While struggling to master porcelain as a medium, I was also probing the central mystery of my faith, determined to bend my intellect to decipher Christology. Now I know that neither clay nor Christianity can be mastered, and I am at home with my doubts.

I often turn to medieval and Byzantine art when the big questions loom. I find something clarifying in the mystical images that point to the reality beyond reality—in the solemn Christ Pantocrators (the all-sovereign “Christ in Majesty”) in apses, their dark, all-knowing eyes flashing against gold, the comical body language and flat perspective that unsettles our equilibrium, and in the energy barely contained by symbols like the mandorla, an almond-shaped aureole that surrounds a holy figure, signifying its divinity. I borrowed that shape for a small bowl into which I planned to carve a copy of an eleventh-century “Christ in Majesty,” intending to depict our attempts to contain God. I placed a rough-cut clay copy of the figure in the wet clay bowl and wrapped it in plastic to keep it moist and pliable. A few days later when I uncovered it, ready to mold the figure into the body of the bowl, I found that Christ had cracked. Not only cracked, but curled up at the edges as if he were coming out of the bowl. This was irreparable, and I was mad. Then these words flitted into my mind: “Here is my body which is broken for you.”

I have come to believe that such wake-up calls are the result of growing up in the church, soaking up its words and images. A Waspish town surrounded by the Ozark Mountains raised me, along with a big, happy family devoted to the Methodist Church. Goody Two Red Shoes [see Plate 8] reveals the polite provincialism of my hometown, Springdale, Arkansas. The arrangement of the objects mimics the composition of a painting on the shoebox, a favorite Spanish still life in which vegetables hang from strings. One of my goody shoes is suspended, waiting to drop. A poem written inside the box lid connects the red shoes to the Wizard of Oz and the kindly shoe storeowner who was the only Jew in our town. There was little diversity in Springdale, and there were few cultural advantages, but there were good people and a soft, rugged landscape, which heightened in me a yearning and a sense of wonder that was a sign of God’s presence. I climbed big oak trees where I drew and wrote poems; these were holy moments similar to the studio time I now have in my small treetop space in Austin, Texas. The incidents of God’s grace and mystery come unprovoked, in God’s own time frame, often laden with humor. Why God let me develop my skills by repeatedly painting huge posters for my high school football team to jump through, for example, is still a mystery.

My early art-making memories are directly connected to the church. First, a fuzzy one, in front of a chalkboard in the preschool Sunday school class: I was seized by the desire to use the squeaky chalk and drew and drew squares on squares, doors, windows, and flower boxes as far as my skinny arms could reach. After covering the entire blackboard, I turned with a toothy smile to my teacher. She scoffed, “What’s that, the Tower of Babel? Erase it and sit down for crackers and juice!” I smacked on Chiclets instead and hid the eraser, I think. I progressed in churchly expression, learning to draw during worship on the back of blank checks. The checks were egg-yolk yellow and pale green, one for each of the banks in town. I sketched the preacher on one, and the big kneeling Jesus on the other—the one in that Gethsemane painting by Heinrich Hofmann. A copy hung for years over our altar—a rather benign image to grow up with, but Jesus sure had a neat big rock to lean on. It looked just like the lichen-covered sandstone in our neck of the woods. If I drew sideways on top of the rough Cokesbury Hymnal with one of those itty-bitty pencils, I could almost capture the texture of that rock. But the noise made by rubbing would earn me a poke between the shoulders by some lemon-sucking church lady in the pew behind.

An artist’s call is affirmed by surviving the small collisions of art and faith. There are much bigger conflicts out there, the ones between art and prudence that get dressed up differently every decade, and the gnawing, insidious ones with our own communities. The liberal Christians I worship with look askance at my overt biblical images, especially the pieces that ask Bonhoeffer’s big question, “Who is Jesus for you, in this time?” For them I stacked up bold porcelain blocks that spell out JESUS, with dinky figures portraying Jesus as a teacher, a police officer, a bandit, a glow-in-the dark Holy Ghost, and a wizard. It’s called Lego Logos. Some evangelicals I work with get edgy over images that skewer doctrine, like my Mother Teresa’s Paper Dolls, a porcelain paper doll Jesus who welcomes various porcelain paper disguises: a gay man, a bag lady, a prostitute, et cetera. My secular artist friends question anything that smells religious, so they just describe my work as spiritual or ethical. To me, the paint tray and roller called Holy Roller [see Plate 9] is an affirmation of the act of Pentecost, the deep, quiet descent of the Spirit that empowered the disciples to recognize the oneness of humanity. Somehow this connects with the renewal of arts in the church—I imagine art painted over the whitewashed walls of Reformation-decimated churches. The paint tray bent and cracked in the firing, reminding me again that the holy cannot be contained. But to some art critics, Holy Roller is funky or ironic. Is that because religious imagery seems irrelevant, or disarming?

No wonder many critics do not bother to seek deeper meaning; we artists do tend to present visual glossolalia without any verbal interpretation, and many visual artists see language as a vandal that will deface the viewer’s response. Yet either explaining our idiosyncratic symbols or avoiding explanation can cause misunderstanding. Although I think of myself more as an artist than a writer, I’ve chosen to err on the side of language, offering text alongside my pieces. The writing grows along with the sculpture. The words become the collection plate for the tidbits I dig up in the art research, as well as for feedback from viewers. My hope is that the text and image will become integrated into one form, not to suppress the ambiguities but to tweak them. The use of text remains a tension, with one community hungry for it and another flaring their nostrils over it. These conflicts sometimes make me feel like a pool ball.

This tension between mystery and disclosure gets turned around (and sometimes caused) by signage, which is my term for God’s self-disclosure. Signage is great fuel for the art-making passion. I consider being alert to signage—paying attention to God’s presence in the immediate world—to be a spiritual discipline. Signage is ever present; finding meaning in it is more an exercise of delight than of superstition. Signage is not always obvious, or rare, or even profound. It is found in buzzards as well as redbirds, in pomegranates and in a certain shade of periwinkle, even in cherry pie. Theologians argue over which direction the activity is coming from: whether we discover God or God reveals God to us. Why not both? For instance, my beloved father-in-law died recently, “old and full of years.” Many family members were there for a “good death,” a holy experience. It was a warm day in winter and my niece threw open the patio door. A robust breeze blew in, and at that instant Dad’s labored breathing ceased. Sunlight flooded the room. Then Mom’s seeing-eye watch squawked, “It’s one o’clock!” while off in the kitchen the bird-by-the-hour clock chirped in reply. I later had to call Hope, the caregiver, to ask what bird that was—an American robin, a favorite rarely seen in central Texas.

Signage is closely related to call. From what I understand, call, or vocare, often comes when least expected, resonates with our history and sense of our destiny, and must be affirmed by a community. The answering of divine call is exemplified by the “Yes” of Mary, and also by those prophets who initially gave lame excuses. Such examples figure into a piece that began when I threw out my career Rolodex and started making a set of porcelain business cards that are a brain dump on the word call. Some entries are deadly serious, like Sylvia Plath’s hint that “dying is a call,” or this stinger: “He’s not really dead, God just called him home.” Many are hopeful verses: “See what love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God, so are we all” (1 John 3:1). Many of the calling cards are nonsense: “All of the other reindeer used to laugh and call him names” or “Put de lime in de coconut and call me in the morning.” Others are wistfully banal: “House Calls” or “Call Waiting.” Several years later, with 400 plus entries, The Calling Card Collection is unfinishable. Visitors add new cards with each exhibition. It seems that no matter how hard we try to nail down a divine mystery, the more it expands. How do we discern the call of God amid the clamor of this world, here, in this buzz? One eye must be for self-scrutiny, the other for grace.

My own call to be an artist seemed to come all at once, but seen another way, it developed over time, and connects my past, present, and future. A key moment was a revelation at a waterfall in a city park where I go to meditate. The place has a Thoreauvian, bucolic quality, though its primary source of water is a public swimming pool. Sitting there one day after a foot-washing, I got into a dialogue with God, one of those experiences that magnifies the risk of being called a nut:

“You are an artist,” God said.

“Yeah, right. All I make is cookies,” I replied.

No response.

“Well, then, what do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Pay attention to the verb,” said God.

This call forced me into a period of blessed ontological cocooning at the ripe age of thirty-six, a time of art experimentation and spiritual growth when I was able to withdraw from art as I knew it in order to find it anew. For a while I quit looking at art and turned to writers for inspiration. Certain writers brought worn out religious language to life for me: Frederick Buechner, Kathleen Norris, and Barbara Brown Taylor. Madeleine L’Engle gives artists permission to see our work as prayer. Walter Brueggemann regenerates my religious imagination and feeds my hope. In Catholic writers like Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, and Teresa of Avila, I discover a missing richness of paradox and mystery. The poets who help me are too numerous to name. This great cloud of witnesses seemed to smile as I made some of the ugliest plates in town and proudly showed them to my friends. At some point, people began to seem moved by my non-functional plates and accompanying stories. The affirmation of community is itself part of the call cycle.

The next phase of my call was a financial kick in the rear. I’d been making and firing my work at a community art school, where my peculiar porcelain pieces often got damaged while awaiting firing in big kilns that were sometimes commandeered for pizza parties. I needed my own space, but funds were limited. An episode in Jeremiah spurred me to action: when Jeremiah was imprisoned during the siege of Jerusalem, he got a call to purchase some land from a relative. It was foolish to invest in real estate when it was likely to be seized, but Jeremiah did it. It was an act of faith in the future, based on hope made possible only because God was in the call. My husband and parents covered the costs, and we built my “Jeremiah’s Field,” a small studio with a small kiln. It quickly became a safe space for re-entering my life, for facing reality.

Call comes to you where you are, and therein lies the rub. In all outward appearances, mine is a conventional American dream life, with a cherished and supportive husband, two well-adjusted kids, and the world’s best dog (of indecipherable breed). I am also an art consultant, an adjunct seminary professor and student, and a former art museum professional. Busy, yes, but a voyeur won’t get any thrills here. Although I came of age during the Vietnam War, I never knew it. I asked my sister, “What were we doing in the late sixties?”

“We were doing our hair,” she said.

With apologies to Rabbi Kushner, my family life could have been called “When Nothing Happens to Good People.” I can wallow in survivor guilt for my fortunate existence, or I can be grateful and try to give back. I do both. After I told my story one night at a retreat, a tearful woman thanked me for “letting us know that those of us with comfortable lives are also within God’s reach.” Personal angst is not the only prerequisite to art. A rich inner world is, and I do have that. Plus one hideous tragedy that rocked my family and worked itself out years later in a sculpture called Redbird Binoculars.

The binoculars honor my Grandmother Brown, who died in a house fire on Christmas Eve, 1982, her birthday. She was the rose in my life, a woman of sturdy faith and generous joy. She called them redbirds, those flashy cardinals who lit up her backyard, and she viewed them with a chunky pair of field glasses that must have come out of World War I. Each December, Grandmother clipped redbird feather ornaments to her Christmas tree. I remember seeing those ornaments in the front yard after the fire, still clinging to the charred tree, which the firefighters had tossed out the front window, the only bright spots on the lawn. In one binocular lens is an image of the backyard before the fire, full of birds, in the other, the front yard after the fire, with the burnt tree. The red-specked images co-exist. For me, the flash of a cardinal is now a harbinger of grace, reminding me that reality consists of side-by-side acknowledgment of grief and joy, as in the Psalms.

Both my grandmother’s life and the life of art-making are characterized by generosity and gratitude. Art materials themselves embody this; they are not meant to be hoarded. They ooze abundance. Why porcelain? That also goes back to Grandmother’s fire. Sifting through the ashes that had been her breakfront full of prized figurines, china, and cut glass, I found only one item intact: a Prussian platter with an iridescent glaze—it was feminine and strong, salvageable. It was porcelain.

Art history is another inexhaustible source of signage for me, and that also began early. An aunt in another town had an art history book on her coffee table, and I would sneak a look at it whenever we visited. The Crucifixion by Grünewald was compelling, its religious intensity matched only by Munch’s The Scream. I longed to slice out those pictures and steal them. My first encounter with “real” art was a bona fide religious experience brought on by my first visit to a big city at age ten. In the Art Institute of Chicago, at the top of the stairs, was Seurat’s stunning Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte. That did it. Such a call requires action. Back home, I converted my small closet into a studio and did charcoal versions of ladies with parasols and wiener dogs. Years later, the Seurat appeared on a porcelain Etch-a-Sketch, the Grünewald on a porcelain lunchbox, and the Munch is still screaming at me. Such art appropriations are part of my daily world. I copy them in chalky-tinted underglazes, a meditative practice that disengages my mind. Like a struggling musician’s, my interpretations of the masters are always “off.” Ingestion changes things.

My shoplifting of biblical images may reach its peak with my most recent work, a folded quilt like one you might find on the end of a bed, awaiting a guest. Some thirty-two paintings make up the squares on Patchwork Hospitality; it looks like a full-body tattoo. All the images are lifted from Bible stories that have to do with hospitality. They express not only generous giving but receptivity, and the quilt is meant to express hospitality in a broad sense, as generosity of spirit that reveals the inclusive love of God. Some of the squares are partially tucked under the folds, as if there are more squares hidden inside. I wonder if the quilt has a flip side with biblical images of exclusivity—all those stories of ethnic cleansing, oppression of women, and bigotry that are left out of our lectionaries and glossed over by some theologies. Is our faith merely a security blanket?

Finding tales that go beyond familiar depictions of hospitality involved research into biblical stories and art history. The hardest reproduction to find was a painting of Peter’s vision of the clean and unclean animals—I had to resort to using clip art, which I suppose is on the shadow side of art history. The search for art images is as much a part of my creative process as is the struggle with large slabs of clay. Rooting around in tradition fires my imagination. Perhaps in this piece I am creating my own private Bible of only good stories, or my own private art museum. Or maybe I hope to redeem a former career that began in college.
At the University of Arkansas I was deeply influenced both by photorealism and absurd narrative. From there I was catapulted to Southern Methodist University, a toney school in big, bad Dallas. SMU appealed to me because it had a cool museum of old Spanish art and a Claes Oldenburg Mickey Mouse sculpture on the lawn. The juxtaposition was thrilling. The lure of art led me to an internship at the Kimbell Art Museum’s conservation lab. There I experienced the vulnerability of art—best recalled when everyone in the lab vanished one afternoon, leaving me alone with a stripped down, priceless Rembrandt. It was a small canvas with raw, frayed edges, lying out on the table awaiting a new stretcher. I got to shellac the stretcher. And I got to absorb the curious profession of art conservation. Conservation forces a sideways look at the mystery of art, and makes us realize that our perception of a work of art is affected by its condition. In other words, mystery is mediated through physicality. It is a short leap into the incarnation.

I worked at the Dallas Museum of Art for thirteen years. It is a neurotic and passionate institution, as museums tend to be, and I loved it. No wonder many people substitute museums for church—the darkened galleries, the carved donor plaques, the musty books and acquisition ledgers inspire our reverence. There is a golden calf on every floor. It is impossible not to be swept up by the heady wave of exhibitions from Pompeii to Calder, the thrill of the hunt for the right Mayan pot to fill out a collection, the moment when a favorite Sargent portrait speaks anew, and the juxtapositions behind the scenes, in the storerooms where dislocated masterpieces and duds rubbed elbows. The DMA was a growing museum in those days, and I grew also. I rose through the ranks from education intern to Deputy Director for Planning, a fancy title which meant I knew a lot more about the art collection than I did about myself.

In those years, the museum profession was also trying to identify itself. Buzzwords were: multiculturalism, collection sharing, blockbusters, repatriation, community building. Overlying these worthy ideals was a flush of technological optimism, and I was in the middle of that. Museums are spiritual places, and that strength is also a weakness, for aesthetic encounters in museums are easily converted into private religious experiences. Nothing is wrong with that, but it is a short step down to idolatry if God is left out of the encounter. This I well know. The biggest life lesson of museums for me was that art doesn’t make a very good religion.

My adult identity was formed in museums, amid a surreal mix of ostentatious wealth and glamorous parties against a backdrop of sacred objects. All this was perhaps too rich to percolate. I had a sense that anything worth saying had already been said, and the intimidation was compounded by the attitude that many museums have toward living artists. Declaring oneself an artist was like being the skunk in the sculpture garden. My own gifts were put in the freezer.

It took that waterfall in the public park to thaw them out. And it took leaving the museum career—and some devastated relationships there—to put the gifts to work. My husband Rick and I decided to uproot and move to Austin, as the materialism of Dallas in the eighties was beginning to encroach upon our child rearing. Austin was a slacker town then, and there was no daily diet of masterpieces to worship. The maxim to “make what you know, what is right under your nose” felt like a joke. I started looking under the kids’ beds. Ideas for sculptures came plentifully—omnipresent toys, little red shoes, the Little Red Hen. This took me straight back into my own childhood and reconnected me with Chlora.

Chlora is a character who shows up in my work as an imaginary guide into my childhood and religious background. She looks like a cross between Pippi Longstocking and Anne Frank. When there’s a throbbing in my right ear, a playful disjointedness sets in, and I know Chlora is on the line. My Grandmother Henry and my mother, with four little girls to keep in line, invented the Chlora stories on an as-needed basis. This little tyrant with the odd name got into whatever shenanigans we had just committed. The stories were moralistic and gripping. They began, “Chlora was a bad little girl.” Chlora became so realistic that she grew into a convenient scapegoat: it was Chlora, not me, who chopped up the National Geographics to make collages. She eventually moved on to art books and discovered that she liked tape and anything else that stuck. She was hard on toys. She fantasized about her future in the big city. She innocently garbled her religious training and bungled her friendships, but the nonsense created by Chlora remains openhearted and open-ended.

Chlora gets activated when there is too much “God-talk” around. When things get obnoxiously earnest or tip into piousity, Chlora gets out the squeaky chalk. She gets anxious over starry-eyed charismatics who revel in smarmy, paint-sucking images of the apocalypse which “God commanded them to do.” Chlora is unnerved by the kind of woo-woo idealism that extols the imagination as the panacea for all problems, as if an active imagination doesn’t go both ways. Hitler had one, and so do the folks who invented 132 styles of pantyhose. She knows art is fun and is also hard work, and she rolls her eyes at glib declarations like, “All of us are artists!” Art jabberwocky—that pretentious aesthetic jargon—especially the self-serving kind, is just as odious to her. Chlora senses when the emperor is wearing no clothes, and like a goody two shoes, she politely says so.

Chlora questions my motives and makes me lighten up. She goes to the Episcopal Seminary with me and helps me confront my own bias. She takes biblical images literally—that is, as they literally function in context—and then she messes with metaphors. My most recent Chlora piece is Chlora’s Crèche. The crèche germinated in a previous piece (like much art), and then linked up with a bizarre Christmas Eve worship service at which our family had to go through a metal detector only seconds before receiving communion (that’s what you get when you end up at the same service as a President-elect). Ideas for the crèche began with Aaron, who took the heat for the golden calf. One idea fed the next: the calf made of gold and jewels lead to materialism, and that took me back to Dallas and to sumptuary laws and Girolamo Savonarola in Florence...and on to his influence on Botticelli, whose Mystical Nativity got painted on the crèche. Then I realized that the ox and ass are absent from the gospels but got lifted from Isaiah and now appear in every rococo crèche at Dillard’s. Chlora gets hold of a nativity set and spray-paints the cow gold. At least it wasn’t barbequed like the fatted calf.

Before I started this piece, I was rambling to a friend about my ideas. It was September, and I told her I was scouring Goodwills for a tacky cardboard crèche from the 1950s. I wanted a model from my own childhood, the classic type with straw or moss on the roof and brightly painted plaster figures. My friend looked stunned. “I have one in my car,” she said. Out in the parking lot she opened the trunk. The only thing in it was a 1950s nativity set, minus all the figures except a pink Baby Jesus in a scotch-taped manger. She had kept it in her trunk for months after cleaning out her mother’s home and didn’t have the heart to ditch it. This sign gave me the impetus to get started.

Sometimes a piece continues to unfold for me months after is finished—a reminder that the call is ongoing. I knew the crèche was more than a jab at holiday consumerism, but I was surprised when it suggested to me later that the golden calf is an agent of grace: the little calf wears her gold uncomfortably; she is scalded by idolatry, yet she kneels humbly at the scene. Why would Christ call our idolatry to the manger rather than the cross? How does the incarnation transform the graven image? I’m uncertain, but the personal meaning was clear: don’t confuse the call with the caller, or the gift with the giver. The second commandment jerked me back to the first commandment. The yearning to make meaningful art is not wrong, but it can override the yearning for God.

Fighting Fire with Fire [see back cover] was mainly inspired by my dog, who isn’t embarrassed by anything, and by my kids, who are. My research on fire hydrants involved driving around the neighborhood with the kids taking snapshots out the window whenever I hollered, “Get that one!” It was fun until we neared a friend’s house. Instantly both kids hit the floor. Embarrassment is one of the sacrifices required of people who make up an artist’s support system. Creativity costs; that’s the perennial tension of art. We are forever trying to balance the beloveds.

The story that accompanies Fighting Fire with Fire begins with a variation on the call of Moses: “If you saw a burning bush, would you call 911?” The idea for a life-sized porcelain hydrant arose when I noticed the cruciform shape of the ones in my neighborhood, and the way the hydrants are fluted like classical Greek columns. These visual hints brought up Paul’s great call to inclusivity: “For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:13). On one side of my fire hydrant is the resurrected Jew and on the other the Greek god of fire.

I constructed the fire hydrant under the watchful eyes of guests at Laity Lodge in the Texas Hill Country, the retreat center where I consult. Like any workplace, it requires a balancing of beloveds—in this case the desire to offer guests a rich art experience without coercing art into being something it is not. Aesthetic quality and content—both in art workshops and exhibition planning—has to be balanced with the retreat mission. And then doctrinal boundaries also shape our ministry, just as surely as hands shape clay. Of course, part of art’s job is to test beloved boundaries. In some settings, this can only be achieved by remaining open to the Spirit. Making the fire hydrant at the Lodge showed me that. I had not intended to work in a fishbowl; usually art-making is a private experience and I treasure the solitude. But retreat guests kept edging up to my worktable and asking skeptical questions. Some told corny jokes; others gave me new insight. They delighted in figuring out metaphors of fire and water in scripture. Someone pointed out that the very presence of a fire hydrant is evidence of a system of underground connections. What connects the body of Christ? How is the living water accessed? A volunteer fireman explained to the group that there is a valve on every hydrant can only be opened with a special wrench.

Glazing the fireplug brought out other stories of inclusivity. A dear mentor, Betty Sue Flowers, who is a poet and mythology expert, clued me in to Hephaestus, the beneficent god of fire. A Jewish friend mused, “I guess we are all vessels waiting to be filled.” The New York Times ran a wonderful story about the annual baptism by fire hose in Harlem, an event I would have sneered at had it not been for the poignant photographs of Pentecostals opening themselves up to the blessing of falling water. Opening oneself to others, especially the marginalized, does something beyond the rules: it opens the heart to God.

Like the fire hydrant, many of my pieces present abrupt religious images but are not about overt evangelism. Realism does get misused for proselytizing, leaving abstraction and minimalism as the preferred vehicles of Christian mysticism. I love such art, but in my own work am driven to see if divine paradox can be mediated through quotidian things. What happens when mystery gets “in your face”? The triptych form of a make-up mirror asks that question.

Imago Dei [see Plate 10], an icon of Christ on a porcelain vanity, holds a mirror to our culture’s portrayal of Christianity in order to reflect a deeper mystery. When I was trying to find the right image to paint on this piece, I was slamming around in the kitchen, cooking a late dinner and berating myself for being a lousy wife, mom, et cetera. A sixth-century icon flashed in my head.

“How long are you going to keep on punishing me?” he asked.

My self-flagellation hurt him?

The Jesus in this icon is tender and humane, all-knowing and transcendent—all these qualities are in his eyes. Independently, two little girls have looked at this piece and asked, “Does this mean that when you look in the mirror you see God?” The concept of “god within” (not exclusive to Christianity, thankfully) is a beautiful and healing one.

In a world of war, terrorism, and poverty, where the quantity of suffering overwhelms the supply of human compassion, the question “Why art?” becomes every artist’s wrestling partner. When we rely solely on our own strength, that question will defeat us. If we feel a divine summons to create, our main job is to be faithful to that call, not to pick the call apart. It is Jeremiah’s Field, the leap of faith, the investment rooted in hope, that finally answers the question. Being faithful in the face of tough questions is like Jesus just standing there silently after Pilate asks him who he is.

Art-making is similar to working with the poor in that we will burn out if we cannot let go of a precisely desired outcome. For a year and a half, I directed a small program of art-making for homeless people. It didn’t take long to understand the difference between charity and justice, or to find deep joy. But doing so required giving up the desire for good or quantifiable results and learning that the value is simply in the hospitality. Closer to home, the “Why art?” question became, “Why aren’t you volunteering more at your kids’ school?” God knows the school needed help, espousing Christianity as it did but lacking the basic apparatus for forgiveness. Could art teach the administration something about reconciliation, about seeing life as a gift rather than a set of hurdles? I made The Gift to the Elder Son, based on the parable of the prodigal son [see Plates 11 and 12]. This piece addresses the moment when the father replies to his elder son’s hard-nosed resentment: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours” (Luke 15: 31). His porcelain present is gift-wrapped in Rembrandt’s marvelous rendition of the homecoming. The gift is partially unwrapped, as if perhaps the elder brother had peeked inside and was afraid of receiving the gift, for inside the box is a globe: the world.

In difficult times like these, there is talk about the prophetic role of art. The title “prophet” can seem too highfalutin for a simple artist. Sane people do not hand out business cards reading “Prophet: By Appointment Only.” However, I’m learning that we are all called, unqualified as we are, to prophetic proclamation. This requires a megadose of imagination. Criticizing the existing order, the corruption and the apathy, is the easy part, but the flip side of prophecy extracts hope from the mess. As Walter Brueggemann says, prophecy also energizes.

Go ask Isaiah. Joy is part of justice. Why, then, is joy the hardest thing to depict in art? The idealist in me says: Keep trying. Art does have a role in making all things new. Art can effect transformation, hopefully in others besides the artist. And social transformation begins with a personal confrontation or revelation.

When I honestly explore what compels me to probe the personal, “the holy in the common,” the everyday stuff of life, I have to admit that I’m not doing this for lofty purposes. Housework and simplicity alone aren’t really romantic or transfiguring. The relentless daily grind easily plunges me into acedia, or sloth, that sluggish state of inertia that medieval mystics compare to the mirage in the desert that hypnotizes us into giving up. What about the mirage on the freeway while doing errands? I think God lets me make art because it prevents me from being crazy. But making art goes beyond self-therapy for typical middle-class anxieties. Art connects my particular tension with universal yearning.

Being open to universal yearning is being open to the transformation of the world. But big ideas sometimes taint this desire. Yes, I want my domestically inspired sculptures to furnish an actual house as a big installation piece. And there needs to be a nice catalogue to accompany that. I’d love to take my masterpiece-inspired pieces on a museum pilgrimage to meet their muses. What if my work contributed to reconciliation efforts between Christian liberals and conservatives (or between apples and oranges)? Or, now that the American anomie has been shattered, could my art be a witness to divine hope by simply upholding beauty and goodness? Like Chlora and Walter Mitty, I dream on, hoping that if I met with such success I’d at least have the decency to be humble, to declare, Soli Deo Gloria. Ultimately, when all the good intentions burn away, I’m left with a mysterious presence that can’t be quantified, and that presence is enough.

Back in the checkout line, with a basket full of cans, I wonder how many of these canneries exploit their workers. I regret that I haven’t made time to be a more socially responsible consumer. But I have made time to listen to my work. The porcelain Amos basket has fired badly. Its bottom cracked apart, so I was forced to come up with a new element to hold it all together: a pair of fruit picker’s work gloves nestled inside, palms up, as if receiving the Eucharist. As Bill Moyers might say, it is being “helped by hidden hands.” I scan the headlines over the counter. Trivialities share space with atrocities. I place my yearning on the conveyor belt and look to the Prophets for advice. I find old Moses on a mountain, staring off into the distance, squinting toward the promise. Was he wishing for binoculars?

Visit Ginger Henry Geyer as Image Artist of the Month for March '03

Issue #33 • Winter '01-'02