Have you experienced an imaginative creative process that is responsive and loving?

Church of the Brethren, Kremlin, MT by Jim Westphalen.
Used with the explicit and generous permission of Jim Westphalen.

Isn’t this a stunning photograph? For crying out love! It stopped me in my tracks when I first saw it full size in the home of friends.

Follow along as I imagine the artist’s process: There is an awareness and responsiveness that he must practice. For the series of photographs that this church is a part of, certain places with deteriorating physical structures called out to him. He imaginatively “saw” those places and structures. I might suggest he saw aspects of their lives, their history, something of their spirits, souls, or hearts, or those of the people who inhabited them. Simultaneously, creatively, he began to attune himself to what they touched in him so that he then used his art to try to capture and evoke something of those spirits for and in others. There then is an interaction–or, over time, a relationship that develops–among the soul of the place, his own heart, and how some viewers see and are touched.

No matter how differently Jim Westphalen would describe his own process from what I just imagined with you, I would bet anything that he is grateful for the whole of the experience of his process, for the artist’s part of his way of life. I don’t know if he would describe the process he engages in as loving. I would. Again, I would go so far as to call it prayer, in this case not so much a crying out for help, but a loving creative grateful responsiveness to Love, the heart of what calls to him in the world and life.

And I am caught up in his art or prayer and his expression of love.  I cannot help but gaze longer at the photo and be carried more deeply into its spirit that holds so much: beauty in the midst of deterioration; the fulness of life in the midst of emptiness; creative past and vanishing future; the consoling presence and accompaniment of nature; love in the midst of exile, abandonment, and suffering; the ongoingness of life even with death; and gratefulness …for the life that was; the beauty that is; the eye, creative imagination, and skill of the artist; and the artist’s generosity in sharing it all. How can we not be grateful for the artist who shares such powerful spirit?

Isn’t this how all of us who love and are spiritually oriented try to engage our world? We begin by seeing, being called through awareness, then trying to open and attune ourselves imaginatively to what moves us, creatively responding, and hopefully then engaging in some kind of loving ongoing relationship.  

Have you experienced an imaginative creative process that is responsive and loving?

How do you respond to Jim Westphalen’s “Church of the Brethren”?

Experience more of Jim Westphalen’s art and learn more about him at https://jimwestphalenfineart.com/.