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From my youngest years through high school, art was what I wanted to do; it was
what I felt drawn to. Whether drawing or painting, I envisioned myself as an
artist, spending even then an enormous amount of time at it. Then came the hard
realities of "what are you REALLY going to do" in the transition from high school
to college, and the art fell by the wayside. But it didn't really. To this day (and
maybe into some possible retirement) I am drawn to it. I am not trained in any
way, but even now as an aging adult I read and study a lot about it. And at various
periods in my life I have returned to it with something resembling a passion. It is
for me a form of expression, an expression of my faith, actually, that I still turn to.

In a college theology/philosophy course, as I have indicated in my writing about
preaching, I got hooked on reading Paul Tillich. For me, Tillich grappled with the
world and what it might mean to be a Christian in it. I devoured (and still read)
Dynamics of Faith, The Courage To Be, and my favorite old Tillich book,
Theology of Culture. In that latter book, Tillich has a short essay on art that made
a deep impression on me. It is titled, oddly, "Protestantism and Artistic Style." It
was that essay, in fact, that got me hooked on abstraction, on abstract art-what
Tillich called "expressive art," as opposed to realism or representational art, as
opposed to "pictures of things." So my work, mostly a combination of woodblock
printing (I love the play with wood and wood grain and manipulation of ink or
paint atop the printing) is largely abstract. It is fair to say that I will continue to
experiment with my abstract art in some way until I die.

A few notes about Tillich and art as they deeply affected me years ago, and still
do. Tillich argued that the expressions of religion, of the depth of sin and despair
as well as the glories of "faith," his "ultimate concern," could not be adequately
expressed visually with pictures of "things," whether scenes, people, or even
icons. Realistic pictures could only "indirectly represent the ultimate," as he put
it, while "the expressive [spontaneous, unplanned, abstract] represents it
directly."

He wrote: "The reason for this situation is easy to find. The expressive element
in a style implies a radical transformation of the ordinarily encountered reality by
using elements of it in a way which does not exist in the ordinarily encountered
reality. Expression disrupts the naturally given appearance of things. Certainly,
they are united in the artistic form, but not in a way which the imitating or the
idealistic or even the realistic element would demand. On the other hand, that
which is expressed is not the subjectivity of the artist in the sense of the
subjective element which is predominant in Impressionism and Romanticism.
That which is expressed is the 'dimension of depth' in the encountered reality,
the ground and abyss in which everything is rooted."

Tillich adds: "Therefore, the rediscovery of the expressive element in art since
about 1900 is a decisive event for the relation of religion and the visual arts. It has
made religious art again possible." In short, "The predominance of the
expressive style in contemporary art is a chance for the rebirth of religious art."

That is the viewpoint, at any rate, behind the kind of "religious" art that I
perceive myself working at from time to time, and that is shared, on a small scale,
in what follows here.

--Joseph Webb