Artistic Perception

We’ve been looking at the moments when God uses analogy or parables to trigger our creativity, but we’re going to look now at another creative skill:  perception.

One thing that sets artists apart from others is their perception.  We see or hear things others miss.  While most artists may tend to do this by nature, the best artists train themselves to perceive.  And if you are a Christian artist, God will help you with this training if you will ask.

I was a young man in Bible school, training for ministry. As the teachers walked us through the Bible, we sometimes ran into scriptures that talk about prophetic song.  “We don’t hear much prophetic song,” the teachers would say with a faraway look in their eyes.  “But evidently it was happening in the days of the kings.”

So I began to pray, asking God to teach me about it. His first lesson was a lesson that awakened my perception.  All nature is praising Me, I sensed Him saying.  Listen to the rhythms of the trees rustling when the wind blows.  Listen to the songs of the birds.  Listen to the sounds of the waters rippling over the rocks.

I tuned my guitar in an open tuning (DADDAD) and took it into the woods.  I began to hear rhythms I had never heard in the music of man – it was hard to play them on guitar, especially with the 1-2-3-4 patterns I had learned.  And when I listened to water running over the rocks, I learned to pick out the various melodies, and how they fit together.

I’ve written more about this learning process in my book, Prophetic Song: Gateway To Glory.  But the specifics of my process may not be the main thing God wants to teach you. Here’s another version of a hearing lesson, one that is more likely to fit God’s purpose for your life.

I sat in a prophetic song training session at Morningstar in Ft. Mill, South Carolina.  They announced that a variety of singers and musicians would lead worship.  They assigned the students to keep a notebook of what they heard that they especially liked or disliked.  They made it clear that the point of the lesson was not to criticize or find fault.  Instead, “As you identify the sounds that do and that don’t speak to you, you’ll identify the sounds that resonate with your heart.  And these are the sounds you need to develop…”

If you are a musician, this is a good exercise.

I’ve talked about music, but lessons in perceptions affect all the arts.  I have meager talents in graphic arts – especially since I have a touch of red-green color blindness – but I often need to lay out a flyer, a booklet, or a CD cover.  God has sometimes led me to go through a magazine and pay attention to the graphics that grab me, and to identify the principles that make them work.

It was the same thing with web design. I had Adobe Creative Suite 2 with GoLive, but where should I begin?  I prayed.  Go online and run a search for “free web templates.” I did, and to me, the ones at www.elated.com stood head and shoulders above the rest.  I didn’t use their templates; I wasn’t sure I knew enough about web design to make them work.  But their designs gave me ideas I used on my own page.

We have a God who will teach us to see, to hear, to perceive.  Isaiah 50:4 says the Lord will awaken our ear to hear His voice.  If we have placed our artistic gifts on the altar and invited God to use them, He will awaken our eyes and ears to see what He perceives so we can communicate His heart and not just our own.

Ask and you will receive.  Seek and you will find.  Knock and it will be opened to you.

Stan Smith  ::  © 2009, GospelSmith  ::  www.GospelSmith.com