Life Is A Canvas: Create Something Beautiful

My daughter dipped her brush into her watercolors. I’m not sure what she was more excited about—making a colorful mess on the floor or forming the landscape with stick figures on her paper. She was taking her time with the space provided on the page.

Art uses a variety of materials. But all artistic beauty begins with two fundamental building blocks: space and time. The artist seeks to display beauty, goodness, and truth in a specific place or moment. Art is designed to be an act of worship. It receives what God has given and forms it into something beautiful for his glory. But this task isn’t just given to the artist.

God created space and time so we might know him and make him known. God gives each person a particular time and space to create something beautiful with his or her life.

Building a Place

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. He formed the physical architecture of creation. God’s creation was a beautiful house, both useful and beautiful.

Art is designed to be an act of worship. It receives what God has given and forms it into something beautiful for his glory.

God cultivated a garden. Eden means delight. Delight was the garden’s name and delight its promise. God planted a garden of delight.

It was indeed delightful. The lush green of the foliage was peppered with vibrant colors of flowers and fruits. It was a garden crowded with all varieties of fragrances, from the invigoration of mint and dill to the soothing effect of lilac and vanilla. The fruit was plentiful and nearly bursting with the promise of enchanting pleasure.

God rooted man in that garden.

Setting a Time

But it wasn’t only a place God created. In the beginning, God also created time, a temporal architecture. God fills time with a drama. Time was and is a forum to make his glory known in the drama of salvation.

God used the seven days in Genesis 1 as the scaffolding on which he built creation. This scaffolding wasn’t a temporary structure but part of the frame itself. Time was built into the very fabric of the universe. It’s interwoven with space to form created reality.

Time was a creation of the timeless One.

It’s a mystery that the infinite God enters time and is present to each moment. All created beings—whether angels, humans, or animals, or plants—are bound by time. But not God. He is utterly free from the constraints of time in the free vastness of eternity. Our time-bound brains can’t fathom this.

Yet he enters our times (yours and mine) in closeness and intimacy. God gives the gift of time to us as a context to know him and walk in communion with him. For our times to be “in [his] hand” means that he holds our every moment and is present with us (Ps. 31:15). He keeps watch over us as we move through time (121:8) and is near even in our most vulnerable moments of sleep (4:8).

Art of Shaping Space and Time

God formed humanity as creatures who live and move within space and time. He also gave us the ability to shape space and time into something beautiful. The call to work and keep the garden was, in part, a call to creativity—a call to cultivate beauty. God created the world to be rife with forms, forums, raw materials, and “canvases” for this calling.

When Michelangelo sculpted David (1504), he used one massive block of Carrara marble, quarried out of the Apuan Alps in Italy.

Albrecht Dürer had his woodcuts shaped from pear trees. The Four Horsemen (1498) transformed a block of wood into a picture of the apocalypse.

Van Gogh mixed his oil paints to portray the night sky. He was particular about his colors and revolutionized painting’s color scheme.

Time was a creation of the timeless One.

A painting rests in space. It may seek to frame a specific moment in time, mundane (like Edgar Degas’s paintings of ironing clothes) or charged with significance (like Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Annunciation). Other art forms use time and tempo as the medium itself. Music unfolds in time. Time is the canvas of music. The notes, chords, melodies, rhythms, and sung words saturate the moment with the sound of beauty.

Dance and drama employ both space and time in the creative process. Dance flows to music’s time. The drama dynamically moves on the space of a stage through time. Ballet dancers choreograph their movements to music.

Filmmakers edit together snapshots of time in a manner Andrey Tarkovsky describes as “sculpting in time.”

Writers shape from experience, imagination, pen, and paper.

Human creativity in the arts is a reminder that we were created to make something beautiful.

Rooted in Space and Time for Worship

It wasn’t just Adam and Eve who received the gifts of space and time. God plants each of us in a particular moment and setting as well. He stretches the canvas of life for us, and we’re to make something beautiful, by his grace. In this way, every person is an artist.

It’s as if God gifts days and years and says, “Here is your time. Make something beautiful for my glory.” Shakespeare, who knew a thing or two about drama, recognized that the play or theater is simply a picture of how individuals live their lives:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts.

We’re called to make something beautiful out of instruments and sound waves, watercolors, marble, wood, pen and paper, and other materials. But more than those things, we’re given a life to live that proclaims the beauty, goodness, and truth of our Creator and Redeemer. Hans Urs von Balthasar got it right when he said the Christian life that reflects Christ is the most beautiful thing in creation.

Life comes with the gifts of time and space. Are we forming and being formed into something beautiful?