Most designers and product people have known for a long time that a great user experience is important for long term success. But when business people start talking design it’s a good indicator that the playing field has changed.

Read: Is UX the key to a Long-Lasting Business (HT: Rob Sentz)

Perhaps the cross so subverts beauty that it leaves us all suspicious modernists and expressionists who regard beauty as a superficial source of cheap pleasure. Perhaps the cross encourages a prophetic aesthetic where art shocks us from our complacency and complicity in the dehumanizing processes of modern civilization. Perhaps Francis Bacon, with his loud paintings of meat, is the paradigmatic painter after Calvary. In my judgment, this particular modernist path is closed for Christian aesthetics. John does not say that the cross evacuates the world of glory and fills it with ugliness. He says that the cross reveals a previously unimagined depth of glory.

Read all of Beauty on a Friday Afternoon.

Lenses used:
Canon 50mm 1.8
Tokina 11-16mm 2.8
Tamron 70-300mm 5.6

Locations:
Denver International Airport
Arches National Park
Canyonland National Park
Zion National Park
Bryce National Park
Music is “Love My Way” by William Orbit.

Let me suggest a few ideas:

1. Don’t Keep Your Craft to Yourself.

Become the local guru for your craft. Share it with others and let them practice and make mistakes and get better. Mentorships can be some of the most powerful ways to improve creative community in a smaller town.

2. Happily Make Mistakes.

The more quickly a community can make mistakes, the more quickly they can learn from them. The point is not to only make mistakes or only avoid them. Just work hard and learn from the inevitable mistakes that come with that.

3. Sell the Fruit.

Yes, you can make money off of your craft. Create some artifacts and sell them. Share your skills and craft with others so they can create artifacts too. Make some money and then invest that money in materials, in classes, and in the infrastructure to repeat these steps more effectively.

How can you encourage talent growth in your city or town?

The Wright Brothers transferred their background as bicycle manufacturers to the invention of the airplane; their first flying craft was, in many respects, just a bicycle with wings. Johannes Gutenberg transformed his knowledge of wine presses into a printing machine capable of mass-producing words. Or look at Google: Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with their famous search algorithm by applying the ranking method used for academic articles (more citations equals more influence) to the sprawl of the Internet.

How can people get better at making these kinds of connections? Mr. Jobs argued that the best inventors seek out “diverse experiences,” collecting lots of dots that they later link together. Instead of developing a narrow specialization, they study, say, calligraphy (as Mr. Jobs famously did) or hang out with friends in different fields. Because they don’t know where the answer will come from, they are willing to look for the answer everywhere.

Read the Full Article: How to Be Creative

But what is the true solution to this? How does the Gospel apply to art? Does it apply? I’d like to suggest a few ways that it can indeed be applied to art.

1. Start Practicing

G.K. Chesterton popularly said, “Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Badly”. Just like the Christian life, we don’t grow to maturity overnight. It takes years, a lifetime even. It’s a constant battle. We must die to self and crucify the sinful areas of our life constantly. This is not much different from any area that we seek to develop skill in. We practice, review and critique, often fail, learn from it, and repeat. Eventually we might wind up with something worth presenting to the world. The bottom line is, excellence takes work. Good art takes work. There’s no quick fix or easy route to improving art other than studying it and then practicing it for a while. Get started now.

2. Study historic Christian art.

Art has roots. Christians have a wealth of wisdom to glean from by studying art and the history surrounding it. One of the greatest ways today’s Christians can begin to build a legacy of healthy and robust Christian art is to study our ancestors works and legacy in art. Learn more about Bach, Michelangelo, the Dutch Landscape Painters, and many others.

3. Learn to Read Art

Every painting, song, or photograph tells a story. Words aren’t the only way to tell a story. Learn how tension and resolution helps tell a story. Photojournalism is a great place to get practice at this. What is the photographer trying to evoke or demonstrate with their picture?

There is more that can be said, but these three steps are a great start towards producing real Christian art.

Further Reading:

• Wordsmithyby Douglas Wilson
• Sense of An Endingby Jeremy Begbie (Video)
• Mystery & Manners by Flannery O’Connor