Good Friday: Sermons in Words and Pictures

This is the audio from a talk I gave on Good Friday Morning at AltadenaBaptist.org for a Community Prayer Breakfast with the Joint Meeting of area Kiwanis clubs. They were very receptive and gracious to hear a talk that even began to make me nervous.

This is a live drawing I did as part of the Good Friday Service at ABC. I draw on watercolor paper with a camera feeding a projector so those present can watch. I spoke a lot about the how in Jesus, God looks back at us, through any masks we try to put on others to turn them into monsters or scapegoats. When I was finished with this rendering of Jesus on the cross, staring back, I left it up for the rest of the service. But the longer I looked at it, the more uncomfortable I was and the harder it was to meet his stare.

Wolverine Weeps

Stanley Hauerwas at Fuller - Mental Illness: My Story

Update: Complete, uncut videos of all three of Dr. Hauerwas' talks (my notes are from the first). Don't miss out.

Face in Books

I found some books for free the library was giving away. They had nice paper so I didn't want to see them go to waste.  They were a series of periodicals on the discipline of "Spiritism."  At the turn of the century what is now seen as fringe science was still being studied and was on the same edges with psychology such that even a Christian School of Psychology might want them in its library's collection.

No more.  The current boundaries of the possible have little room for spirits.  Charon makes an appearance because I was reading Dante's Inferno for  Dr. James Bradley at the time I drew these.  The more I read that book the harder I find it to take him seriously.  It continues to fascinate me how natural an expression that work is of an attempt to reconcile a pre-christian "pagan" worldview with with the Christian present.  It fascinates me all the more because I think this process of reconciliation and the blending of narratives and ascribing new meaning to old patterns is at the heart of how we change our minds and migrate from one life-world to another.

iPhone Stylus + Sketchbook App

I discovered this great video today on how to make a simple iPhone/iPad stylus from Make Magazine. Being an art nerd I have been wanting to make one of these for a while in order to be able to actually draw using some of the great apps available (and to see how useful it would be to use the iPad as a drawing surface).

My stylus came out looking something like his and works great. I've been using it with AutoDesk's Sketchbook Mobile app which is wonderful. Its brushes simulate touch-sensitive operation and as you can see below, its line tracking gives you very natural curves and human lines. I'm going to have fun with this.

Charles Finney

Live Sketching as Meditative Worship: Good Friday

Good Friday Sketch from Matt Lumpkin on Vimeo.

Glenn Molina and Altadena Baptist Church continue to invite me to experiment with live sketching as a practice of meditative worship. Our first venture into this was at Advent. It was particularly significant for me to be able to take part in this Good Friday service since it was last year's Good Friday service that woke me up to the power of imagery as an aid to reflective worship.

The service was simple but powerful. It was organized around five readings from Matthew's narrative of the crucifixion which were each accompanied by brief reflections from our pastors, selections from J.S. Bach's "Matthew Passion" and individual sketches I did in response to last year's service. Finally, I drew the piece above, live, projected on the wall for all to see while Bach's music seeped into our consciousness.

What I enjoy most about this is how it shifts the emphasis from product to process. The process of sketching is paradoxically both fast and slow. It is fast in that one is trying to apprehend and portray the whole form in its most basic and central elements. It is slow in that the sketching (or hopefully in watching a sketch) only one line can be drawn at a time. The necessary slowness of the process means that you cannot look away, as we are tempted to do, especially from the crucifixion.

Sketching with a 4 Year Old

My four year old loves to draw and probably draws more than I do. Our neighbor once gave her a pad of old, yellow forms from work and it's her favorite medium. I drew these with her markers. The sketch on the far right vaguely resembles her. I find it a distinct challenge to draw people in my family. I think I know their faces so well that I always see the flaws that in sketches of others I would overlook.

Justo Gonzalez at Fuller Seminary

Justo Gonzalez spoke at Fuller's Chapel today. He articulated the way the process of translation across the boundaries of language and culture have been a part of the Christian story from the very beginning (Pentecost). This means that no one language or culture has a corner on the gospel message and all of us know it most fully when we are engaged in conversations across those boundaries. This notion is central to my understanding of the Christian faith and it was a pleasure to hear it stated so well.

I'm well past the honey-moon period with my studies at Fuller but I can still say with honesty that the seminary understands this fact and is further along the slow journey moving towards reflecting this reality than any other school I know of.

If you are interested in reading some of Justo Gonzalez' profound and profoundly accesible prose but are intimidated by his massive works of Church history, let me recommend the slim volume, Santa Biblia: the Bible Through Hispanic Eyes, which focuses on the issue of translation and looks within the Bible itself for guidance on how this process unfolds.

Speed Sketching Musicians

Speed sketching is about catching the movement impact or emotion of a subject in as quick a time as possible and often with as few gestures as possible.  Whenever I hear musicians performing it always makes me feel like playing along with them.  Lately I've started trying to draw them while playing.  Normal people are hard enough to draw but musicians are often in constant motion.  

Here are a couple of sketches I felt got close to expressing some of the experience of seeing them live.

Paintings for a Wedding

Dave and Tera are getting married tomorrow. They asked some of their friends who do art to paint some paintings of places they've visited to serve as place cards for the reception. I had fun picking a couple of places in Singapore I've actually visited. Once the wedding is over they will collect all twenty-something paintings and frame them as one crowd-sourced piece of art.

Bonus points for people who know the names of these buildings

Evinrude St. Sebastian III

Last Summer my friend and colleague, Simon, was out of the office for a week or so and I decided to draw him a serial comic, spending a 5 minute break each day to draw a panel or two.

Protector

Last Summer when I was taking time off from classes to rest up for the birth of the new baby, I went on a science fiction binge. One of the most fun books I read was Larry Niven's "Protector." It's about a man who gets exposesd to a catalytic enzyme that triggers a sort of metamorphasis transforming his body and super-charging his mind. This how I imagined him.

Recent Sketches

Winter Quarter Schedule

Advent Sketches

Haiku Hymn
by Tim Eby-McKenzie

Ears you need to hear
The Word softly crashes in
Silent song of joy

Kings and despots plot
The Word in timely splendor
Humbly awaits birth

Naked helpless babe
Swaddled nursed attached secure
In poverty rests

Absurd scandal's eve
Unrecognized miracle
Light not overcome

Word of God unveiled
Blind eyes look to be opened
The world knew him not

Joy set before him
Rescuer of wretched souls
Wades into the mire

Ignorance and want
Reckless, sinful - all condemned
Violent guilt and shame

Seated in darkness
Endless waiting for the light
Lame, blind, deaf, sick, dumb

Healing in His wings
Captive's freedom, sinner's joy
Come, Lord Jesus, Come!

This is a collection of sketches I did last Sunday as part of an Advent service at Altadena Baptist Church. I drew them in real time as a series of nine haiku s reflecting on Advent themes were read by their author, Tim Eby-McKenzie. The sketches were in response to the haiku's which you can read below, and a video feed of the drawing process was running so the whole congregation could watch the drawings unfold. As Tim read and I drew, our worship pastor, Glenn Molina improvised on piano in response.

The most significant part of the experience for me was the immediate connection the images evoked. Each different image (each completed in under a minute) seemed to connect with different viewers. I love the Advent idea of clarity emerging from uncertainty, and of the process of waiting, watching and a pattern starting to unfold.

I have been sketching in church for some time now but it wasn't until last Good Friday that I began to focus my drawing as a reflective and meditative, even worshipful exercise in the context of the congregation. It is a pleasure and a privilege to serve in a church where the richness of the gifts that God has given us can be celebrated and brought into service of the broader congregation.

More Faces: drawing from life vs. from photos

I had a great time at a little open mic concert hosted by Fuller's Coffee by the Books. The two performers (Dan Long & Kyle Megginson) didn't seem to mind my sketching and my daughter's interpretive dancing.

Drawing from live moving, singing, performing people is an altogether different experience than working from photos. It feels much more alive and collaborative. I move faster and make bolder choices because I have to. At times, especially when drawing musicians, I almost feel like I'm playing along. It nearly scratches the itch I always feel at concerts to pick up an instrument and join in. And yet the outcome is almost always sloppier. The eyes or the the jaw or the lips don't come out quite right and I can't shake the feeling that it's harder for the sketches to stand on their own if the viewer wasn't there and doesn't have their own memories to complement them. My "analog facebook" project has been an exercise in drawing exclusively from photos, often of friends I haven't seen in person for a while. Sometimes I find a great portrait that looks fun to draw. Other times I composite several photos into something that approximates my memory of the person. I usually have more time and the ability to do a pencil sketch first before working in the ink. Despite the overall greater detail and precision, I still almost always find a fatal flaw that just isn't quite right. The reason I like drawing live so much is that I cut myself more slack about the precision and the mistakes and focus on capturing something of the feeling of being there.

Is California On Fire?

Like the rest of LA, I have been transfixed by the station fire as it crawled visibly across the mountains above my house. It was eeriest at night when the flames filled the the smoke with an orange glow. In the daytime, I kept being reminded me of the Hebrews wandering in the desert with a pillar of fire at night and a pillar of cloud by day.




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http://www.iscaliforniaonfire.com

Analog Facebook Returns

Same rules apply:
1. If you want me to draw you a profile pic it would be my pleasure.
2. Message (and friend if you've not already) me on facebook.
3. I'll snoop through the pictures of you on facebook and find a few I can use to draw you.
4. I'm drawing in order of request (and I'm nearly done with the first batch! Matt Cleveland and Justin Fung, you're next).

Check my album on facebook for the individual images. Don't forget you can use them for other sites that require a profile pic and if you need a higher resolution image, just let me know.

ps. Appologies to Jonathan. All I can say is I was trying out a different kind of paper. It didn't work.

South Pas Farmer's Market

One of the many fun things a Summer at Fuller Seminary without classes has afforded has been excursions to fun things like the farmer's market. I rode the Metro fam and all. While the wife waited in line for dinner the kid and I watched and sketched folks around us.