The Yellow Ochre Newsletter
A weekly curation of encouragement and practical wisdom to turn your art from a hobby into a purposeful blessing for your community and culture.
How to Create Mic-Drop Culture
One way to get a “mic drop” culture is from “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” slogans.
One Reason You Might Not See Artists In Churches
One reason the church might not feel welcoming to many artists is this…
There appears to be a sacred Spotify playlist.
And only the leaders have access to it's curation.
Barabas Days
We live in Barabas days.
What are Barabas days? They are the times when we call good ‘evil’ and evil ‘good.’
The cure is the same as 2,000 years ago: a God who empties himself and His followers who do the same.
8 Concepts of Art
Calvin Seerveld:
One misreads the knowledge won artistically if one thinks the painting or sculpture is simply a carbon copy of what is visible.
When the norm of allusively is transgressed the artwork becomes a tract.
Fundamentally art is…like a flower, like a jewel or an imaginative tear or a smile you giveaway to your neighbor, for Christ’s sake.
Walter Brueggemann
This is why poetry is so important; because the poetry just keeps opening and opening and opening whereas the doctrinal practice of the church is always to close and close and close until you’re left with nothing that has transformative power.
C.S. Lewis:
This is one of the functions of art: To present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude.
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past— are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
Jean-Jacques von Allmen:
Art is “basically the longing of things for liturgical self-expression, to find their justification in the praise for which they were created.”
Makoto Fujimara:
A grieving mother drove over 11 hrs to see my exhibit at Berry College Martha Berry Museum. She stood in front of my paintings and wept for a young son she lost only a week back. Art is a portal into the New, and I am grateful and humbled by these moments.
Merry Christmas Ya Filthy Animal!
Check it out, its old man Marley!, Matt Taylor Digital Painting 2022
Elsa, the Grinch
Hear me out…the Grinch is Elsa generations later.
The town, Arendelle, has died off. She’s still all alone in her mountain castle only to be transformed up into the Grinch.
Her selfishness kept her alive while the whole town’s generations came and went losing their town narrative in the process.
From Eustace to Useful
My kids have been listening through C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. We’ve refrained from watching the Narnia movies until they’re imaginations have marinated from the books.
We noticed the character, Eustace, sounds a lot like the word useless. And his actions display such things.
We even made a fun game out of his character. “Everyone take your Eustace glasses off and put on your useful ones.”
Eustace might be one of my favorite Narnia characters due to his transformation.