Christian Artists and Culture
“My fascination with the relationship between music and art began when I realized the dynamic was a kind of feedback loop. Both were reflecting one another and impacting the world around me.”
During the 60’s and 70’s who didn’t buy a poster of their favorite album cover, pin it on their wall, and stare at its wonder for hours? Album cover art itself became a collectible idea and cultural icon.
As a kid in a suburban landscape, my life went into technicolor in 1971 when I saw the YES Fragile album cover by Roger Dean.
This epic cover depicts a child’s dream of living on a planet that is breaking up and the space ark which is pulling pieces of the broken planet on its way to a new world.
Dean’s art conveys hope, springing eternal, amid great tragedy. Guitarist Steve Howe has said that Fragile reflected the then-current state of the band as they were each going through tough times and changes. The times they were a-changin’. In a post-modern world, people were casting off the religion and traditions of their predecessors in search of new moorings and new belief systems. In the midst of all their questioning, the collective psyche was burning and looking for hope and peace.
Jethro Tull’s Aqualung cover, also in 1971, depicts a homeless man, seen by some as commentary on whom the burden of homelessness belongs. The album questions the reality of God. On the back cover, we read: “In the beginning Man created God, and in the image of Man created he him.” From the song, My God:
People, what have you done?
Locked Him in His golden cage, golden cage
Made Him bend to your religion
Him—resurrected from the grave, from the grave
He is the god of nothing
If that's all that you can see
You are the god of everything
He's inside you and me
For the young Christian artist, to know God’s word and to convey the powerful truths found there is of paramount importance and is our calling, in our music and our art. As image bearers of the Creator God, we have imagination because He has given us this gift. As Francis Schaeffer said:
“The Christian is the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars.”
“What a Christian portrays in his art is the totality of life. Art is not to be a vehicle for self-conscious evangelism. Christians ought not to be threatened by fantasy and imagination. The Christian is the really free man. He is free to have imagination.”
“The Christian should be the man with the flaming imagination and the beauty of creation.”
Christians know The Way, The Truth, and The Life and, as artists, it’s our privilege and responsibility to offer truth to a dead and dying world.