In the past, artists lived comfortably in a world which they knew was created and sustained by a benevolent, creative, and almighty God. They saw evidence of His divine imagination everywhere and couldn’t help but try and capture it in paint, song, and in the written word. Sadly the “acidity of modernism” burned off the spiritual realm and left nothing to replace it but charred neuro-chemicals. Maybe the artistic angst we see so frequently played out on our cultural stage is related to the inability of the artist to create on a spiritless worldview canvas. They are internally frustrated by a modern world that tells them that they can’t use the pastels of spirituality, but only the black and white of scientific materialism. They see explosions of Technicolor in their brains but are then handed a palette that contains only gray. Deep down the artist recognizes that the universal divine sense that percolates in their soul cannot be expressed with culturally conditioned palettes. Despondent they end up painting soup cans.

The artist was always free to hang his or her works in God’s art gallery but now find His studio boarded up with an eviction notice nailed to the door. Without a venue to display their work, they are forced to engage in the unpleasant business of building their own worldview gallery, instead of attending to their creative first love. The artist must now wear the cap of a philosopher and try to justify his or her ability to create art in the first place. The artist is no longer free to just embellish the beautiful world around them, but now has to create entirely new narrative scaffolding upon which to hang their artwork. As they begin their next project and reach for a canvas they find to their dismay that it is actually a culturally pre-approved paint-by-number kit. Art then becomes a never ending series of Dogs Playing Cards with Velvet Elvis and the artist turns away, sad and tortured, and asks himself, “why bother living?”