ARTWAY:
OPENING EYES,
HEARTS & MINDS
Follow Us
Vision
Inform and open eyes
Motivated by a Christian view of life, ArtWay seeks to open up the world of the visual arts to the interested lay man and woman. Our goal is to hand people a key to this world that is rich and fascinating yet sometimes hard to enter.
ArtWay desires to open eyes for the beauty and meaning of art, so that more and more people may begin to enjoy the vast treasury of art that has been and is being produced and to learn to discern the spirits as mature and culturally aware viewers.
We advocate a thoughtful engagement with art and culture over against an uninformed rejection or uncritical embrace. While dealing with works of art, we will always have an eye for the form as well as the content. To us, it is important to note that this content is formed by the spiritual dimension of a work, whether Christian, Buddhist, post-modern or other. Specifically we look for voices of truth, hope and love in the art of the past and the present.
Interdenominational and global
In recent years the number of Christian artists who produce good work has grown in addition to the number of well-informed and insightful books and essays about art written by believers. The impact of all this seems at times to be limited to a rather small group of the initiated. ArtWay intends to bring Christian art and reflection about art to a greater public.
It is our dream that the Christian world may become familiar with the quality art that is increasingly available. It is our dream that these works may find their way into our homes, schools, churches and other cultural institutions, that they may become more widely known.
Images can instruct, inspire and feed us as much as words can. We therefore will give suggestions and develop materials for the use of good images in the church, in the liturgy, in small-group gatherings, on the LCD projector, in the church bulletin and church buildings. Moreover, we hope to stimulate the re-evaluation of the place of the image. The fact that we live in an image oriented culture and that we ourselves have therefore also become more visually oriented, makes this re-evaluation all the more urgent.
We understand Christian art to be not merely art that deals with Christian religious themes, but all art that is rooted in a Christian view of life. A landscape or still life, abstract work or scream of doubt or protest, all such art can spring from Christian convictions. There are, moreover, various callings: some artists will prefer to make art for the Church or their fellow believers, others see it as their calling to make work for their non-believing neighbours, the art world or the culture around them. To us, all of these callings are legitimate.
Dialogue
By means of book reviews, information and web-links, ArtWay will showcase and open up what has been and is being written about art, whether popularly or scholarly, philosophically or theologically, meditatively or liturgically oriented. In this way we hope to be a platform for reflection about art and to stimulate dialogue.