The more successful the work, the more people will step in to try to influence and manipulate the work for their own benefit.
I think everybody is different. We are trying to be ourselves, and other people are trying to be themselves. We all share commonalities with each other, but all of us have different thumbprints. We all have our own unique things.
You don’t have to be afraid, even death itself does not have power. In Christ, everything is becoming new, everything is different.
If anyone should have a reason to not be afraid, to move beyond the expectations of culture, that is kind of the whole message of Christianity.
It’s hard to make a living in music, so a lot of times in the arts it’s safer to kind of fit into a box.
The whole idea of worship being associated with music, it gives you an impotence to make art that is true, that is honest and that opens the human heart to God and to reality.
I do think that Christians will make music that oh should have some of the grandest visions of why we should create music and why we should seek to create beauty world.
To me genres were always an imaginary things, they’re just marketing channels.
To me music is music. A person of faith, a person that calls themselves a Christian, they are the Christian and they make music. Some music has more to do about God than other music, but in reality what makes the difference between “secular” and “Christian” music is simply a marketing channel.
One of the things I love about art, is that it can say number of things to people. I broad hope is that it would just open people’s hearts and that they would experience love, and that that would experience God.
Doubt purifies faith. Without doubt, belief calcifies into rigid fundamentalism. Without doubt, there are no questions; and without questions, there is no imagination.
Fundamentalism is rooted in arrogance. It thrives in fear and control and darkness.
Entitlement is not a friend of art. Work is. Pain is.
Will you be courageous enough to create the art that you truly desire to create rather than settling for the art that you feel is necessary? It.
All human creativity depends on something deeper than itself.
A healthy faith is one that has aligned in word, thought, and action.
She didn’t even insult me. She just didn’t compliment me. This is how fragile the ego can be in connection with our creative expressions. The critic’s voice is so powerful because it resonates with the voices of our deepest fears, those voices speaking from the inside of us, telling us that we are not good enough. The critics confirm our repressed and terrified suspicions that we don’t measure up, that we are unsafe and unlovable.
Our deepest beliefs about the universe filter their way up through the soil into the tiny aesthetic decisions that the artist makes. How we make our records. Which color feels right. Rhyme schemes and word choices. These kinds of decisions are rarely made out of purely analytical comparison. They come from the guts. From faith.
Creator, if what you are creating has grown insipid and dull, perhaps you ought to take a step back for a moment. Before you go back to your instrument, your pen, your brush-take a breath and remember how to listen again.
Not every artist has to make a living making art. Millions of people who play guitar would do well to keep their day jobs. Plenty of people make incredible art “on the side”. William Faulkner wasn’t any less of an artist for writing As I lay Dying on the back of a wheelbarrow during breaks in his job shoveling coal for the electric company.
As an artist, the voices you listen to ought to align with that inner Voice that knows who you are. When that foundation is set, then the rest of the voices can begin to build and work together, becoming the voice of a community, adding synergy and depth to your art that you couldn’t possibly manufacture on your own.