If you’re reading this, you’re likely a maker—someone who enjoys working with wood, metal, or fabric to create something. If that’s true, and if you’re at all like me, there are times when something triggers a feeling deep within that with your favorite medium, anything is possible. What sight or sound or smell creates that particular feeling for you? A new pad of drawing paper? The smell of oil paints? A visit to a fabric store? A blank spreadsheet? (Okay, maybe not that one.) Unformed clay? Metal stock begging to be welded?
For me, it’s the smell of a lumberyard, or the sound of construction paper being cut, or the feel of my hand flattening out a new, blank page in my sketchbook.
Burst Into Song and Clap Their Hands
A sermon that included Psalm 104 got me thinking about the blessing in Isaiah 55, especially the second half of verse 12: “The mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.” What came to my mind were wave-like shapes reaching up and out from the bottom of the sphere and toward each other in beautiful arcs of color and shape.
Taking this idea to my sketchbook—a gloriously blank page—resulted in something that could be interpreted in lots of media: fabric, paper, stained glass, and, I assume, wood or clay.
For this digital rendering, I went with fabric. A larger whole being made from smaller pieces that were in turn made from even smaller pieces makes me think of the complexity of creation.
At first in my sketches I kept adding something to the center to represent the object of our adoration, but in the end I decided against it, agreeing with the more imaginative centuries-old description of a God beyond description: “An infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”