Artistry
With strawberry blonde locks alight like flaming tongues,
she descends into her basement studio
to sit before her easel, its canvas
tabula rasa made taut upon its frame
in preparation, expectation, to receive
her delicate brushstrokes intentionally touched.
Her eyes scan over tiny pots of paint
like books arrayed on a library shelf –
lapis lazuli, lingonberry, brick, clay
her Dickinson, Derrida, Plato, Paul,
some of these vessels well used, near empty,
while others brim full for when they are called –
and she starts to mix upon her palette
different pigments to craft the right shade,
ivory added to brighten up jade
while equal parts umber and thyme combine
to form a warm glow: the hues kept on hand
blended to create the colors required.
So she trains her sight, focused and alert,
to reflect her subject’s shadows and lines
with an outlined sketch, her keen imagination
composing the scene, fleshing out symbols,
drawing on tradition to layer on meaning
to bring into being her vision of beauty,
and as I sit in my upstairs study,
seeking to understand the faith I sense,
my pen in hand, a journal open to advent,
I start to notice how my thoughts arrange
events from my life, blending book-bound beliefs
to illumine who I am on the page:
the realities stored within our souls
flowing through this process like ink moving through pens,
paint rushing through brushes, words resting in prayers;
each of us contributing our pigments
to the portrait revealed slowly by Time –
we shaped for this image, created to create.
Nathaniel A. Schmidt is an ordained minister in the Reformed Church in America who serves as a hospice chaplain. He holds degrees from Calvin Theological Seminary, Calvin University, and the University of Illinois Springfield. His newest collection of poems, Transfiguring, is available from Wipf & Stock, as is his first collection, An Evensong. He lives with his librarian wife, Lydia, and their two children in southwest Michigan, meaning life is a perpetual story time.
