For the children – young and old.
What is art? Something created from nothing. “How can that be?” you ask. Let’s think about the first Creator , the first artist to ever make something out of nothing. I like to think of God as the “Great Almighty” or the “Great Creator”. He created this big, big WORLD, but there was more work to be done. God was full of ideas. It all started with huge void like an endless blank canvas, and He knew just what to do to fill the void.
Imagine Him as He took his huge brush filled with blue and swept it across the top of the canvas, declared it good, and called it SKY. He became very excited and began to have fun. He made another big swipe with his brush loaded with green and a myriad of other colors, saw the beauty of the color combination and declared that good. He called it EARTH.
He then stood back – way back – because this was a big canvas. “What else does this need?” he asked himself. (You see, an artist is never satisfied). God decided the colors were too dark, so he put this BIG circle of yellow between the earth and sky and declared that good. He called it LIGHT, or SUN. The yellow color brightened and brought all the other colors together into a glorious sunrise. He added another circle of light and called it MOON, To lighten where the sun couldn’t reach.
Again, He stood back, scratched his chin, took and deep breath and thought, “This needs something else”. He didn’t ponder long – after all, He was God. He again lifted his big brush laden with paint and between the earth and sky he put in mountains and long S-curved rivers, added trees, rocks and flowers, stood back and declared it AWESOME. However, he soon tired of the garish color. He picked up some gray on his brush and painted a few clouds in the blue of the sky, dropped down and added some gray to a few spots on the earth colors, at the base of the trees and rocks, on the edges of rivers, and called them SHADOWS.
Now he was getting somewhere. He liked what He saw but soon grew puzzled and dissatisfied and finally declared it all dead and lifeless. Another word came to him: SOUND – IT needed sound. His excitement returned. In the nearby trees, he put many birds with open beaks from which poured glorious sounds. But then, like most artists (creators), he got too “picky”. He created tiny, tiny bugs and insects, more birds, big and small, and game them strange names like whipporwill, owl, rain crow, eagle and egret, and katydid. He added things that crawled on various numbers of legs: centipedes, caterpillars, and on and on, but they all had a part to play in his masterpiece.
After all that work, he pondered the possibility that He had still missed something important. He had clouds to make rain to make the trees and flowers bloom. He had light and shadow. He had sounds to delight Him. He had hung fruit on the trees and veggies in bountiful gardens, and his huge canvas was nearly filled with every imaginable “subject matter”, flora and fauna, animals of every kind and shape. Another thought came to him. It needed HUMOR. So He created the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, giraffes with long, long necks, and ugly alligators.
He backed up again and looked from a distance to see what he might add. “What a mess”, he thought. “I’ve made it too busy”. He had grown tired so he took a brief nap. When he awakened, he knew what to do. He needed Helpers to care for all that he had created. His World needed Helpers, so he created Man and declared it all GOOD.
