John Dennison: Letter to an artist: on faith and making art

Published by Venn Foundation, Auckland, New Zealand, 2024; £6.00 paperback, plus postage. https://www.venn.org.nz/

Calculating price per page this will not be the cheapest book you buy on Christianity and the arts: it costs £6 (plus postage from New Zealand) for 34 pages (actually only 24 pages of main text).  However, it will repay every penny.

Attractively illustrated and produced, the text is in the form of a letter from John Dennison, poet and Director of Resources at New Zealand’s Venn Foundation, to a young person who aspires to be an artist but has a range of fundamental questions about the validity and purposes of any kind of art-making for a Christian. 

It is a warm-hearted, rich, and stimulating encouragement for Christians to get involved in art-making, not as an offbeat activity for a few fringe people, nor a luxury to be indulged after you have sorted out economics and politics, but as a mainstream activity of equivalent status to any other calling in life by which we serve and praise God.  Art-making, Dennison says, is first of all a response of delight to God’s creation, and therefore, he says, whatever the state of the world, it would actually be obscene not to be making art. 

Delight is not superficial or fluffy.  It is a perfectly serious response to God’s creation, and it stands in opposition to the cynicism that marks so much contemporary art.  Borrowing the title of Jeremy Begbie’s book, Dennison says that art helps us to voice creation’s praise (Psalm 19).  But it also recognises the fallenness of the world, and shares in creation’s laments (Romans 8).  Delight also provokes serious questions such as, ‘Where did all this beauty come from?’ and ‘Why do we think something is wrong with the world?’

An attitude of delight also induces humility in the artist, reminding them that they do not stand above or apart from creation, but are part of it, helping it voice its praises and lamentations.   Delight encourages artists to look outwards rather than inwards, in contrast to so much contemporary art that, Dennison says, is serious about the wrong thing – about itself (or the artist) and not about the world.

Such an approach also steers away from Romantic visions of the lonely, rebellious artist.   Instead it encourages artists to recognise their inherent relationality, and to work in and for communities, serving others and not worrying too much about self-expression.  If artists primarily focus on learning their craft, including the basics of carrying a notebook to jot down ideas, phrases, sketches, and recognising the constructive benefits of both physical and moral limits, their voice will emerge and their message will become apparent.

Dennison avoids delving far into issues of ‘content’ or the message of art, although he emphatically denies that art by Christians should mean either propaganda or kitsch.    But he is clear that artists are responding to the whole creation, which is not just physical but also moral and spiritual, and taking account of how their non-Christian neighbours are engaging with it too.  So the artist who is a Christian will in their work ‘speak of the world faithfully’, and not just evangelistically but prophetically.  To do that, a Christian artist must also, in turn, pay attention to prayer and Bible reading, not in order to direct the content of their art, but to shape their life, thinking and instincts, which will in turn shape their art, and the witness they bear in the world.

This rich, short book is one to enjoy and to give to any aspiring artist or art-student you know.   Art-making is part of our calling to cultivate the earth, by producing work that is, in Dennison’s words, not sentimental or naïve, but ‘faithful, unafraid and joyful’, and which in the end, like everyone’s work, is offered up to Jesus, with the prayer that he will bless it and use it.  

[A shorter version of this review was first published in Art + Christianity, no. 121, Spring 2025, p. 13.]