People ask me what Christian modern art actually is, usually because what they have seen under that name did not look like either one. So here is the answer I would give in the studio.
The short definition
Christian modern art is art made in a modern visual language, abstraction, color, light and form, that takes its subject from the Christian faith. The faith is in the source, not in the surface. There is no lettering, no illustration of a scene, no explaining. It is a painting first, and it is Scripture all the way down.
What it is not
It is not a verse set in a nice typeface and printed on a board. That is lettering, and lettering is a different craft with a different job.
It is not a picture of a Bible story. Narrative religious painting is a great tradition and I love it, but it is a tradition that shows you the event. This does not show you the event. It gives you what the verse does to a person who lives with it.
And it is not the faith drained out to beige so it will not bother anybody. That is the version I set out to answer. Glory is not muted. Peace is not gray. If a verse is about light, the painting should be full of light.
Why abstract
Because that is what the verse is like from the inside.
Read Genesis 1:3. The first thing God said was, Let there be light. Nothing in that sentence is a picture. It is an event you feel before you can describe it, and color is the honest way to paint it. Read Jeremiah 29:11, thoughts of peace and an expected end, and try to draw it. You cannot draw it. You can paint what it feels like to be held by it on a hard morning, and that is abstraction doing its proper work.
There is a practical side too. A painting with no lettering hangs as a painting. It sits in a modern room, a farmhouse room, a coastal room. It does not announce itself before the art does, and it does not embarrass anyone who did not come for a sermon. The verse is on the page, in the title, and in the story you tell when someone asks. That is the difference between witness and shouting.
How to look at one
Stand back first. Let the color do what it does before you go looking for meaning. Then read the verse it came from, and look again. Most people find the second look is a different painting.
Where my work lives
There are four doors, and they hold different things.
- This store is the open edition: thirty-four paintings on canvas, printed to order in the United States, framed or unframed, ready to hang. It is the way to live with the work without spending like a collector.
- Mark Lawrence Gallery holds the collector editions, small editions of uniques, each finished across its whole surface by my own hand in clear impasto, signed, with a certificate. Nothing there is printed to order.
- VerseVisions is the book: the verses, the paintings, and a word on each. It is free to read.
- Mark Lawrence Art carries open-edition prints and home décor through Fine Art America.
Who I am
I am Mark Lawrence. I have painted Scripture since 2008, one verse at a time, from a studio in Georgia, and I have not run out of verses. I am not painting religious decoration and I am not painting to argue with anyone. I paint the verses people live by, in the color they deserve.
If you want to see how that lands on your own wall, send me a photo of it at hello@christianmodernart.com and I will show you.
In Jesus,
Mark