A Tantalizingly Wonder-filled Coral Reef

"Dunlap's Art is to Art as a Coral Reef is to Architecture"

--Mark Paul Petrick

I was pleased to find a great review of David Dunlap and his work.

I find it interesting that I am thinking of him so much these days. I moved into a new house over the summer. As part of the moving process, I pulled all of my old abstract paintings from storage and relocated them to my new address. Perhaps this is the root of this emerging memory of a professor I hadn't given much thought to recently. But perhaps it has more to do with what I have been reading of late. I see a connection between Dunlap's theory of art, called Art Exhibitionism by Petrick, and the book Praise Habit by David Crowder.

Be glad, good people! Fly to GOD! Good-hearted people, make praise your habit.

--Psalm 64:10 MSG remix

The crux of Crowder's book is that praise is something we are, not something we do. If you are stuck in the old paradigm that praise consists only of singing a couple mediocre songs on Sunday morning, you are missing the point. David Crowder, the leader of his own postmodern/experiemental/emergent worship band/experience opens the reader up to a new way of thinking about praise. It is a new perspective, a lifestyle, not an event. Crowder, using techniques of Sacred Reading (lectio divina) reflects on psalms, writing new parables, poems and short tales about how they effect him. He explains how to develop a habit of praise in your everyday life. A praise habit is not just possible; it’s essential. Its the very reason we were created. We must strive to live in constant awe of God and watch what He does next.

I feel this connection between my artistic nature and my growing pursuit of a praise habit. I see the process of art making more and more intergrated with the idea of worship.

Art Exhibitionism: David Dunlap is a cultivator of relationships, a planter of conceptual seeds, a harvester of images, and a packager of the fruits of his obsessive creative labors in exhibitions that seem to accrete into place like a tantalizingly wonder-filled coral reef.

Doesn't that description sound like what we want here in our little emerging church movement? Don't we want to be cultivating relationships? I want to plant conceptual seeds, and oh, the harvest! Oh the fruits of our creative labor. And ever I aspire for my worship to grow into a tantalizingly wonder-filled coral reef.