In today’s mainstream Protestant culture, it can seem difficult to find good art. Living in such an environment, I quickly wearied of the art that immediately surrounded me, from “preachy,” “clean” movies filled with Christianese to never-ending Hillsong bridges in worship. Although it is difficult to say how widespread the issue is, clearly the quality of much modern Christian art has suffered.
Multiple Christian organizations have recognized and analyzed this issue. Take a recent piece from Steiger International, which calls bad Christian art a “systemic problem”; it claims that Christian artists, in attempts to humor Christian and secular audiences alike, have produced “hollowed-out, sanitized content that’s more wallpaper and less art.” A 2019 article from the Gospel Coalition, titled “Why is Christian Art So Often Bad?”, states that “[i]f you’re looking for the butt of a joke, Christian art is an easy target…for much of the past two millennia, Christians were the ones making the best, most enduring art. What happened?” Lastly, Bo Helmich at Modern Reformation admits in a 2021 essay that “Protestants…have long been criticized for treating beauty with indifference, suspicion, and hostility” and that “[l]ike most stereotypes, this one contains an element of truth.”
Broadly speaking, this lack of excellence suggests that some Christians are either unwilling or ill-equipped to understand what quality Christian art is. I assume that the latter may be the case. Beyond relatively recent names such as Tolkien and Lewis, I knew very little growing up about the longtime tradition of excellent Christian art passed down to us from ages of church history. Prior to my college studies, few people ever suggested to me what might make modern Christian art good or bad, successful or shallow. As a result, I unconsciously placed my artistic hobbies in a separate sphere from that of my faith. I was writing, singing, and drawing—honing my skills as an artist—without learning what it means to make Christian art. The broad Evangelical and Protestant circles in which I grew up rarely, if ever, addressed the relationship between Christianity and art.
In my last year of high school, I was at last confronted by the lovely mystery of faith and art’s intersection, thanks to a poem by William Wordsworth. I knew I had encountered an objectively beautiful thing in Tintern Abbey. I also knew it contained no clear, didactic statements of Christian truth, and this intrigued me. I began to make a conscious inquiry, gathering resources on poetry and Christianity. Slowly I approached the question of what defines a Christian artist. Around the same time, my family and I shifted toward a particularly Reformed view of the faith, so the challenge seemed to grow even greater: how do I become a Reformed Christian artist? At a quick glance, the Reformed affiliation expresses itself in the clarity of catechisms and creeds—let alone, of course, its traditional iconoclasm. This did not seem promising. I strongly believed the Reformed faith to be true, but if so, then where were the artists which explored its beauty?
At the time I didn’t even know how to begin looking; however, my college studies have been invaluable to me in bringing clarity to the relationship between art and the Christian faith. As I grew in understanding of that relationship, I learned of modern Christians who are in fact making excellent art.
As Helmich from Modern Reformation ultimately suggests, despite the stereotypes, “Protestants (the Reformed in particular) have made valuable contributions to a theological understanding of beauty.” For myself, I have been pleasantly surprised to learn that the reformed tradition has actually inspired many artists, including historical figures and those working today.
A brilliant example of a successful reformed artist is Makoto Fujimura, whose abstract paintings sometimes involve over 200 layers of hand-ground minerals. As he explained in his 2023 Kuyper Prize Acceptance Speech, “Kintsugi Grace: Prismatic Art beyond the Rainbow,” such layers create an effect of “poetic beauty of mystery and complexity…new reconciliation.” The term he uses to describe his method is “Slow Art,” for each layer requires time to develop and dry.
In an age when so much of Christian art fails to be effective, it is deeply encouraging to give some attention to one of Fujimura’s paintings in particular: A Leaf by Niggle.
Fujimura, Makoto. “A Leaf by Niggle.” 2002, Mineral Pigments and Gold and Sumi on Kumohada, 50 inches by 36 inches, Private Collection, Shanghai, China.
The painting takes its name from a short story by Tolkien, wherein a young painter named Niggle takes care in painting every leaf on the tree on his canvas. Niggle fails to finish painting his tree before he is taken on a strange, symbolic journey involving a lot of sanctification. After undergoing trials, he is rewarded with the sight of his tree before him in reality—complete, ideal, and better than he had ever hoped to paint it.
On his website, Fujimura describes a parallel experience with his own painting. He painted it during the months after 9/11, in 2002, “with feeble strokes of watermarks that painted the invisible tree. As far as I know, this was a painting that I never really ‘finished’ as I felt I needed to let it go, incomplete. When I arrived at C3 Museum [i]n Shanghai, I was startled to find…22 years later, that it IS complete[ly] whole now, because of the watermarks revealing themselves more and more. The tree had generatively become whole.”
The painting overall looks like a large turquoise rectangle, vertically oriented. The shape of the tree occupies the upper two-thirds, looking so fragile and organic that its upper leaves become difficult to distinguish from the background. If one looks a little closer at that turquoise background—even using a digital image of the painting—some layers can be observed: the turquoise seems to have been swept across the canvas in soft broad strokes, intermingling with slightly bluer and greener tints and patterned with a fine, scaly, eroded texture.
As for the tree itself, one imagines that it really was practically “invisible” at the time Fujimura decided to stop painting. Most of it is merely suggested by the greyish “watermarks,” although a few branch-like strokes and evocative shapes of leaves are made here and there in a more concentrated ink. Yet the watermarks make up the bulk of the tree, and their shape and direction guide the eye in determining its parts. Those at the roots and trunk appear like static bubbles or blocks, while the leaf-marks seem to be blowing in the wind, flying away off the barely-there branches, toward and beyond the margins of the canvas. The shapes at the very top of the tree are long and scraggly, stretching upward and vanishing into the background, perhaps suggesting further growth yet to be seen. Many of the leaves have been allowed to drip down the canvas in long slender lines reminiscent of rain.
Perhaps the most important thing to observe about this painting is the location of the gold. “[M]y use of gold is to inject the sublime in my art,” Fujimura states, in “Kintsugi Grace.” The most prominent gold here is in the bole of the tree, within its center watermark. I find that my eye naturally rests on that point of the painting. Fujimura has suspended the tree a third of the way up the canvas, so that the broad horizontal strokes of blue in the background, one below the tree and one crossing its branches, seem to frame that gold spot.
Gold also appears just beneath the trunk, where the roots might lie. In fact, beneath the trunk there are two sets of watermarks which look like roots. The right hand root descends in a curve away from the trunk, while the left hand root sits at a little distance away, at an angle, as though it were severed from the tree. Still, the painting does not strike one as imbalanced, especially if one gives attention to the gold, which fills the gap between the left hand root and the trunk, and leads the eye upward, from gold to gold.
Beyond the gold at the bole, there are also tiny brushes of it here and there among the branches. One blush of gold lies at the very top of the canvas, inside a little watermark-leaf, marking the clearest, highest point of the tree.
The gold is not constrained by the watermarking. It crosses the borders of some of the watermarks, and on the right toward the top of the canvas, it appears where the water has just petered out. But rather than appearing in an external or separate shape of its own, it seems to mostly appear within the tree, providing it with structure, and the viewer with glimpses of structure. It is remarkable how the gold traces and helps complete the shape of the tree. For unlike the watermarks, the gold contrasts effectively with the turquoise (although its borders still remain soft, not sharp); it makes the tree easier to see and fills in the gap of its roots. Although the watermarks have grown more prominent over time, all the gold was present and fixed when Fujimura stopped painting in 2002.
If the gold “injects the sublime,” then perhaps Fujimura has suggested how a transcendent God transforms what otherwise would be a muted, faint, human attempt at beauty. In such a case, divine intervention is gentle, harmonizing and reconciling. Remember that a higher authority graciously allows Niggle to see his tree completed and made real, alive and yet also painted—transformed. The gold does not overwhelm the picture; it gracefully takes on the humbler shape of, while not becoming altogether subservient to, the watermarks.
The painting certainly invites more interpretation than I have room for here. Unlike the mainstream Christian art of today, Fujimura’s work withstands longer attention. Such a work should encourage Christian artists in any denomination today. It demonstrates that, despite the slew of art which falls short of the name, modern Christian art is still capable of giving glory to God, either in fresh paint or in watermarks which slowly expand over the decades. By the grace of God, artists like Makoto Fujimura continue to find ways to harmonize their faith and their work. We can exclaim with Niggle as he gazes on his completed tree: “It’s a gift!”
