Untamed

These paintings came out of a place of frustration and desperation. I was feeling the pressure of having to explain every painting and for each be a prophetic word for someone. Painting is worship first for me, and in trying to explain each painting, I felt like my value for worship was being shoved to the side.

I have a high value for worship. It is where I go to be faced to face with God. Worship is about giving all my attention to God with the intention of affection. It is where I pour my love out on Him. I paint to worship; I make music to worship; I write to worship. Worship has many forms, but when I create in worship, I am creating beauty for and with my King. There is nothing more precious than that.

I came home one evening from an apprenticeship class for prophetic artists frustrated because of the pressure I was feeling. I said to the Lord, “Is every painting prophetic? Does each one have to have a meaning? Can I not just create and worship you like I do on the piano without having to worry about the meaning?”

“How about you find out?” he replied. I sort of felt a little giddy when He said that. Usually when He says something like that, it is an invitation to learn more about Him.

I sat down with a sheet of watercolour paper and watercolour paints - something I do not typically use - and began painting. It was hard at first. I did not know what to paint or where; I felt sort of lost. After a few minutes, I asked the Lord what was going on. He said, “You did not ask me what to do. You are trying to do this on your own. You always ask, why would this painting be any different?”

“Ok,” I replied, “How do you want to start this?”

“Blue,” He said. And so, onto the canvas went the blue. The presence of God was tangible in the room as I worshiped. I could feel His peace and delight in me as we created together. The colours flowed across the paper without effort. I could not help but laugh at some points because I was having so much fun! It was so freeing! I was not trying to interpret what I was seeing nor was I thinking about how someone might perceive it. I was simply creating beauty with my King. It was intimate, beautiful, and full of love. Actually, it was so intimate that I kept this painting a secret for quite some time.

The final image is gorgeous. Yes, it is my own piece, but I am going to say it anyways. This painting is gorgeous. When I look at it, I get the faint impression of expensive wine being poured out and its aroma filling the air. It is full of movement and life; it is never still. It has a wildness about it that makes me think of a dancer dancing through puddles in a rainstorm.

My first thought when I saw it was, “It is music!” Yet, something about that did not feel quite right.

I thought again: “Oh, it is me,” but I was still missing something.

Then the Lord said, “The reason you feel like it is you or music is because this is what your raw worship looks like. This is what is happening as you worship.”

I asked Him what it means, to which He laughed and said, “I thought you did not want to know what it means.” That was true, I had wanted to just paint for Him and not worry about a meaning, so I contented myself with knowing simply that it was a visual representation of my worship and that I had tapped into something deeper creatively than I had ever before. Little did I know just how powerful that something was.

The first painting of Untamed right after it was finished.

Please understand, everything Holy Spirit does has meaning. He does not do things flippantly; He is always purposeful in everything move He makes. So yes, every painting I do with Him is prophetic, it has a meaning because He is speaking. But I had to come back to the heart of worship in my creativity, I had to remember why I was doing it in the first place. That is what this painting was about… Plus, it was not finished yet.

A few weeks later I started another painting with the same heart, using the same materials and same colours. It did not take me long to complete the background. I simply put paint where Holy Spirit said to and went until I felt Him say, “Good, time to put the brush down.”

And there it remained; it was quite a while until I touched that painting again. I worked on other paintings in the meantime until one day, a year later, He said, “How about we work on that other watercolour one again? I am thinking violet this time.”

Gently, I swirled hues of violet and grey on the wet paper, following the intricate patterns it made as it danced through the water. I pulled it up to meet the red, blue and yellow in the already existing background, and splattered colour higher and higher up the painting. Once again it did not take me long, once again He said, “Good, put the brush down.” And once again, there it remained - for several months.

This painting was a process of a different kind. Whenever I needed to refocus my heart on worship, this was the painting He took me to. In the first painting, I was exploring a new area of our relationship. In the second painting, I was revisiting that area and learning something new about it each time.

Over the next six months or so, the painting developed, and it was not finished until sometime in August 2018. My husband and I were just newlywed and starting to create our home together. Something that has always been important to us is the presence of God in our home. We want our home to have an atmosphere of worship. One of our dreams is for it to be a place of love, joy, hope, peace, and safety for people. We want people to encounter Jesus in our home. Worship is, and will be, at the very foundation of everything we do, and we want that to permeate our home. What better way to facilitate that in the natural than to have a space within our home dedicated solely to worshiping Jesus? And so, the worship room was born.

Our first worship room. Since then, we've had a worship room in each of our homes.

We were setting it up with our music and art supplies and I had unintentionally laid these two paintings side by side. That is when it clicked for me. I had always assumed they were separate paintings and it had not occurred to me that they went together until I saw them next to each other. For three years, I had unknowingly been preparing these paintings for our worship room. It was there that I learned the full meaning of them. Together, these paintings speak of freedom in worship – freedom of expression and freedom of creativity. They speak of the liberty that comes when we worship. They speak of our home being a place of freedom because of the atmosphere of worship that we have cultivated. I am blown away by the goodness and creativity of God to take something that I was frustrated in and slowly nurture it into something foundational for my family. He is incredible!

Through these paintings, I discovered a bit about who I am. My style of artwork really developed after these as I explored what my wild, untamed worship looked like visually. I still look at them and know that they are conveying things no words can describe. And that is ok, because the heart will know things that the mind cannot fully comprehend. Sometimes worship is not about words, but expression. If we say it is just words, then we limit it to what our minds can understand. Please do not misunderstand what I am saying, words are powerful. God created the entire universe with words alone. And yet, the number of times I have cried and not known why. Sometimes the heart has things in it that words cannot provide meaning to. I know the overall meaning of these paintings, but they still have a depth to them that expresses my raw worship in ways I cannot express to anyone else. When I look at them, all I can see is wild, mysterious, and untamed love.