With the average American spending only 2.4 minutes per day on religious activities, it’s perhaps inevitable that spiritual realities have come to feel increasingly distant to many. Christian artists today are pushing back on this trend by creating images that remind distracted minds of realities they can’t always see, including and especially the truth of a “Messiah” or “ Savior of the world .”
The Deseret News spoke with 15 Latter-day Saint artists to go deeper in appreciating the experience and personal impact of creating rich visual portrayals of Jesus Christ.
Surprising inner turbulence
As soon as she finished the last stroke of her painting, “Atonement,” Kate Lee describes being overcome by negative thoughts, “this is a really bad painting. … You’re a really bad artist. … Don’t tell anyone about it. … You need to hide this.”
Startled, she slid the fresh image under a stack of paintings and kept it there — only later displaying it in the back corner of an art show where people wouldn’t likely see it. Little did she realize how many people would eventually be impacted by that simple image.