"Why Does the Lord Colour Everything?" – Discussion with Elias Ferenczy

All right, everybody, welcome. Welcome.

Welcome. Somane, we are recording.

Yes. OK, cool.

This is only here to record it for posterity.

Also for Elias's mom. Actually, though, for real.

That's not a joke. She asked us to record it, and

we're doing it for Elias's mom. That's why we're all here sort

of so, so wow. Thank you all for being here.

Just this is so cool that you're all here and we're packing out

the loft for our artist in resident Elias.

Let's hear it for him. So Elias started his residency

back in the fall and you know, we were we were overjoyed to

choose him for this residency. He's he's done so well with it.

He's gone through a faith and arts course with Sumani and he's

been working really hard on his craft.

And there's nothing that I love to see more than someone who is

just an artist who is obsessing over their craft and they're

going as deep as they can go into a singular idea.

And I remember we were meeting, I think back in the fall and

Elias was like, I'm really obsessed with like Magnolia

leaves and also the color brown. And we, and we've been talking

about like all these other ideas of things he could focus and

work on, but he was obsessed with these like detailed things.

And, and we were. And it was just so clear that

that was the way to go. And I think tonight is is kind

of a culmination of that to a certain degree.

But it's also like Elias sharing his gifts of this deep, deep

knowledge with all of us. And, you know, sometimes I'm

sure you felt this in your own life and career.

You get to this point where you're like, you feel like you

don't know anything. And then you have a moment where

you realize you have a lot to teach other people.

And so I know that that moment is happening for Elias tonight,

and I'm so glad you're all here to to take it all in.

So without further ado, Elias. Thanks, Steven.

That was really sweet. Yeah.

Thank you so much for being here.

I'm really grateful for all of you.

I do want to say that I'm not an expert.

I am also not a pastor, so this is not a sermon and it's

definitely a work in progress. But I'm glad that you're here

because I wanted to invite you in and just hear your thoughts,

hear what you had to share. All right, and we'll see if this

clicker works. All right, So I, I am an artist.

I have been mixing colour with clay and paint and pencils ever

since I was a child. When I think about colour,

oftentimes something like this comes into my mind.

Still, I think about something that's kind of childish.

I might think about crayons or construction paper or play DoH,

and if you're like me, you will think of these things too.

But as I look at this screen, I cannot help but wonder, is this

really the level at which I was meant to think about color?

Otherwise, as Christians, we love to talk about stewardship.

We mostly talk about stewardship with money, but we also talk

about it in terms of relationships and skills and

spiritual gifts. A few years ago I was studying

theology at La Brie, which some of you might know, but it's a

ministry and this one is in England.

And I was wondering how Christians might consider color.

And just a series of simple questions.

One, does the Lord command us to steward all of his gifts?

2 is color a gift? And three, if yes to both, then

how are we commanded to steward color?

What does that even mean? Is that a stupid question?

That's kind of just been, I've kind of been sitting with this

for a while. So since England, I had a good

conversation in England over this lunch discussion.

I've returned to DC where I've set up a art studio and have

been working on my oil paintings.

As you may know, I've read some books about theology and art.

I have mixed colors and paints, and for this project I really

just wanted to see if I could try to have an answer for this

question of why does God make color?

So I'm going to define color first by just how I think of

color as an artist, and then I'll be citing some theologians

and professors and a few pieces of scripture to try and answer

this question for us. We'll talk about color as a

language, a tool, and 3rd an invitation.

And I'm going to try to keep it quick so that we have time for

discussion because I do want to hear your thoughts.

So what is colour? This might sound like kind of a

silly question, but it's something that I had to learn.

I mean, I guess we're, I'm still learning because I definitely am

limited on my scientific knowledge.

Artists talk about three things. They talk about value, which is

the grayscale. So when you're editing a photo

on your phone and you just turn the saturation down, you're left

with black and white. That's value.

They talk about chroma, which is kind of like the quantity of the

color that's present. And then they thirdly talk about

hue, and that's what we think of as colour.

For the sake of this talk, I'm going to say colour because I

don't want to sound snobby, but you'll know that I mean hue.

So this is the colour wheel. We love the colour wheel.

We've seen it since kindergarten.

I don't know about you, but I never had someone explain the

color wheel to me in a way that was actually in any depth or

felt useful. I always just saw it as a pretty

picture. This is called the Munsell color

wheel model. There are a lot of models, but

this guy, his name is Albert H Munsell and he was an American

color theorist in the 19th and 20th century.

But he basically devised this way for us to think about the

three things that I defined value, chroma and hue.

So we have value is a vertical axis.

You can see hue is kind of this flat plane that all of the

blocks are on. And then chroma is the intensity

in, you know, one of these color strings going towards the center

and in the center is like this theoretically neutral Gray.

It's kind of weird. It's, it'll come up later.

So here are some color schemes that people use to arrange

color. I'm sure you all know these as

well. You, you might even know them

better than I do. But if we look at these colour

schemes, we can see some interesting things happening as

far as order. So we have a straight line

that's complementary. We've got a, what's the name for

a triangle that's not equilateral, Thank you.

Isosceles triangle that we have just in a row that's analogous.

And then we've got our triangle, rectangle and square.

And the monochromatic 1 might be harder to like visualize, at

least it was for me. But if we go back to this one,

you can think about it, it's like one of these little blocks

just on a vertical axis, if that makes sense, starting with

complementary. There is this idea of semi

neutrals in art. So there is a 19th century

American physicist named Ogden Nicholas Rude who writes about

this in his book on color theory.

I have yet to figure out if he's the first one to come up with

this, but it's generally accepted that in order to create

colour harmony, if you take colours that are opposite each

other on the colour wheel and mix them together, you'll create

a string of colours that are all kind of beautiful together.

And I think what's interesting here is you can see, if you are

attentive to nature, you can see this happening in things like

fish and plants and birds. So there's a lot of order in

color that we see keep getting. It's wrong, it's down.

Here's another example of color harmony in nature.

We've got the monochromatic and I actually pulled these.

I used the little ink blotter to pull these from the images to

like be legitimate, not just making this up.

You've got analogous here in this parrot and Tri attic in

these pansies. So it's fun to think about.

It shows something about our creator and artists use this all

the time. It's called, yeah, complementary

muting. So this is Irises by Vincent van

Gogh. I'm not sure.

I'm not sure which paints he's using here.

I'm guessing it's like cobalt blue and cadmium yellow that he

mixes together to create this more muddy or muted, not muddy,

muted green in the background. Another thing that artists think

of is just the ratio of color. And designers think about this a

lot. There's a common design ratio to

balance kind of the presence of different elements called the

603010. So we have, if you're thinking

about it in terms of hue, you can have 60% of your painting or

artwork be a dominant hue, 30% be secondary and then 10% is the

color that you want to make pop. So in this 160% green, 30% red,

10% flesh, and you can notice similar things in these other

paintings. I think that's a drawing.

Here we have a combination of the color schemes applied and

the 603010 ratio. So whether or not this living

room just kind of strikes you as too loud, you can kind of see

the harmony in using this color pattern and then just using it

as a guide to create something that hopefully feels homey for

this person. So humans are sensory beings.

We have three cone cells. We are made to see color.

And this also makes us different from the animals.

Some people, this is a side note, but some people say that

color exists on its own outside of perception.

Other people say that color only exists because we see it,

because that's how our eye is processing light.

But there is an article from the NIH that says people who are

depressed might not see color as vividly because they have what

scientists call less contrast sensitivity.

So it's interesting. How can we think about color as

Christians though? This was my question and for our

answer 3 categories have come up with that are that kind of stood

out to me. Color is a language, it's a tool

and it's an invitation. How can color be a language?

Don't we all experience it differently?

Well, I got to talk with Doctor Rachel Smith, who is our very

own Jared's mother from from Taylor University, and had a

great conversation with her. She was so helpful and I asked

her about how people experience color.

She's an art historian. And in response, she cited this

Israeli American psychologist named Daniel Kahneman, who wrote

this theory in he published this theory that basically has two

categories or prompts for how people interpret or react to

color. The first system prompt, he

says, is innate. It's it's system 1.

So we might have kind of a an innate response to the color

green as associating it with life, for example, because of

nature, because of all the green that we see.

Or we might have an instinctive aversion to the color red

because of blood. But those are not the only ways

that we respond to color because we're also seeing color, excuse

me, in our culture. So that's why we have system 2

prompts, according to this theorist.

And these are culturally programmed responses.

So we might think of red as symbolizing love if we see a red

rose. And then Doctor Smith also said

that individuals might have traumatic experiences with color

and we might have good experiences with certain colors

too, so that that changes how individuals respond to colours.

But regardless of this theory, I think people have pretty strong

responses to colour. So if we pay attention, colours,

tell us stories, we might notice that people are not feeling well

if they're the wrong color. Or when we're a giant looking at

a watermelon, if there's kind of a mustardy tint, we might avoid

buying it because maybe that means that it is rotten.

When I was a teenager, just I guess to make it a little bit

more personal, I had a a brief period of mild depression.

And I remember 1 moment that really struck me was when I was

folding laundry in my room and I looked in my drawer and I

noticed that every single T-shirt was a type of grey.

And I had not planned that. I wasn't, I didn't think that I

was trying to be Moody, but it it told me something about

myself. So this is something that I want

to ask you about at the end. But for now, I guess I think

colors communicate. People communicate through color

is my second point. Now I understand the risk in

commenting on what a painter is trying to do.

With a painting, so I won't try to do that here, but we have

this painting by Kupka, his Czech painter, and it's called

the yellow scale. Our, our, our cultural

connotations with yellow are that it's cheery and light.

We think of the sun maybe, but in this painting, to me it's

kind of overpowering the, the, I think this is actually a

self-portrait, the painter's face and it it actually does

make him look kind of ill. So to me it's kind of upsetting

to look at. But regardless of what's going

on here, we know that something is being communicated through

this use of yellow. Am I going too fast also or.

OK, cool, thank you. So the other thing that Doctor

Smith helped me out with was talking about colors importance

in our traditions. So we tell stories through color

and when we when we make a wreath at Christmas, we can

think about the evergreens symbolizing the everlasting life

that we will have in Christ. When we look at the red of the

holly, we can think about the blood of Christ that he gave for

us. Same with Easter.

We think about using white to symbolize purity and to make us

remember, help us remember the resurrection.

And we think about the purple just meaning Christ's royalty.

We also use colors Don pointed out in Oh, She's Not Here.

We also use colors in the Wordless book to tell the

Gospel. And we use colors in our church

calendar to keep time. So it's a language.

All right, my second observation.

Color is a tool. So color is a tool that we can

use for good or evil. There is there is a marketing

professor, I'm going to butcher his name named Satyendra Singe,

who says that McDonald's is probably red and yellow because

red simulates appetite, because we associate it with energy and

excitement, and yellow we associate with happiness.

And it's also the same colors as ketchup and mustard.

So watch out. You might be manipulated, be

being manipulated through color. If you're not attentive.

Drug advertisements will also use color.

They might start out kind of Gray and then get colorful to

try to get you to get on their drug.

So. So color is a tool that affects

us psychologically. How else is color a tool?

Well, color can help us. So appreciating color can help

us to slow down and reconnect with our embodiment.

I'm not sure about you, but I feel I spend way too much time

looking at screens and it makes my head hurt and I feel tired

and it also makes me feel disembodied.

We really call it virtual reality for a reason, right?

This can come with serious issues, and I think it's

important to be physically present and to work work for

that in light of today where we have so much technology.

Some of you will know this is a beloved professor of art at

Covenant College. Her name is Doctor Alyssa

Weichbrought, and she wrote a book called Redeeming Vision,

which you can see pictured here in 2023.

It is about art, specifically, it's about how to view art as

Christians. So she's writing about going to

an Art Museum, but I think it applies to us for the sake of

this talk. So Doctor Wiper has this idea

called embodied vision, and she starts out by this will take me

a little while to walk through, but I think it's worth it.

She starts out by saying that God meets us materially.

He meets us through Jesus, through sending Jesus to us.

But we also can encounter him physically, she says.

And the example that she says might be most powerful is

through the Lord's Supper. So when looking at art, Doctor

Weichbrought has a few steps. The 1st is looking with

intentionality, she says in her book.

Get up close, take a step back, walk around the art and pay

attention to how your body responds.

Her second point is to acknowledge our place in a

culture. She says that anytime we are

looking at something, we are looking through a lens of our

time and our place, and we can remember this and see it as a

symbolic of our finitude. And she says that we can we can

praise God that we are finite beings and we can approach the

things that we look at with humility, knowing that we might

not understand all of the cultural nuances.

But her Third Point is to begin from a place of love.

And she says that if we adopt A principle of looking to look

from a posture of love, then we can expect to be changed.

She cites James KA Smith, who says that we are what we love,

and our love is shaped, primed and aimed by liturgical

practices that take hold of our gut and aim our hearts to

certain ends. That's that's James KA Smith's

quote. So these are habits and

practices and rituals that we can adopt of looking that will

form our identity. One way that we could apply

this, according to Doctor Weichbrought, is to take what

she calls a color walk. So she started a few years ago

going on a walk and looking for a specific color in the wild.

She would say, I, I think it might have started out with

just, I'll look for blue. But eventually she started

saying I'll look for teal or coral.

And just doing that practice helped her to be more aware of

her surroundings and of how she was feeling.

How else is color a tool? We can know and care for each

other through color. A few months ago, I had coffee

with Dawn Luke. I just said her name wrong.

Luke, thank you. And she let me know that she was

seeing a friend and she was buying her friend purple flowers

because she knew that her friend loved purple.

I have a few. Well, I have one color that I

can think of that I know is a favorite of one of my friends.

And then whenever I I see that color, I will think of this

friend. So you might be able to do this

and just use it as an opportunity to think of people

and to maybe pray for them when you see that color.

I this doesn't really fit into the presentation here, but I

also want to say that the more I think about color, the more I

see it. So I've been thinking about

color a lot this last year. And I notice even on just like

my morning run, I've just noticed myself being kind of

struck by the beauty and the harmony in the lighting and in

the green of the trees and the, you know, the overcast sky or

however it looks that day. So we can use color to just

appreciate individuality of other people and appreciate how

different we are, our different responses to color.

And it helps to be sensitive, which is useful in general to be

aware of our surroundings. OK, My Third Point is that color

is an invitation. This is the most kind of

abstract. So I'm asking you to bear with

me, but it's an invitation to marvel our Creator, worship God

and imagine heaven and become more like the Lord.

OK, first one, our Creator pays attention to the sparrows that

fall on the ground. I took cohort recently through

this church and I think I mentioned to my small group that

when I read Jonah, I was really struck by God's care for the

animals and Jonah. He when God is talking to Jonah

about his compassion, he says, quote, should I not pity Nineveh

in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know

their right hand from their left and also much cattle?

Isn't that so sweet? God loves the people of Nineveh,

but He also loves his cattle and he pays attention to them and He

expects Jonah to respect them and pay attention to them too.

He cares for all the animals that he makes, and we don't know

how many animals there are, just like I don't think we really

know how many colors or hues there are.

But I think the animals and the colors show his delight in what

he makes, and it shows his care in sustaining so many colors and

so many animals. I think they just show his

extravagance toward us. The second thing that color

invites us to is to worship and imagine.

I had no more pictures for this. In Matthew 26, there is a story

of a woman, you know it, who anoints the head of Jesus with a

very expensive ointment. I called Soleimani today to ask

if I could double check this language to make sure I was

speaking truth about this passage.

But she worships Jesus through the senses of touch and smell,

and Jesus in that story calls it a beautiful thing.

The psalmist in Psalm 34 eight says, O taste and see that the

Lord is good. Music is really important for

Christians, and we know that the Lord delights in hearing our

music and we know that we can praise Him through creating

harmony and beauty and the sounds that we make.

I think that we can worship Him through color as well in the way

that we arrange it and create harmony according to the

structures that He has built for us.

The second point, I'm sorry that I don't have more interesting

slides for this point. It's just the same.

But the second point here is that color can help us imagine.

Doctor Wyck Bro talks about how the Holy Spirit allows us to

imagine heaven through the art that we create.

I'm reading another book called Heaven that's written by Randy

Alcorn. I'm sure you know him, but he

wrote this great paragraph about imagining heaven that I wanted

to share. He says we cannot anticipate or

desire what we cannot imagine. That's why I believe God has

given us glimpses of heaven in the Bible to fire up our

imagination and kindle a desire for heaven in our hearts.

And that's why Satan will always discourage our imagination or

misdirect it to ethereal notions that violate Scripture.

So color is an invitation to worship and imagine.

Lastly, color is a way that we can know and share the love of

God. God has been watching His people

since the beginning of creation, and He continues to watch us

today. Seeing is integral to His nature

now. Doctor Wiper cites a lot of

examples of God seeing in Scripture, but one of them

struck me as really powerful that I wanted to share, and I'm

just going to read a direct quote because she tells the

story better than I could. In Genesis 16, the Egyptian

maidservant Hagar is on the run, pregnant by her Master Abram and

abused by her mistress Sarai. Hagar desperately flees into the

desert, but as she rests by a spring, the Angel of the Lord,

speaking as God in the first person, addresses her directly

he tail. He tells Hagar to return to

Sarai and promises to bless her offspring, making them too many

to count. The son she carries will be

called Ishmael. God hears because God has heard

her distress. Then, for the time in the

biblical narrative. For the first time in the

biblical narrative, Hagar speaks.

You are El Roy, the God who sees me.

Weichbrot says it like this. God seeing Hagar changes

everything. It makes her feel loved.

And from that knowledge, Hagar steps into obedience, confident

that her longings will be fulfilled.

So folks. Why does the Lord color

everything? I think this is a very

mysterious question and I don't have all the answers, but I

think the answer that I am most confident to give at this point

is because He loves us. Thanks for thanks for listening.