So far in the Conversations series here on An Iris Awaits, we’ve looked at the topics of mission, Bible word studies, ethics, and human trafficking. Today, I’m excited to delve into another group of topics that might not seem all that related at first until you really start thinking about it—which is exactly what a conversation with Nathan Bennett Adams will help you do.
I met Nate in college when we took a class together that involved meeting weekly in our professor’s home (Matt Benson’s, actually, who was featured in the first Conversations post) and traveling to study at L’Abri in England over spring break (when the below photo of us was taken). Nate’s enthusiasm, intellect, and spoken word poetry inspired me during that time to consider things in different ways and to actually express the excitement I felt about the things of God. After college, Nate continued sharing his poetry and speaking about language in venues such as TEDx. He married Anna, another graduate of our school, and together they moved to Italy to serve at Saints Bible Institute for a couple of years before moving back to Tennessee. Nate has spent the last several years honing his talents in the visual arts, and one of his commissioned pieces is featured in the header of this very blog!
A few weeks ago, Nate and I had a chance to catch up over the phone. As an athlete, poet, and artist, Nate brings a unique perspective to the table, and I welcome you to listen in on our conversation regarding language, art, God’s character, and how we relate to Him. Unlike previous Conversations posts, where the conversation has happened through writing, this post is an edited transcription of a vocal conversation.
Olivia: Okay, so first off, how did you become interested in spoken word and visual art?
Nathan: It starts at my salvation for me. So I was saved later in life, like 21/22 when it happened. Yahweh pulled me out of a lot of muck, a lot of gross and . . . not-life. He pulled me from death to life. And what ties very closely to my desire for poetry—and then spoken word—is my learning disability.
So I was diagnosed with a learning disability at a very early age, and schooling, all things learning, all things reading and memorizing and spelling . . . all intellectually learning was just brutally difficult. And I just kind of separated, and I was an athlete, and I was a very good one, so I was like, “There’s something I could invest my energy into” and that was soccer, right? Sports came very easy to me. I enjoyed them; I enjoyed the very acute trial and error, risk and reward, and then the quick learning that happens in sports.
So this whole trial-and-error-system, gets-saved, strong-athlete side of me, and then God shows me that thinking about Him is like the basis—not just thinking about Him intellectually, like stroking your beard with a pipe in the corner (there’s room for that), but I think there is this space that I had a reason to then think hard. I had a reason to philosophize. I had a reason to think about, “Oh my gosh, all things are connected?!—to Yahweh?! Like there’s a source to all of this? And that just got me boosted! I just had a reason to study now. I had a reason to think or consider things.
It all started with theological stuff and slowly started spreading in some of my own personal history, so I saw how much—I never read a book! Like, Olivia, I read what I needed to, but then when Yahweh took over, I saw things worthy of learning; I’m learning about His world. That’s a completely different paradigm.
And I just started getting excited about words, and then one day I think I was going through some YouTube videos, and I came across spoken word. And I’ve always liked hip-hop, so this is like another connecting piece to spoken word. Yeah, hip-hop has always been fascinating to me. Even rhyme, right, that someone like Shakespeare writes a play; it’s in rhythm; there’s a cadence to it; there’s a story being told, and we’re getting the rhythm. It’s not much communication of like, “Hey pay attention, I’m gonna explain something to you: there’s a thing called rhyme, and it’s coming.” You don’t have to do that; we get it. And that’s really cool.
And my dad was the first one to encourage me to start writing poetry, and it was because I showed him a spoken word piece that was connected to a girl’s testimony. And my dad just said, “You should write your story.” And then the first poem I ever wrote was an extremely long—oh my gosh it needed editing!—but a poem, it was a spoken word piece that I just wrote my whole story. And hanging out with me, if you ever catch me around a fire or a 1-on-1, I wanna be authentic and genuine and real, so my first story was pretty raw. That started there. Spoken word and poetry was probably my first pursuit in these two art forms.
And drawing was always around. I drew occasionally because my dad was a landscape architect. I liked being creative, and again, remember, the intellect world was not what I passed my time with. So drawing occasionally, sports for sure. Drawing was kind of around, it just kinda just stayed around, but I never took it seriously. I was decent, but I never studied it. I only took three classes my whole life, one in middle school, one in high school, one in college, and they’re all basically Intro to Drawing. It wasn’t really serious. And then, segue. . .
Italy was probably when I started taking drawing really seriously, and it’s when I saw the street artists—their use of color, the looseness. It wasn’t tight. And when I say tight, I’ll define that real quick: I think sometimes we have the perception that drawings need to be a real illustration of reality, and what that’s called is photorealism. And I think there’s a real significant conversation that needs to happen around that topic, because most people say, “I can’t draw,” and they’re thinking about photorealism. I’ve had a couple times when I taught, people would ask, “Hey, I just don’t like my drawing…” So then, I’m noticing that there’s something that’s pretty rhythmic about people and drawing and how they relate to it. And it’s like, “It doesn’t look good. I don’t like it. It doesn’t look like…it. It doesn’t look like it.”
And I kept on observing and read a couple books, and the more and more I kept the sketch books, I started noticing that an artist who’s doing a visual work—you’re supposed to replicate reality, not like bring it out of reality and put it back on a piece of paper. So you’re supposed to just replicate it; you’re supposed to be similar to it; you’re not creating reality. And I think that’s a really big philosophical change, ‘cause then your drawings, if you’ve seen some of mine, there are times when like a one-line drawing exercise is really handsome. It looks really good. And why? Because you get it as the audience, I get it as the drawer/renderer, it communicates successfully. And I’m like, wow, why is that sometimes more successful than someone who tries their best to do an apple as real as possible, and then everyone steps back, and they’re like, “This looks like garbage,” or “I don’t like it,” or “It doesn’t look good.”
So that got me excited philosophically, that I think the artist’s role, one of their roles, is to replicate reality, to address looking upon reality. And it doesn’t need to be photorealism, because you’re dealing with perfection at that point. And a lot of artists talk about this, but people talk about this too, so I’m like, “wow, there’s a lot of cross-over here”: to pursue to be perfect is an endless goal, it’s gonna be only a dud. And we all understand that philosophically, but when someone gets to a piece of paper, and they draw it, they actually see the conflict of it a lot. So.
Drawing started in Italy, and I just started
keeping a sketchbook, and right around that time, there’s a whole bunch of
materials on YouTube I found and then two books I found that emphasize this
point: Loosen up. And then I studied a lot that a lot of greats did these
one-line exercises. Put it down. Render it quick. Give yourself 30 seconds. And
then I saw some of these street artists again, so it was kinda like a lot of
dominos happened that encouraged me, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, that’s right,
I did want to be a landscape architect!” So I just sketched a lot of buildings
and studied urban sketching.
So Italy was primitive for that block in drawing and illustrating, and then poetry, spoken word—that was really serious, I mean I thought I was gonna be a traveling speaker, which I kind of did. I did that after my TEDx. A lot of people asked me to start (universities) guest lecturing, and then Italy happened, so kinda all put that on pause, but yeah, that’s a full answer to how that started.
Olivia: Yeah. That’s so cool. All right, so what does creating art, whether through words or visuals, teach you about God as Creator? Or, what things about Him does creating art help you reflect on?
Nathan: I think I would start off by saying that this is a question that all humans should wrestle with. Because if we are all creative, and this is something I’ve had to learn how to defend because people sometimes can get very stubborn of like, “I’m not creative.” And what they’re trying to say semantically is, “I’m not an artist,” and if they’re wanting to make that distinction, that’s fine. But to say that they’re not creative is to deny a very core [part of their humanity]. In their semantics they’re not doing a good job of identifying it—but every human is creative. Every human is creative.
And it’s funny, because even when I say that, I’ve had people who are like “Mmm…?” ‘cause then they’re doing the artist thing, they’re doing the replication, [and thinking] “I’m not an artist.” And I’m like, “If you got dressed today, you put together some color combinations however you wanted to, but you put them together. If you made cereal, if you put toast in . . . there’s things in which you’re deducing, you’re grabbing materials, and you’re making something. That is what a creative person does—grabs materials that already exist, receives them or forms them into something. I’m like, “That’s creative.” That’s a very basic premise.
So, yeah, the creativeness of what this declares about Yahweh, man . . . it’s vast. I think that’s my first inclination, is that within His infinite mind . . . and it’s good, right. It’s that big and wide, when He goes to create it’s within His right to have a lot of details and intricacies. And let me give you an example. I’ve recently been blown away by this. I’ve been like freakin’ out. So I’m doing a little garden here. We have pots; this is a cute little apartment, we have a little balcony. And one thing I’ve been shocked by, and impressed, and it’s led me to meditate and ponder more is how colors within our natural world start with green a lot of the times. It starts at green, then it blossoms to a color.
And that’s been fascinating to me, because green kind of gets a poo-pooed posture. People are like, “Yeah, I mean green’s like, whatever. It’s cute; it’s good for balance.” And I’m like, yeah, that’s true; that’s all true. But do all colors—earth’s colors—start at green? Does it kinda spread off from there? That is very true in vegetables. A tomato starts green and then it can head towards a yellow, which is like a cherry, grape tomato. Jalapenos, same thing. Starts at green, and if you leave it longer on the stem, it will go to a purple, and then sometimes to a red. So I’m kinda freaking out, like God is hilarious—so creative.
To be continued…
In Part 2,
we’ll keep discussing what art teaches us about God and ourselves. To follow
Nathan on his artistic journey, find him on Instagram @nathan.b.adams
No comments:
Post a Comment