I am looking at Charlie Classe’s version of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. The swirl of stars tumbles in purple and green onto a curved horizon. Yellow crayon resists green watercolor, making the hills look like they are reaching for the stars. The moon and planets, encircled by bright yellow rays, blink across the night. The heavens are set in motion by curves of pink crayon peeking through a turquoise sky. When I look at stars, I am reminded of our creator God who “made the stars also.” I picture God the Father with a handful of glitter, casting stars through the heavens for signs and seasons, and for beauty.
We worship a God who, in his love for us, made us in his image. We are created creative. When I walk through the halls of The Geneva School, I can feel the creative energy glowing out of classroom doorways, bubbling in hallway conversations, and floating in a noontime blessing sung before lunch.
Charlie’s cloud-like cascade of stars tumbles like a waterfall onto the horizon. I wonder if she remembers that van Gogh liked to make water look like land and land look like water. A large brown cypress tree, a symbol of death, pierces her green and purple scribbles. Charlie has filled the triangular negative space formed by the tree and cloud, with a rainbow. I love rainbows. When teaching art, there are times when it seems God reaches in and reveals something that had never occurred to me. Once, we were studying Noah’s ark in the second grade. I was explaining with excitement something I did not understand until I was an adult: “Did you know that the ark is a symbol of salvation through Christ? The ark cradled Noah and his family saving them from destruction in the same way Jesus rescues us from sin and death.” “Jesus is the ‘what’ of the world?” I solicit, and get a variety of answers and land on the one I am after: “Yes, He is the Light of the world.” Even though it is probably a bit over their heads, but we talk about white light. “When you put a prism up to a light, or if sunlight shines through a crystal in a chandelier, what do you see?” “A rainbow!” someone will invariably exclaim and somehow God’s symbol for His promise not to destroy the earth again by flood, becomes potent with meaning. Jesus is all the colors. They are a picture of Him. We see it again in the story of Joseph. His coat, like the cloak of righteousness we are wrapped in, is multicolored. Our coat is so full of color it is white.
The first-grade children learn that Van Gogh repeats the shape of the looming cypress with the steeple and church in the little town beneath the stars. The actual scene he was painting did not have a church. He added it by his own invention. When Charlie was finishing up her painting, she left an unpainted section underneath the village. The stark white is interrupted by black crayon dashes that look like quotation marks . Will Coleclasure, the art assistant, suggested “Don’t you want to color the ground underneath the church?” “No” Charlie responded, “it’s in the clouds.” As I look at it I think of the New Jerusalem, descending from the clouds, where the streets are of gold the color of clear glass, its foundation made of every color of stone imaginable, and whose light is the Light of the World.
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