Why I Paint — Beauty as Testimony to Eternal Truth

I’ve been thinking again about why I paint. Why spend years with brushes, light, and paper, when a camera could fix a scene in a heartbeat and another artist could render every detail with precision? I love nature, but mere accuracy leaves me restless. The air on your skin, the wind gathering over water, the rustling of trees and grasses—there’s something alive there that can’t be caught by representation alone. I’m not chasing the world exactly as it is, but as it ought to be—as we know, somewhere deep down, it was meant to be: not just ordinary, but eternal.

Scripture says, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” If that is true—as the sky says, as the dirt says, as the breath in our lungs says—then the most important reality in any landscape is not the trees or shoreline, but the One who made them. All our mortal preoccupations grow small beside Him. And yet the world we move through is bent. It is lovely and wrong at once, groaning with brokenness and freighted with mercy. We learn to live as if the fracture were normal.

Years ago, I sat in a crowded waiting room on a college campus. People murmured about schedules and scholarships; I was there to lead a tour. I remember this sudden ache to stand up and say, “Think about your life! Think about your eternity!” I didn’t, but the desire to communicate the truth never left. My work in the studio has become that kind of speech—the kind that matters.

I’ve always loved Lewis and Tolkien for how they “sneaked past the watchful dragons,” how beauty could carry truth without kitsch or slogans. That’s what I’m aiming for in every piece. My landscapes are not just landscapes. They’re the feeling of being outside, yes, and how we need it! And for some people, that’s enough. 

But my landscapes are also the feeling of being human: walking through a broken country with a homesickness for redemption; grieving what’s lost and beginning to heal; holding a battered, defiant hope that truth is stronger than sorrow. If Christian landscape painting means anything beyond décor, it is this: a visual reminder that the world is fallen but not forsaken, wounded yet watched over.

When I paint, I’m not reproducing nature so much as responding to it. Creation doesn’t merely reflect light; it speaks. Psalm 19 isn’t just a metaphor, and I’m trying to capture some small part of the same thing. I paint skies that testify, water that remembers, horizons that lean forward like promises. The forms you see—tree line, dune, cloud-bank—are ordered toward meaning. They are witnesses, pointing beyond themselves to the Maker they can’t contain. 

I call this new body of work Daylight. Dawn over open fields, light spilling like gold through bare branches, trees blinded by haze, ruins and grasses washed in clarity—luminous landscapes that hold a small echo of renewal. This collection isn’t an escape from the real world; it’s a way of truly seeing it. The earth is wrong, but it’s still radiant. Habakkuk says the knowledge of the Lord’s glory will one day fill the earth as waters cover the sea. I paint toward that day.

The studio, for me, is one place where belief meets practice. The slow work—stretching canvas, mixing color, waiting for layers to dry, walking outside to listen to the wind—isn’t holy in itself, but it trains attention. I can slow down to remember; I can look long enough for the ordinary to confess its meaning.

I don’t paint to persuade or to preach. These paintings are not icons. They’re not prayers. They’re not images of God.

But I paint because beauty still tells the truth. If the world is fallen and yet full of rumor, if we are dust and yet beloved, then the truest thing I can do is to paint as one who believes it. When light falls across a quiet place, I remember that darkness doesn’t get the final word. If someone stands before a canvas and remembers even the smallest sense that something eternal has brushed near, then the painting has done its work. This is my small part in the church’s long confession—that the fine art of hope is not sentimentality but fidelity.

Light over darkness is not a mood; it is a fact secured by a risen Christ.

So I keep painting the light I’ve been given, trusting the One who gives it. Beauty points beyond itself. And truth, in the end, will fill the world.

Daylight is coming very soon. If you resonate with any of this, join my email list below, and watch. And feel free to leave a comment. I’d love to hear your story.