God Is The Artist

Deuteronomy 28:8 - 'The Lord will send a blessing on your barns and on everything you put your hand to. The Lord your God will bless you in the land he is giving you.'

All the talents Tom has are a blessing from God, and he wants to use them to give praise to God by spreading the Gospel, helping the stories to resonate further with people. Whether that be a visual reminder of your favourite passage, introducing new and unfamiliar stories, or providing a different insight through a visual representation, the goal is to bring people to the gospels.

God has given us all the greatest gifts of mercy, grace and life. Tom just want to give thanks to him and spread his word.

Creative process

Tom's Faith And Love Of Art Explained

Tom works exclusively in acrylic paintings. He previously painted landscapes inspired by his travels, but has since moved to Biblical subjects, to help explore and showcase the gospels. Initially he took inspiration from AI generated images he saw online, painting his own versions on paper. However, he wanted to really explore his own understanding of these stories, so he went back to learning about how to bring together his own images, reading many books on drawing forms, painting techniques, colour theory, and drawing from imagination, as well as studying further the stories of the Bible to get a greater understanding of the scenes.

All of these compositions then come to him from God. He makes a rough sketch, plays about with various details, and will start working on canvas. These will often have many layers as he will tweak certain elements of the composition or colour combinations until he is happy with the final result.

The Bible is kept open during the painting to refer back to the scriptures of inspiration, with worship music playing in the background, so that he can remember that God is the true creator. He puts the inspiration on Tom's heart, who merely tries to express it.

Tom's love of art showed early on and was nurtured by his mum, who would regularly come up with artistic activities based on their daily walks through the fields behind their home, making little cotton wool sheep and drawing the trains that they saw going by. This continued as he got older, drawing his own Yu-Gi-Oh cards, superheroes and entering various competitions in local village fairs. By the time he was in secondary school, he was listed on the Gifted and Talented register for art, and left with an A at GCSE. However, he would them take more of a focus on STEM subjects, with a particular emphasis on maths, which he would go on to study at University.

Artwork would take a backseat for a number of years until he started working. Tom loves working in data, but he did feel the need for a creative outlet to 'switch off' at the end of the day, so he picked up a sketch pad. He started simply drawing music acts he was listening to at the time, later becoming inspired to paint landscapes based on his travels, taking a particular interest from the architecture of European cities like Florence, Paris and Prague, as well as bolder colour pallets from the street art seen in the US and Colombia. This would take a while for him to get back into, as it had been a number of years since he painted, and even back at school he had more of a talent with drawing, but he was determined to not only get comfortable again with paints, but improve on what he was previously capable of. He would have moderate success with his landscapes, developing finer detail, establishing a preferred style, even selling paintings in Australia, Europe, North America, and exhibiting over the UK. However, the inspiration started to shift to more Christian themes as he rediscovered his faith and found works by incredible Christian artists online, most notably Vanessa Hora Buena, Sam Ryan, Joel Pilcher, and more.

Similarly to how his art took a backseat before a revival, Tom's faith would follow a similar path. Whilst not coming from a religious family, Tom grew up mostly in small villages with a church community. Particularly during his latter years of primary school, he would regularly attend church and participate in readings or musical performances. He then attended a christian foundation school requiring regular church attendance. Whilst he understood the morals of Christianity, he was never fully convinced about the reliability of the events in the Bible, and so simply walked away from religion. However, during years at university and early years of work, he couldn't help but feel that without Christianity centring his morals, there was something lacking. There were key standards that used to be so fundamental to him that were no longer present. Initially this had been liberating, a release of certain pressures, but after finding a new level of self confidence at university, he was not feeling the same weight from the though of aspiring to those values, instead, he felt a greater appreciation for their need in life.

So, a few years after work started, he went back to church to try and both re-centre his morals around the teachings of Christ, but also try to answer some of the questions around the reliability of biblical events that he was previously unable to find answers to. This was not a quick journey. He found many answers from Christians purely centred around faith, i.e. 'It's written in the Bible so it must be true,' sentiments which, whilst noble in their faith, were not convincing to him and would come across as very naive. But eventually, he was able to find a deeper understanding of what Christianity is truly about and start to obtain answers which, whilst he may not understand fully, give him enough to take the rest on faith. Following this, he wants to share the stories of the Bible with a level of explanation and meaning that he did not achieve in those early years, and expand on some of his learning to the tougher questions on this site, through both his art and his blog.

He hopes there is something here for everyone exploring Christianity.