The decision to run a week’s studio-based art course at WYSOCS (the West Yorkshire School of Christian Studies) arose out of conversations following a day of art lectures in the summer of 2006.
There have been many opportunities for Christian art students to listen to good speakers, and to see some excellent work by practitioners — but, since the 1980s, when students used to draw and paint together at John Stott’s cottage in Wales, ‘The Hooksies’, there have been hardly any workshop situations where Christians could work out together in practical terms what it means to respond to God’s creation around us.
The title of the course, ‘Visual Encounters and Artistic Practice’, was intended to reflect the fact that artists are making discoveries, and finding new methods to record them, within a creation which God originally saw and declared to be good.
