The Art Ministry

Making as a Spiritual Construct

A Note about The Art Ministry before reading:

This is the first in a series of stories weaving Principles and Elements of Design, with Spirituality. For much of the past decade, I’ve reflected in the similarities between the way Art and Life are “Made.” The Art Ministry story series is my attempt to share these ideas with you. They are longer posts, but it is my hope you will find them worthwhile to dig into. I should also add, these stories are true (as I perceived them.) Please consider sharing your thoughts, or sharing with your friends and loved ones.

Warmly,

Becca

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The first time I met Dan was at 11 pm on a Monday. After our son was born, I began taking evening phone calls with friends on the front steps of our house between feedings. The habit stuck. It was the furthest point from the baby’s room. There were fewer mosquitos than in the backyard. It felt oddly like the most private place, yet was the most public place in other ways.

Dan bought the house across the street a few months earlier. My first time seeing him was doing yard work at 11 pm on a balmy June night. Over the next months I’d see him regularly. Sometimes his dog would romp around. I’d be yammering away on the phone, and he’d be weeding. It was oddly comforting… both of us engaging in late night activities while everyone else was heading to sleep.

Eventually one morning I saw him mowing his lawn. (To be fair, Dan only did quiet yard work at midnight.) I introduced myself formally. He was immediately charming, if not a little uncomfortable. I liked him out the gate. “You must be wondering why I do yard work at night” he said to me. “You must be wondering why I talk on the phone at the same hour,” I chuckled in return. We had a good laugh, and quickly became friends.

I’d learn over ensuing months Dan was wicked smart. Born to a first generation single Taiwanese mother in Chinatown, NYC, he was a self-taught computer, finance geek. Over the years, he married his love for computers with accounting. Large companies began fighting to hire him for his rare mix of money and tech smarts. The rest of what he did eluded me. It was a stressful line of work, and he shared that night yard work was a way to unwind. “It’s too hot in Austin to do summer yard work any other time, and I’m logging into work at 5 am most days.”

Eventually my husband began bonding with Dan over tech chats, and the three of us became real neighbors. By this point Braeden was two years old. Just like us, he gravitated towards Dan’s gentle energy. I’d often catch him carrying a stick around the back yard, blowing pretend leaves. “I’m Dan,” he’d chirp happily.

In addition to his calm, kind nature, Dan was lonely. He struggled to make friends in Austin after leaving California. “I work too much,” he lamented. “I’m thinking about taking a sabbatical and going to LA.” I put him on our email list for hangouts with friends. Dan thanked me profusely every time I saw him, but he never joined us. Still, our front yard chats were regular and enduring. Perhaps Dan was slow to warm, and would join us when the time was right.

In May of 2024 I was setting up an art workshop at a wellness retreat in north Austin when my phone buzzed. It was a text from my husband: “Hey, Dan’s co-worker is at our house. Dan hasn’t logged into work for two weeks, and they’re worried about him.” Jason asked if I could try calling him. My heart plummeted into my stomach.

I knew before I knew.

I punched his name into my phone. No answer. Try again. No answer. After my third round my text buzzed again:

“Never Mind. You can stop calling.” Then Jason did something he almost never does. He posted a crying emoji.

I crumpled to the art studio floor and wept.

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In 2016 I got my first large corporate illustration client in Austin. I wasn’t looking to start an illustration business. I was painting chalkboards for local food trucks and bars, waiting tables, and trying to get a local coloring book of the city self-published. The coloring book caught the attention of the beloved Texas grocer, HEB. They reached out about designing a reusable bag together.

I emphatically agreed, before realizing I didn’t have the tools of a designer. Even my coloring book was basically scanned pen drawings. They wanted a vector image, and all I had was pencil and paper. Scrapping in a hurry I offered a portion of my deposit to a friend with Photoshop. I sent literal pencil/eraser edits to HEB’s team using my iPhone. Looking back I cringe a little. They put a tremendous amount of faith in me to deliver. My friend vectorized the final illustration, and the work was printed on 90,000 bags for Earth Day.

That design was my first large payout as an artist. I used some of the money to buy a tablet and stylus. I enthusiastically taught myself to draw digitally. It was exceptionally fun, but something was immediately, noticeably ‘off.’ Other digital artists were certainly extracting meaningful imagery direct from the screen, but not me. Compared to my ink work, the digital was terribly flat. I stumbled for a few months before realizing I needed the pencil. I am a lo-fi illustrator. I need limitations, static, and tooth of paper in order to make sincere work. I began doing designs with pencil on paper before importing them into the tablet for re-rendering. The difference was palpable. Ever since, each of my corporate gigs is drawn in pencil before re-rendering it digitally. No one knows the pencil was there first, but the feeling is there.

I can remove the pencil, but the energy of the pencil remains forever.

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Jason wouldn’t talk much about the day Dan’s co-worker found him. I never pushed. I am thankful he didn’t enter the house. He was outside with Braeden when Dan’s co-worker and wife successfully pried their way into the garage. I don’t know what it must have sounded like to hear their shrieks upon finding him, but I take my husband’s hesitancy to talk about it as more than enough description. Dan had taken his own life, and Jason immediately pulled Braeden into our house. For weeks we didn’t know much more than that.

After a few months, Dan’s mother came down from NYC and moved in. Some of the neighbors mumbled private sympathies towards her: “Poor woman. How tragic. Just terrible.” Jason and I toggled back and forth on how to approach her. Admittedly those first weeks we opted for saying nothing. Then one day as I was hurrying out the front door, purse in hand, Dan popped in. When I say ‘popped in’ I mean, into my imagination.

Before I tell you this next part of the story, I want to take a short detour. Like all detours, the travel is longer. It might be worth it. Maybe it won’t. Stick with me though, because I think this part is important.

Pablo Picasso famously said: “Everything you can imagine is real.” It’s most popularly taken to mean everything in our world first started in someone’s imagination. I haven’t run across someone who directly chatted with Picasso on his intention for this nugget. Who are any of us to really know what he meant? Even if this is exactly what he meant… I feel artist to artist he might be onboard with me interpreting it in a new way.

In quantum physics, the wave-particle duality, states that photons and electrons exhibit particle or wave properties depending on who is looking at it, (and what they expect to see.) I have yet to hear a more compelling case for how thoughts literally create reality. To me, I’ve always wondered if Picasso was saying: The act of imagining something brings forth that thing… somewhere, somehow. That everything that crosses between our ears should not be written off as mere myth. We have barely scratched the truth of the multi-verse and reality.

I share this because when people dead or alive “pop into my head” I have gotten to place in my life where I assume they are not only my imagination, but literally there. On that day when Dan showed up I did what I’ve now learned to do: I talked back.

“I’m mad at you,” I told him.

“I know.”

<Sheepish silence>

“What do you want?”

<Pause>

“Please check on my mom.”

Maybe you would be wondering why in having this experience I believed to be downright magical, that I would be such a jerk. Looking back, I wonder the same. In that moment though, my anger melted. Of course he’d want me to check on his mom. I tapped in with him a few more times but there was only silence.

The pencil line disappears, but the energy is still there.

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If I wrote about how I came to believe the thing in my imagination that day was in fact, Dan… this story would fill chapters. For another time. All to say, over the years I’ve learned to take that thing seriously.

It still doesn’t get easier.

What do I say, Dan? “Hi, I’m your neighbor across the street. Your dead son asked me to check in on you.” What would you say if a stranger said such a thing to you?

I knocked on Alice’s door later that night. I had decided a better thing to say was: “Hi, I’m your neighbor across the street. Can I bring you some food?” Alice declined the food, but later that night came across the street. She had mail from Dan’s bank, and wondered could we help her read it?

It turned out Alice didn’t need food. Months later we’d invite her over for dinner and her fried rice would be the best I’d ever had. Alice did struggle with English. We learned Dan had taken care of everything for her. As he and his brother grew up, she worked two jobs to support them. Dan eventually began getting high paying work, and took over her bills so she could retire early. When his life ended suddenly, his money got tied up in probate. Alice was quite literally in need of lots of checking in on. Reading mail, paying things on time, or simply figuring out how to get her son’s Tesla to roll the windows down. These were all things she gratefully called upon us for over the next months.

One day another “thought" popped in on an unlikely Tuesday afternoon, while sweeping the front sidewalk. Maybe you’re wondering how someone is supposed to entertain everything their imagination pops up? It’s a good question. Wouldn’t we all drown in overwhelm?

Well. YES. (I speak from experience).

I began exploring the idea that my imagination was something “real” a decade ago. In the beginning I tried listening to everything and nearly gave myself a mental breakdown. Over the years, what made most sense was to pay attention when a thing showed up, that made me really want to create something. Just as imagination lights a fire in my belly to draw wild stuff, sometimes it lights a fire in my belly to LIVE wild stuff. There is so much more to this story, but for now this is sufficient to share what happened next with Alice.

What I thought on our sidewalk that Tuesday: “You should tell Alice about your immortal chat with Dan.”

Maybe artists will relate to the absolutely unpredictable nature of imagination. Maybe they will know that taking dictation from the imagination sometimes feels irresponsible at best, and dangerous at worst. Talking to Alice about this was positively terrifying. Not to mention possibly thoughtless.

I wrote a post recently comparing Artists to sieves. We pull the world into our bodies, filter it through our cells, and out comes the work.

Artists inhale the world, and exhale the work.

Creatives are wired to be sensitive. They filter like a sieve into their physical bodies, and make things from that monstrous flow. What if we didn’t just inhale things from this world? What if the sieve drew things in from other worlds too? I started this Substack because I wanted to write about my experience with the latter. I have come to believe folks who feel compelled to create, are radio receivers for the downright supernatural. Whether they experience it as such or not. Whether this idea intrigues you, annoys you, or pisses you off, it’s an idea that has been around for a very long time. I believe it’s an idea whose time has come back around.

There’s two things I know are true at this point in the story:

1. You’re still reading

2. All of us are sensitive enough

It’s why when I show people digital drawings first done in pencil, they like them better than the non-pencil ones. It’s why digital art that was re-rendered from pencil sells much better overall. It’s why sales data is such I don’t bother doing straight digital art without that pencil draft any longer.

People feel the presence of the pencil from the past. They feel it even though it’s been covered and erased long ago. They feel the way the pencil brings out my energy. They feel the way the art is simply… better. They couldn’t say why, but they feel it nonetheless. Likewise I can no longer experience Dan with my five senses. Yet just like the pencil layer, he still exists.

My life with the invisible stuff is better. Just as my art with the pencil layer no one can see… is also better.

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Alice and I stood in her front yard on the afternoon I told her about Dan. The yard was (and still is) impeccable. It turned out Dan inherited his passion for yard work from her.

“Do you believe in the metaphysical?” I started by asking her.

She didn’t have a translation for that word. I settled for “psychic” which was cringey, but she immediately nodded in understanding. I noted she received the word favorably.

“The day I came to your house that first time, Dan showed up to me. He told me to check in on you. I’ve wanted to tell you this for a long time.” I was poised to give her a disclaimer. I was sorry if it hurt her more. I hoped it would give her comfort.

I didn’t need to do that though because Alice was crying and laughing.

“Dan is with me all the time,” she said. “He knows I need him. He did everything for me, and it is so hard without him.” She began to tell me story after story. How she couldn’t get the coffee maker to work, and Dan would guide her hand. How she got lost on the way to the Tesla mechanic, and suddenly her Google Maps magically fixed itself. Who was I to tell her these things could easily be a coincidence? Who was I tell to myself these things as well? This was how I learned that just like me, Alice needed a life of the invisible. I think we all need this in our lives.

“I know in my heart he would have told you to come to help me. Thank you.”

I tried to give Alice a hug then. She backed away awkwardly, but not unkindly. Perhaps it’s a tall order to ask Taiwanese mothers to hug relative strangers. I wonder if she hugged Dan, I found myself thinking. Dan popped into my mind just in that moment, and I heard:

She does now.