The EMCAPP Journal Christian Psychology Around The World - number 15, 2020 About the Artist: John Freeman (Australia) by interview with Werner May Werner: First of all I would like to ask you to give us some insight into your life development, your family situation and your professional ways. John:I have been married to Janie for nearly 40 years, we have four grown up children and two beautiful grandsons. We currently live on the Fleurieu Peninsular in South Australia, a beautiful part of the world with sea, hills and grape vines. I trained as an Art teacher and taught art for over a decade. The next season of my life was focused on raising a family, and various entrepreneurial enterprises. I spent 30 years in the commercial environment retiring at 60 after selling my online training company to a University consortium. I have been retired for over six years and have had the great fortune to have the time to pursue my passions: family, reading and of course Art. It is in the past decade that I have returned to painting, first in my spare time and then after retirement, at my pleasure. My current work endeavours to create something beautiful, playful and joyful, but also uses abstraction as a means to facilitate imagination and self-awareness in the viewer. Werner: Now of course I am interested in your spiritual development, because we stay not the same person and not the same Christian in the years of our lives. John: Having grown up in a loving, but rather dysfunctional family, I became a Christian around nineteen years of age. I had what is described as a “born again” experience which radically changed my life, my values and how I perceived the world. For about 25 years up until the time of my retirement, my family and I were very involved in a Protestant church, where I was an Elder for over 20 of those years. Around the time of my retirement we had an incident in our Church community that caused me to evaluate my life and critique my understanding, knowledge and experience of God and the institutional church. After a considerable amount of questioning, reading, reflection, and anguish, I stepped away from an Evangelical or Christian fundamentalist view of the world. I came to see, for me, that my understanding and experience of the Divine was determined and confined within a Christian Protestant framework. It was a structure of prescribed beliefs, dogma, and cultural bias that determined how I viewed myself and my world. For my journey, what became important to me was an expression of love that was open, diverse, and inclusive. I embraced mystery and the contemplative path. A deep awareness of the divine and a hunger for that presence in my life caused me to seek in a broader more open manner of inquiry. My spiritual practice began to include readings from a diverse range of religious and theological perspectives, mindfulness, meditation and yoga. My life experience, education and openness has enabled me to come to a richer understanding and experience of the Divine. Silence and stillness have been one of the doors that have opened me to this deeper awareness. I8 came to believe that I was not my thoughts and that there was a deeper presence that can be experienced. As Pierre Teillard de Chardin has clearly articulated, „We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.“ Werner: Which famous painters have inspired you? John: My greatest inspiration in the past and now is Vincent Van Gogh. His anguished and tormented life, along with his sense of the Divine, enabled him to produce the most beautiful and authentic images that account for his unique journey. I have also been inspired by Matisse and the German Expressionists for their use of vibrant expressive colours. Werner: Your work is characterized by symbols. Why are they important for you and which are preferred? John: My early work was generally about narratives from the Bible. More recently I have moved to an abstract expressionist style of painting. Abstraction allows a different engagement with the viewer. At a more basic level, the intent for me is less about communicating an ideology or world view and more about imagination and self-awareness. However, I have still retained the image of a bird in all my paintings. Images, like words, speak of and point to another reality. This image for me represents the Sacred, Divine, God, or a deeper reality. The bird stands apart from humanity, it is a different being, separate from our world and able to view our world from a higher perspective. In this sense it speaks of the transcendence of God. However, its subtle presence in all the images also speaks of the immanence of God. Like the sacred, it is not easily identified, one has to look and seek in order to find it. The divine, although veiled, is imbued in the whole of life. Werner: Can you focus in some sentences what is in your heart? John: Having arrived at this particular season of life (I am 67) with the experiences that life has brought, I have a great sense of gratitude. What enchants and allures me can be summed up in four sentences, I am sure you are familiar with. Be still and know that I am God. The Kingdom of God is within. In him we live and move and have our being. God is Love. I would hope that my art reflects the joy and beauty of this life we have, and also lead people to a greater awareness of the Sacred in their own lives. https://www.johnfreemanart.com/
