“Daddy, draw me a horse.”  So begins a scene typical to my home a number of years ago.  One of my twin daughters, Rachel or Paige, would appear beside me with a colored marker pen and a sheet of paper, and ask me to become Artist Daddy.  Now, this not difficult.  Horses, stars, dogs, cats, and flowers are typical requests for little girls, and they measure the quality of my work not by their realism, but by whether or not the characters are smiling. So I accept the challenge.  I take the pen from her delicate fingers, smooth out her tousled paper, and draw.

The result is part caricature, part cave drawing, but she is delighted nonetheless.  “Thanks Daddy,” she will offer politely.  And then she would muse, “Her name is... um... Buttercup.”  And then she would add green grass, a yellow sun in the corner, and eyelashes (because this is how little girls distinguish girl horsies from boy horsies).

This, to me, is a picture of the first Chapter of Genesis.  God the Father is also God the Artist.  It is not just what He does; it is more precisely who He is.  And because He is the Creator, the Artist God, He must stretch the canvas of infinite emptiness around Him, and wish for more.  Then, from the eternal imagination that is His nature, He begins to paint: galaxies, nebulae, capacious, dynamic kaleidoscopes of light and energy and mass, churning and coagulating at His fingertips.  Mass yields to gravity, atoms become molecules, stars begin their intricate dance.  Cosmos comes from chaos.  And by His very will, the Artist God paints the universe we know and understand and live in.

Then He stands back.  He puts down his palate, cleans his brush, examines the easel.  He smells the wet acrylic, feels the interplay of colors on the canvas.  He takes it all in, and then He slowly smiles.  And then He calls it “good.”

But He is not done yet.  He calls on His creation, that which is humanity, that which is privileged to experience the wonder of it all, and invites him to participate in this creation.  Abba God calls Adam to His side, and then gives him a job to do: to name the animals.  And in so doing, He calls us to be creative himself.  The created becomes creator, the art becomes artist.  We are invited into the mystery of His inborn aesthetic.

Genesis says that we are made in His image.  This is more profound than we know.  We are made with intellects, with the amazing capacity to understand and ponder and offer explanations about the world around us.  We have sentience, the awareness of our own being and a consciousness of the universe.  We have the ability to build machines, create cities, form entire civilizations, and then destroy them.  We can philosophize, moralize, theorize, and know good and evil.  And we are made not just as physical beings, but as spiritual beings as well.  We are made with a capacity to love as He loved.  To have free will, as He has free will.  To choose the course of our own lives.  And also, to create as He creates.  To express ourselves in artistic and imaginative ways.  In short, we are artists because He is an artist.

Thus, as artists, we are endowed with both the ability and the desire to create, and the ability to derive pleasure from it. Human creativity is a part of the cultural mandate—to be fruitful and multiply, and to care for and steward the earth (Genesis 1:26–28, 2:19–20).  God also created the unspoken aesthetic to which we aspire. We are endowed with an innate, mysterious understanding of this aesthetic (Romans 1:20), and thus we are moved by beauty and art, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. It is another aspect of us being made in God’s image, and another aspect of God’s revelation of Himself to the created universe.

In short, we create because we are made in the image of the Creator.  We simply cannot help it.  This is why Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel.  This is why Homer told his stories.  This is why Shakespeare penned his dramas.  This is why David played the ten-string lyre.  This is why children draw and play act and imagine.

That is who we are: artists.  Children of the Creator. We grasp at sunsets and attempt to paint them.  We hear the sound of the ocean and compose sonnets in its honor.  We see the autumn swans dance, and we dance.  And we draw horses named Buttercup.

Excerpted from Imagine That: Discovering Your Unique Role as a Christian Artist, released by Moody Publishers in July 2009.  Visit Amazon.com or your local Christian bookstore.