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JR: Steve Turner, the British poet and writer has said in a short text entitled Being There: A Vision for Christians and the Arts. "I’ve always had the conviction that Christians should be involved in the mainstream of our culture. Part of the health of our democratic society is that we debate and that there is always a vigorous discussion taking place about who we are and what truly matters. However, there is often a noticeable lack of Christian contributions to this process." Do you think that a Christian who is an artist has something particular or different to, as Mr. Turner says, "contribute to the process?" And what strategies do Christians need to take to engage the creative debate?

MF: First of all, we have to be honest about our own conditions. We as Christians are far from having perfected our own condition or having arrived at any perfection. It just shows God’s grace and mercy because we tend to be the ones who are misfits. Second of all, artists of faith do need to get together to exhibit. We need to be working as a whole, as a community. Working in collaboration and pushing each other sharpens our calling and our gifts. It is the ultimate way to be able to both grieve with the world but also serve the world that needs love. New York City is full of isolated individuals who are enormously gifted and yet they have no hope. In an Art in America interview Eric Fischl spoke of four tasks artists have historically, within the Christian tradition, been asked to do: to imagine what heaven is like, what hell is like, to imagine the garden of Eden before the fall and after the fall. He notes that artists have generally become specialized and that it is rare to find an artist whose work encompasses all of these. This poses a question about our ability to show the grace of God working through us. Can we show the reality of heaven and the reality of hell? To the world they are fantasies but to us these are realities with weighty substance. These are even more weighty than the reality of what we experience today. We need to create with that understanding. I think the world is longing for artists who have the expressive range to create a picture, a vision, of where we are going.

JR: In 1997, you had an exhibition entitled Images of Grace. How does the process of making a painting, using the techniques that you do, engage the idea of grace or give weight to grace?

MF: The pigments I use have a semi-transparent layering effect that traps light in the space created between the pigments and between layers of gold or silver foil. This creates a "grace arena" in which light which is caught creates space. It is neither the Renaissance system of creating pictorial depth through perspective nor is it the Modernist emphasis on the surface space. It is much more similar to the stained-glass window. This approach creates the effect of space rising and falling through these veils of pigment. In Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil states that there are only two operating forces in the world, one is gravity and the other is grace. That is precisely what I am trying to do with these pigments.

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