Art Is: A Journey into the Light Audiobook

From a widely celebrated artist, this dazzling book takes listeners on a profound journey into the heart of creativity

When Makoto Fujimura painted as a child, he felt a mysterious electrical charge pass through him. Over decades of art making, writing, and reflecting in his studio, he has come to understand this charge as his Creator—a source he connects with most profoundly when making art. To be human is to be creative, Fujimura believes, and art making is a discipline of awareness, prayer, and praise by which we journey back to our original light.

In this book, Fujimura takes listeners along on his meandering journey as an artist. We witness him making his “process-driven slow art”—using pulverized minerals, gold, or pigments made from oyster shell—as he considers the plants and wildlife on the land where he lives. He draws on Japanese aesthetics, modernist art, Christian theology, sado (art of tea), literature, ecology, and personal narrative, with inspiration ranging from William Blake’s poetry to the art of Mark Rothko and Josef Albers, and from the wisdom of Scripture and Japanese tea master Sen no Rikyū to the traditional Japanese painting technique called Nihonga.

Bringing together the author’s written reflections and his paintings, drawings, and photographs, Art Is invites us to see the world in prismatic and diverse lights, helping us navigate the fractured, divisive times we live in.

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“When reading Makoto Fujimura’s Art Is, I hear song sparrows, bluebirds, and a goldfinch deliver an impossible peace with his paintings. Like William Blake’s, his faith is a door to his imagination. Working to the rhythm of slow art practice, Makoto Fujimura is a master painter very much in the present.”

— Susie Ibarra, Pulitzer Prize–winning composer, percussionist, sound artist