Artists are often depicted as solitary characters, whiling away days – and nights – in their studios, often with a tortured expression. But while creativity can sometimes inspire an isolated lifestyle, a collective of Christian creatives are seeking to offer an alternative. Bezalel – an arts community set up in 2011 to bring creatives together – believes that creativity has an essential role to play in enabling any community to flourish.
This group of 20-something artists have united around their shared love of community, creativity and God to develop Bezalel, which hopes to bring together other artists and support them.
Although there's a danger of this all sounding pretty theoretical and convoluted, the idea is simple: "God created us to be both creative and to live in community with each other", says Christy Balfour, an artist involved with the project. And so that is what these friends are seeking to live out.
The idea is in Bezalel's DNA, right down to the choice of name. Bezalel was the first artist in Bible, found in the book of Exodus, who created beautiful things and was surrounded by a community that supported him in it. The word in Hebrew means "under the shadow of God".
Three of the collective – Dom, Becky and Christy – are in the middle of launching workshops in London as a way of putting their theory into practice. They will offer activities such as drawing, weaving, flower arranging, calligraphy, cooking and photography and the hope is to bring people together over a shared interest, and encourage them to explore creativity.
"You're all coming together with a common purpose, and you're working with your hands so you have a distraction," Christy says.
"There's no pressure to talk, if there are gaps in the conversation it doesn't feel awkward."
The group are keen to avoid the stereotypes often attributed to religious organisations, and said that Bezalel workshops wont be explicitly evangelistic, although they aren't adverse to chatting about their faith if asked about it.
Rather than creating an environment where people "feel preached to or controlled in any way", the "dream is for people to be able to come as they are, and be honest," Christy says.
Where many fear religion is synonymous with control, Bezalel is seeking to defy this.
"Bezalel wasn't formed around a set of rules, it was formed around the desire to encourage, ennoble and inspire people to find their own creative expression," says Becky.
This approach is foundational to Bezalel – they are a group seeking to build relationships, not an organisation seeking to constrain. They want to create something people are keen to get involved in, not impose themselves, or their ideas, on people who don't want to listen.
The vision is not to be a group of artists "desperately trying to persuade our culture that they are needed", but rather to live "in a way that people can begin to see and understand how necessary creative expression can be," Dom says.
All of this is rooted in the group's scriptural understanding of God's creativity and how that impacts on humanity, as people made in his image. While the world might put "creatives" in a box, as a separate sub-genre alongside the "sporty" or the "clever", Bezalel suggests creativity is inherent in everyone's identity.
"The question ceases to be whether one is creative, rather, how one is creative," says Dom.
In this way, "creativity isn't confined to art... but is the idea of creating something that wasn't there before," Becky adds.
But what does this actually look like?
Although the image of creative community may sound attractive, the reality is that it hasn't come easily. There's been a lot of 'stuff' to work out, and many uncomfortable and honest conversations had in order to cultivate the community growing with Bezalel.
It has "been a challenge to obey God in how we love each other," says Christy. "There have been so many miscommunications, difficult conversations, grumpy emails, and so many opportunities for us to withdraw from each other, to stop being honest with each other and prioritise our own comfort or safety over our relationship.
"However, time and time again, God has pushed us to commit to one another and to what we are building," she says.
Instead of being a community plagued by rules, Bezalel has chosen to build its foundations on relationships and God.
"He has enabled us to build relationships not built upon agreement, but on a commitment to understand, respect and pursue one another regardless of our opinions," Becky says.
But this remains a challenge. "Intimacy is scary, letting someone in to see your more ugly character traits at the risk of being rejected, is never going to be easy.
"The beautiful thing is that God always pursues us, always welcomes us to go deeper with Him because He's not afraid of our flaws and has already given us victory over them. Therefore in order to love one another we simply have to believe what He is saying about us and what He's saying about the person we are working with!"
