Artist and storyteller Joel Schoon-Tanis shares the heart behind his art

LOUISVILLE — Joel Schoon-Tanis is already the artist-in-residence at his church in Holland, Michigan. This summer, he’ll establish a mobile studio Montreat Conference Center for a two-week stint as the artist-in-residence for the Presbyterian Association of Musicians’ Worship & Music Conference.

This week, Schoon-Tanis joined hosts Sarah Abushakra and Jeremy Roberts for their “Sounding Board” podcast. Follow their 73-minute conversation here. Schoon-Tanis is introduced at the 7:50 mark.

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“I have always loved church and felt home in church, and I am super thankful to have two daughters who feel the same,” he told the hosts. His younger daughter arrives at church early every Sunday “to make sure everything is OK, and then she rings the bell,” he said. “She appointed herself bell-ringer,” which she does every Sunday 10 minutes ahead of the start of worship.

The son of a professor at Hope College in Holland, Schoon-Tanis attended the Christian liberal arts institution tuition-free. Halfway through his studies, he realized that “all I’ve ever wanted to do was paint and make stuff.” During his senior year, he met a woman in a painting class who was preparing to open an art gallery. “We became friends, and the next thing you know, I was her sole employee,” he said. She allowed him to show his work there. “It was the last time I held a real job,” he said, “but at the same time, people started buying my work.”

He said he’s always enjoyed the juxtaposition of painting childlike images “and the realistic.” He told the hosts he’s convinced “there are colors in God’s Creation we don’t know about yet.”

“I have this ache sometimes to find a color I expect to have on my palette but it’s not there,” he said. “To me, the new creation should be better than the old creation. That’s my hot take, and I’m sticking to that.”

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Asked by Roberts about the intersection of his work and his faith, Schoon-Tanis summed it up in one word: wonder.

Take a child on a hike and they’ll notice the tiniest things, including bugs, he said. They often describe what they’ve found “through a different angle, so a zebra is a horse with a striped suit. They’re piecing it together, which ends up being delightful and whimsical.”

When Schoon-Tanis prepares to paint something he’s done a thousand times, such as a tree, he’ll try to do it “in a whimsical, fun way so we notice it differently” and “so it doesn’t become just a bland thing that we’ve seen before.”

Similarly, when we study Scripture, “we can get locked into how we think a biblical passage should go or what it should mean,” he told the hosts. “If you hear a sermon on a specific passage enough times, you say, ‘Oh, I’ve got this.’ I know I can sometimes not listen as well then. I’m always thankful when pastors can prove me wrong and guide me in a different way.”

“What eyes of wonder or this whimsical approach can do is it can take on a passage from a different angle,” he said, “and help us look at the same story we might think we know deeply with fresh eyes and a slight change in perspective.”

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That reminded Abushakra of Mary Oliver’s “Instructions for Living a Life”: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

Children are especially good with the “telling” part, Roberts said. While working with a children’s choir one day, the term “merciful” came up in a hymn the children were singing. He asked them: what does “merciful” mean? A first-grader raised her hand and said, “My mom loves me all the time. Even when she gets mad, she still loves me, no matter what.”

“I thought, yes, that’s what merciful means,” Roberts said. “The way kids can break things open is so wonderful.”

Fatherhood “has absolutely reinforced my philosophy of wonder,” Schoon-Tanis said. He used to watch the way his daughters drew things and would sometimes steal their techniques. “Not anymore,” he said, “because they’ve both gotten pretty accomplished.”

When she’s teaching piano, Abushakra asks her students to use multiple senses while playing, such as singing the bass part while playing with one hand, or tapping and counting so “the music is engrained in a more permanent and deep way,” she said. “It makes sense that the more senses we can employ in worship, the more deeply we learn the messages.”

“You’re not alone,” Schoon-Tanis told her. “Visual art, especially in the Protestant tradition, was kicked to the curb for a while. Part of my mission is to help people think about the things that you just said and to help them see how art can help.”

At church, he’s undertaken a few big projects, and has enlisted the congregation’s help to complete them. During Advent, he and others “pieced the Christmas story one strip at a time. Each week it got filled in a little more, and it was really cool,” he said. “Last week was the first week we didn’t have an art project, and happily I heard from people who asked, ‘What’s going on? Why is there no art?’”

Schoon-Tanis has taken his gifts around the world. For three years, he led an art camp at a Christian school in Beit Sahour, east of Bethlehem on the West Bank of Palestine-Israel. The second time there, he used the separation wall to paint “Balancing the Peaceful Kingdom,” which depicts the animals mentioned in Isaiah 11 standing atop one another trying to get over the wall.

“That really sparked a lot of this new interest of mine in doing activist art,” he said. He pained a similar image on the wall that separates the United States and Mexico.

“When I talk about the animals being stacked up, it looks impossible,” he told the hosts. “It was extra impossible, the position I put them in. It’s a reminder that it’s impossible for us and it’s only possible because of God.”

Find the work of Joel Schoon-Tanis on Instagram or through his website.

“Sounding Board” is available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.