Interview with Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt
Jake Sonke: Tell us about your background and how you came to be teaching art history at the college level.
Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt: I grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii, and I loved art since I was a little girl, but I also grew up in a denominational context that was not Reformed and where I thought I had to choose between being an “A+ Christian,” in full-time ministry, and doing something with art. My first attempt at integrating faith and learning was dressing up as a missionary to Japan who illustrated children’s Bibles for our Awana club. I was just trying to figure out how those things could go together. When I was in high school, my dad became a lay pastor, and he brought back this stack of Reformed books on art and faith for me to read. I just devoured them because they let me see that being an artist didn’t make me a second-rate Christian. Every semester, I teach Intro to Art History, and it’s really that class that formed the impetus for writing this book.
JS: You talk about struggling with and thinking about how we as Christians integrate faith and art. Were Francis and Edith Schaefer writers you encountered as you were thinking about theology and art in this book?
EYW: Certainly, Francis Schaefer, Hans Rookmaaker, Calvin Seerveld, those were all folks who I started out learning from, and I thought they provided such helpful scaffolding, especially for a theological argument for why Christians should care about art, beautiful things and culture more broadly. Where I depart from Schaefer and Rookmaaker is that I am less interested in seeing art as an illustration of a worldview or philosophy. I am more interested in understanding artworks as shapers of culture, not just mirrors of culture. If we understand them in that way, that means that as viewers, we are being formed by the things that we see, and we have agency and can be generative in our looking. So rather than simply being critical of a Monet painting because of the “worldview” that it represents, we can learn something from the Monet painting. What happens when we hold it up as a mirror of ourselves and not just as a mirror of his own culture?
JS: In academics, we often use the language of “entering into conversation” with existing scholarship. How does your book add to the existing conversation on art and art history, especially for Christians viewing art?
EYW: There’s excellent work out there that makes a robust theological argument for why Christians should engage with art. I do think that Schaefer is part of that tradition and I think that Makoto Fujimura’s work as a call for all Christians to be makers in some way feels important to me. What we haven’t had yet is a field guide for viewers that says, “Hey, all of us, especially those of us who are non-vocational artists, are already looking at and being formed by images. How do we do that faithfully and well?” That’s the gap that this book wants to step into, to empower people who don’t think that they’re artsy or who are not vocational artists, who feel overwhelmed when they go into an art museum and maybe also when they open Instagram. This is for the beginner. There’s no assumption that the person coming into this book has had any kind of artistic training. This is for those people to receive the tools they need to look well in all those contexts.
JS: Tell us about writing a book. What kind of work goes into writing a book like this?
EYW: *chuckles* When I first started this process, Dr. Kapic told me that this was going to be a marathon, and he knows what he’s talking about. Writing a book is a long-term commitment. Before you even start writing in earnest, you’re conceptualizing what the project as a whole looks like. For me, it meant choosing artworks that I thought I could write a whole book about or use throughout the book. The actual writing is a lot of revising. I cannot emphasize enough how much revising happens. It’s always easier revising twenty poorly written pages than staring at a blank page.
JS: There’s no course on “how to write and publish a book,” so how did you get into that process?
EYW: I spent a lot of time looking at different publishers’ websites, seeing what they required for book proposals. Even when the publisher I used didn’t need all those pieces, the pieces from other publishers were good scaffolding for the project as a whole. I wrote seventy thousand words in a six and a half month period, and the two reasons I was able to write that quickly were because this was coming out of my teaching, specifically Intro to Art History, and because I had put myself in the position of writing small things frequently in the last few years, so I had been working on building up my writing endurance. I could not have just jumped into writing a book if I hadn’t been essentially keeping a writer’s sketchbook of these smaller pieces for the last few years.
JS: What advice do you have for readers as they approach this book?
EYW: I would be surprised if someone sat down and read it cover to cover. I conceived of it more as a practical guide, the same way you might not read Birds of North America cover to cover. It’s a way to equip you to go out and do something. I think the best way to read the book is to probably start with the Toolbox in the first three chapters on how to look, and then go try to apply that somewhere, like in an art museum. The rest of the book is divided into some smaller themes and case studies, so if you’re interested in portraiture, if you’re interested in documentary photography, it’s okay to jump around in the book as well and to find different models for how you can approach the things that most interest you.
Dr. Weichbrodt’s new book, Redeeming Vision: A Christian Guide to Looking at and Learning from Art, released on March 21, 2023.