When it comes to art, show, don’t tell

One of the things attendees to IAM Encounter 09 received in the obligatory bag of conference goodies was an audio CD with an interview of Steve Turner. Turner wrote a book titled Imagine: A vision for Christians in the arts. The interview is a stellar listen.

I can’t find the CD at the moment — in the chaos that is packing up a house — so can’t quote Turner, but the crux of what caught my attention in the interview is summed up in three words: Show, don’t tell. This is apparently a maxim of the theater world in particular.

In one sense, the idea is very simple. At the same time it’s probably worthy of a thesis. I tried and tried again over the past two weeks to turn this post into an essay worthy of this topic, to no avail. Instead, I’m going to follow up with a series of posts comparing images. One image will show, the other will tell.