Two stories of creation

Some people took up cross stitching or painting by numbers to fill their time during the pandemic. Others took on a long-delayed project, like fixing up the basement. Artist Doug DeLind had bigger ideas.

Most mornings, he walked down the hill from his home in rural Mason, hunkered down in his studio with several massive slabs of clay, fired up a kiln to a hellish 2,000 degrees and touched the face of God.

The result is “Days of Creation Revisited,” a set of five murals and two large figures depicting the opening verses of the Bible’s Book of Genesis. The works serve as the centerpiece of an exquisitely balanced art exhibit running through Dec. 5 at the Peoples Church of East Lansing.

The balance comes from Laura DeLind, a longtime printmaker with a nicely appointed studio of her own just up the hill from her husband’s.

A generous sampling of Laura’s crisp linocut prints, popping with whimsical splashes of bird and plant imagery, provide a perfect counterpoint to Doug’s monumental, dark visions.

The Genesis murals were fired to iridescent glory in a tricky, centuries-old process called raku.

“It was fun, and I’m glad I did them, but those are probably the last big raku murals I’ll do,” Doug said. “I’m 77, and those slabs weigh 80 pounds apiece.”

He couldn’t remember an “epiphany” that gave him the idea for the ambitious project, but he always wanted to depict a deity with fluid gender and physical form.

“I’ve always loved creation myths,” he said. “I decided to go back to Genesis and put a different figure for God in each one.”

In his vision, human diversity is one with the emerging diversity of creation.

God, in the form of a biracial woman, releases the light into the darkness in the opening mural, “Let There Be Light.”

“I’m trying to poke a little at society and say, basically, ‘We’re all people,’” Doug said.

He felt he was onto something significant, but he admitted to being “a little nervous about it.”

He showed a preliminary drawing to his wife. She encouraged him to render it in clay.

Raku is not exactly genesis, but it’s close. In the fickle firing process, Doug heats the clay slabs to nearly 2,000 degrees, removes them with tongs from the oven and drops them into a metal garbage can, where they are instantly swaddled in paper (including old copies of City Pulse) and allowed to catch fire.

The results are unpredictable. Heavy as the slabs are, they can easily shatter or crack at any point in the process.

When the smoke cleared on “Let There Be Light,” Doug discovered that a rainbow was burned into the clay, creating a halo over the woman’s shoulders. Other slabs emerged from the kiln with spectacular iridescent shimmers worthy of the six days of creation.

“That’s why I’ve been doing this for 50 years,” he said. “It’s still interesting.”

In “Let the Waters Bring Forth Abundantly,” he chose to depict the deity as an Inuit woman, conjuring a gracefully curved whale.

The directness, confidence and simplicity of Inuit art have long fascinated both DeLinds.

“I find their work self-assured but unpretentious,” Laura explained. “It’s apparently simple, but it’s not simple in the slightest. It’s complicated to get there.”

The same could be said of Laura’s bold, high-contrast vignettes of owls, partridges, pigs, tulips and many other natural delights, reduced to knife-sharp outlines in vivid black and white. At first glance, the prints throw a refreshing splash of icy water into your eyes. A longer look reveals carefully considered nuances of composition and form.

Laura started making linocut prints more than 40 years ago, as a right-brained balance to her work on a dissertation in anthropology at Michigan State University.

She found linocut to be a democratic medium, requiring little more than a kitchen table, a spoon, some paper, a few carving knives and a “hunk of battleship-gray linoleum.” (She uses a press, but shoulders, arms and hands work nearly as well.)

“When I was starting out, it was really inexpensive,” she said. She also liked that linocut prints have a long history in the world of cheaply and quickly produced political posters and broadsides.

“It’s unpretentious, has no pre-existing texture, and it lends itself to spontaneous, bold images,” she said.

The prints on display at the Peoples Church float in an intriguing middle zone between fine art and disposable, populist art that’s up one day and gone the next.

Part of the fun of the exhibit is finding the commonalities between Doug’s and Laura’s work in spite of the obvious differences in their chosen media, scale and style.

“Doug says we steal from each other, but I don’t know about that,” Laura said.

They consult with each other regularly, but they work in separate studios.

“We found out a long time ago that clay and paper don’t mix,” Doug declared.

Both artists avoid impressionist swirls and romantic, soft-focus forms in favor of bold, stylized imagery and sharp delineation of form. All of the art at the People’s Church exhibit, from Doug’s heavy, Old Testament-freighted raku pieces to Laura’s nimble little linocuts, burn with a deeply humanist, yet unsentimental, life force.

Doug grew up in Mason. He met Laura in the 1970s while working at Ace Hardware of Okemos to pay for his studies at MSU.

Laura had just moved to East Lansing from New York to get her doctorate at MSU. In Doug’s version of the story, she walked into the hardware store one afternoon and asked for “Mr. DeLind.”

He knew she wasn’t looking for him but for his brother, who was offering a room for rent. But he was instantly hooked.

It wasn’t exactly love at first sight for Laura.

In her version of the story, she came to the hardware store to hand over a rent check. When Doug called her two days later, she recalled asking, “Doug who?’”

“She didn’t want to talk with me at first,” Doug admitted. “But later on, we got acquainted.”