Welcome to the Art, Life, Faith podcast. I’m your host, Roger Lowther.

I have an exciting announcement to make. Our next book, “The Tsunami Violin,” comes out next month, November 2025. We’ve been working on this project for some time now, and we are so excited to finally be able to share it with all of you. This book is based on real-life events that happened after a tsunami hit the northeast of Japan in 2011 and tells a story about a tree that is completely destroyed, along with a forest she lives in and her town. And then a master craftsman, a woodworker, comes along and redeems her and forms her into a beautiful violin, which now currently travels around Japan and around the world, giving concerts and telling people her story. We’ll have more information about that in our next podcast.

For now and along this same theme, I want to share a conversation I had with Vince Black. He is a woodworker and pastor from Fort Collins, Colorado. Every month, we invite an artist to come and share their art with us after a meal and then lead a discussion. “What does their art have to do with our lives? What does that have to do with the Christian faith?” Art, life, faith. When this artist can speak English, I ask them to record one of these podcasts so that we can share the story with you as well.

Vince looks for downed trees in the forest, which are badly damaged. Either they’re badly burned or beetle-eaten or something else happened to it. It just looks like trash laying on the ground. And then he redeems them and carves beautiful objects out of them: flower vases, bowls, cups. His whole message is about finding beauty and hope in this world coming from brokenness and death.

In the very beginning of the event, Vince shared a little bit about one of his projects sculpting people without any limbs, which led to a fascinating discussion in perfectionist Japan. He talked about Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man,” which seeks to show the perfect proportions of the male body. And the question was what happens when a body does not meet those proportions? Does that mean it’s no longer ideal? Does it mean it’s broken? Does it mean it’s not beautiful? The Bible tells us that in heaven our bodies are perfect. Does that mean that everyone has all their limbs in heaven? These are just some of the things that we talked about.

Vince also shared about the death of his 18-year-old son. Then my wife, Abi, shared a little about her 18-year-old niece, Lydia, who had a genetic mitochondrial disease. At that time, all the organs of her body were slowly shutting down. She was suffering and in a lot of pain, and there was nothing the doctors could do to heal her. When Vince spoke, it was earlier this year in January, and Lydia died that very next month. Abi went to the funeral and brought one of Vince’s flower vases and gave it to Lydia’s mom and told her the story. This flower vase was particularly damaged by a forest fire and showed its suffering. And yet, it was beautiful. It was the perfect gift for that time of grieving, and to show the incredible beauty we can find in brokenness, and to share that we’re not alone in our grieving, and that God is always present with us, and that suffering is not the end. His art gives just a little peek into what God is doing in this world and the beauty that he will one day bring out of all suffering.

There was another person we also gave Vince’s bowl to that was going through a very difficult time. We always keep one of his flower vases in a place of honor in our living room where everyone can see it and be continually reminded of his message. If you ever come to Japan and visit us, you can see it sitting there in the living room. Vince’s time with us was really meaningful, and I’m so glad that I now get to share it with all of you.

Roger

Vince Black. Thank you so much for being here.

Vince

It’s good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Roger

Yeah, I’m really intrigued by you and your art. We’ve talked a little bit before we started recording. Why don’t you introduce yourself?

Vince

Sure, I am Vince Black. I have a history in art. I’ve always wanted to be involved in art. It’s something I grew up desiring to be in. I went to a small school and studied sculpture, so I have the very useful degree of sculpture that will get you a job in a coffee shop or something like that. I studied classically under one artist. We had a lot of fun and worked on the human form for four years. It was a beautiful time. From that point on, I moved toward ministry, toward being a pastor. People have brought up the corny joke that I am now sculpting hearts instead of sculpting other materials.

Roger

Oh, nice.

Vince

But I’ve been a pastor for about 20 years and have always been interested, still interested in art, and have been in art circles, talked to artists, had artist groups at our church, but have just recently, over the last couple of years, gotten back into art again. Physical, tangible, sculpting art.

Roger

Now, you’ve brought some of these pieces with you. I have them right here on the table, and I’ve been noticing some are heavy, some are light. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what we have seen in front of us?

Vince

Yeah. About two years ago, I started turning wood on a lathe. I was given a lathe, an old lathe from a friend. A lathe, if you don’t know what it is, it’s a tool that will turn wood very quickly toward you. It’s spinning at 2,000 RPMs towards you.

Roger

That’s dangerous.

Vince

Yeah, so it can be dangerous. This old lathe that was given to me, I had no idea what I was doing, took a spin on it, and threw the wood across the room that I was in. I knew that that was a dangerous thing but was intrigued enough by it. This is something that could really be interesting. Got a newer lathe and started turning wood, and we can talk through all of that. But I’ve got here four pieces that I brought with me to give a sense of what I’m doing. The whole thrust behind the work that I’m doing is taking something, a piece of wood, that has been either gone through fire or death through beetle kill or some other insect that has been downed. That would typically be either thrown in a fire or brush pile or just lay to rot. I’ve taken those pieces and turned them into what I think is a beautiful piece of work.

I have a bowl here that’s about 6 inches in diameter. It’s aspen. Aspen you see all over Colorado, but this one has burn marks on it from a fire that it has gone through in a canyon that’s near our house. That’s one piece. You can see the beautiful white or yellow tones of the wood with some scarring on it from the fire. I have another smaller vase that was pine. And pine in Colorado goes through a couple of different destructive things. One is beetle kill. Beetles will infest a pine tree and then begin to go from pine tree to pine tree, and just take out entire forests through the kill. And what happens is it leaves them, leaves the sticks or the stumps of these trees there dry, which makes them very susceptible to fire. So many trees will be killed by beetle kill and then taken out by forest fire. So you can see on the edge of this one, the charred bark around the side of it that’s been taken out by fire, but probably before that beetle kill.

Roger

Yeah, it’s gnarly, like how it sticks out like that. I really like it.

Vince

So what I’ve been trying to do over the past couple of months is bring some smooth, beautiful edges out of the harsh, as you said, gnarly pieces of wood to show both the beautiful and the destroyed in one piece.

Roger

It’s a nice color contrast, too. It has the black against the white with the brown texture of the wood. What about that one?

Vince

So this one is ash, and you can see the visible marks of the beetles that trace all the way through it, eating away the wood and eventually killing it. So that’s what took this tree out. And again, leaving some of the bark edges on the side of it, trying to pull up some of the beautiful smooth insides of it, but still leaving the remnants of the beetle killer. And then this one is a small juniper vase, probably three or four inches tall. And the juniper, it’s also called redwood. It’s got the red inside of it coming out of some of the white flesh here and then leaving some of the bark that’s been taken down as well. That’s been my desire recently from these turnings is to have some of the remains of what we see in the death of the tree, but from that, carve out some or turn some of the beautiful softer edges of it to show both, to show the contrast, which I think, and my whole desire this is to show the beauty that comes from the brokenness that has been left. So we see the discarded, the destruction that’s there, and the redemption that can come from some of those harshly treated pieces.

Roger

Why would you want to do that? I think we’re often taught to try to look away from brokenness and from pain, from suffering. For you, too, when people make things, they try to make it usually as perfect as possible, to have no blemish. You’re embracing the brokenness. Why? Tell me more about that.

Vince

Yeah. There’s a story behind a story, and part of this goes back to two years ago. We have five boys. Two years ago, we lost a son to cancer, 18 years old, fought for a year and a half. Even in the hospital, he began sketching out. He would draw and sketch some things. He began sketching out this image of a skull that had been turned upside down, and he drew flowers coming out of it, even in the hospital, as he was thinking through this. As we talked to him, he said, “One day, there will be some beautiful things that come from death.” This was before he knew his end was near. That really has struck me. From that, my wife and I began talking after we lost our son, Ezra, we began talking about just some healing for me and a place of being able to be creative again. I wanted to show some of the beauty that can come from death. You brought up many people try to turn from suffering or turn from that. I think beauty is more beautiful when it’s juxtaposed against suffering. When you actually see the brokenness and see the thing that’s underneath it, to see the beauty that can come from that makes it even more beautiful.

It shows a beautiful picture of redemption and what I believe God can do to the that we experience is bring some beauty from that. I wanted to make that visible in the pieces that I was bringing to life.

Roger

Yeah, and it definitely comes through. Actually, I was at an art gallery showing last week talking to an ikebana artist, which in the Japanese flower arrangement form, they try to juxtapose life and death in the textures and in the materials that they use. I showed her pictures of what you make and she thought that they would work perfect with her ikebana. She would love to something together.

Vince

Yeah, that’d be great. I would love it.

Roger

It’s definitely part of the Japanese aesthetic, I think. It is beautiful. You call it black cone, right? I see black cones, your logo at the bottom of these.

Vince

About five years ago, our family took a trip to Sequoia National Park. As we were there, we would see these massive trees and massive pine cones. We have a picture of our son, who was probably five or six at the time, holding this pine cone that was literally half his size. A foot and a half long pine cones. We read one of the plaques at this National Park that said the optimal situation for a pine cone, especially a sequoia pine cone, to release its seeds from the cone is under forest fire. So these pine cones have been designed by God to pop open under the pressure of heat. And the seeds are released then only when the pine cone busts open from destruction. And my wife and I were out on a date about two years ago, talking through this idea of turning wood, and what could this be, and could we name this something? And so we took our our name. My last name is Black. Took our name and put that in with this story of the pine cone. And the artist I had designed the logo has this pine cone with five seeds that are busting out of it, and each of those seeds represents one of our boys. There’s this beauty that comes from the cone, and that beauty is only there because of the pressure that it’s been under. That’s become the name Black Cone.

Roger

Yeah, that’s great. Even the logo then has that symbolism. Why is this not just pleasing to the eye, but something good for society, for us, to think about?

Vince

I think for me, it is, again, I want to bring to light the things that we often discard. I want to put those things in the spotlight. There’s an artist who used to put up installations, where he would put up a large wall. I think he did one on Central Park in New York. He would put a wall along Central Park. And people would walk around thinking, What’s on the other side of this wall? And they would get to the end of the wall and look around and see Central Park and say, “Wow, that’s a beautiful park.” The whole point was this is something that’s been here all along, but you’ve not looked at it because it’s always been there. Now I’ve blocked it from your vision. And as you walk around it, you look in with some intentionality again and see the beauty behind it. And he did several installations like that where you would wrap bridges in canvas or wrap things in canvas so that people couldn’t see them and then take it off and people would enjoy the image again.

So I think there’s a piece of that for me is this is something that we would… If we were walking through a forest and saw a tree that was knocked over and burned, we probably would just keep walking. Why not take that, put it in front of us and say, There’s beauty in this as well that mirrors the lives that we have? We all have stories. We all have a piece of us that’s broken, pieces of us that are broken. There’s the temptation to say, That piece is broken. I need to hide it, not talk about it, push that aside. But to bring that to light and say, This is a part of who God has made me, something that others may shove aside, I want to see as something beautiful that would bring to light who our God is.

Roger

And who is he? Well, you’re a pastor, and so you talk about this all the time. I’m actually really intrigued by the fact that you’re a pastor and an artist making these things and the combination between the two. Tell me a little bit about that.

Vince

God is Creator. This is something I learned from my sculpture professor, he taught me. He would correct me all the time when I would say, Oh, I just want to create. And he would say, You can’t. And I would say, What? And he said, There’s only one Creator, and all we do is mirror our Creator in being creative. So he would allow me to use those words, You can be creative, but you cannot create because there’s only one Creator, and we get to mirror that. So that’s what I want to point to, that God created these things for our enjoyment so that we could see more of him. So let’s bring to beauty some of the things that he has created that we would often discard.

Roger

I’ve heard it said that the new heavens and new Earth, that somehow through the brokenness, it’s more beautiful for having been through the brokenness. God doesn’t just wipe it away, but the scars are there to point to his glory, as part of the story, which is exactly what you’re putting in your woodwork here.

Vince

Yeah, that’s what I want. I want to do it. I want others to see that. It’s been an avenue for me to have these conversations with others. It’s been a unique opportunity to bring both, yes, I’m a pastor, but I also do this, and there’s a reason I do it, and there’s a story behind it, and there’s been some real meaningful conversations that have come from it.

Roger

Well, hey, you should import your your work here. I’d love to see more work like this around. I’ve actually never seen anything like this with wood. It’s very interesting. You’ve probably heard the Japanese aesthetic about kintsugi and how pottery that’s broken, put back, and made more beautiful, more valuable, stronger for having been broken with the gold veins. That’s such an interesting way that you’ve done that with wood, the same aesthetic and thought process. I love it.

Vince

Yeah, thank you.

Roger

How can people get in touch with you?

Vince

That’s a good question. I do have a website that I try to keep up to date with the things that I have, blackconeworks.com. I also post things as much as I can on Instagram. You can message me through there as well. So it’s all right there.

Roger

Very cool. Thank you so much for sharing with us this evening. Looking forward to tonight, to see who comes and have a great discussion.

Vince

Yeah. Thanks for the time.