“When Temma was born my whole faith world was turned upside down,” says Sherrie Lowly. A lifelong Christian, like her husband, artist Tim Lowly, she wasn’t planning to have a child when she became pregnant in 1985, though she and Tim were willing to be parents. They became concerned when she didn’t gain any weight in the last month of her pregnancy and worried when her labor turned difficult. They’d wanted a home birth, but after 24 hours the fetus’s heart rate started to drop, and they went to the hospital, where Temma was born on September 27.
The Lowlys felt guilty about the choices they’d made. Perhaps they should have left Temma in the hospital that extra day, though Tim points out that if she’d stayed she might have stopped breathing there too. Sherrie remembers that one of their many doctors looked at Temma, then looked at her in a way that gave her the sense that he thought she’d done something to cause her daughter’s condition. She’d been raised in what was then called the Dutch Reformed Church and had grown up believing in a “punishing God,” and she couldn’t avoid feeling that Temma’s problems were somehow her fault. It took years of therapy to overcome that feeling, though the members of the church she and Tim belonged to at the time did all the right things: when Temma was hospitalized on a Sunday they interrupted the service to offer a special prayer, and the pastor told Sherrie that simply loving Temma would “heal a lot of wounds.”
The Lowlys say they aren’t seeking sympathy. “There are parents who go through much more difficult situations,” says Tim, “who have children who are alcoholic and homeless, who have to bail their son out of jail or get him off the street.” For Tim, putting her into his paintings (seven are on view at the Gescheidle gallery, 300 W. Superior, through December 10) became a way of expressing his faith. And Sherrie says, “My whole way of knowing and seeing God changed, via a day-to-day process of working through my own guilt to seeing that God loves me and beginning to see God in Temma.”
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Tim Lowly was born Tim Grubbs in 1958 in Hendersonville, North Carolina, to parents who soon afterward became Presbyterian missionaries. When he was three the family moved to South Korea, where they lived in a compound with other missionary families. From 7th to 12th grade he attended a boarding school for missionary children about 50 miles from the compound. “Growing up in what was at that time a developing third-world culture that was still rebounding from the Korean war had a profound effect on me,” he says. “I had a constant awareness of our relative wealth in comparison to people of that culture, and whenever we came back to the United States, for a year every four to five years, I sensed the difference more acutely.”
He remembers being struck by reproductions of artworks he saw in elementary school, including an early Picasso, The Old Guitarist. “It impressed me as a very, very soulful painting,” he says. “I don’t in general care for Picasso’s work, but that period of his art was less about style and more about people.” Perhaps even more important were the vivid impressions he had of Korea. “A group of missionaries and their children would go geese hunting when I was a boy. There was a wide-open space near the ocean, and I remember the sight of thousands of geese taking off at the first gunshot. The memory has less to do with the hunt than with the sensation of the space.” Lowly started making his own art in elementary school–“drawings of drag racers’ cars that had been souped up in strange ways.” By high school he was doing portraits of friends and allegorical images that reflected his faith.
Sherrie was born Sherrie Rubingh in Grand Rapids in 1955. Her father was a state highway department worker, and the family struggled to send the children to private school. She describes the Calvinist community she was raised in as “inbred, tight-knit, conservative–keeping the rest of the world out.” But during high school she visited the intentional community where she would later meet Tim. “My reaction was that someday I wanted to be part of a community like that,” she says. “The kind of spirituality they were living out, the songs they were singing, was very charismatic, very life-giving. Here were people happy about their faith.” After earning a degree in social work at Central Michigan University in 1978, which opened her eyes to the possibility that “there are other ways of worshiping and seeing God,” she returned to Grand Rapids and joined the community.
Tim spent that year working on his art, then was given a one-person show at an art center in Chunju. His father–whom he calls “a very rational kind of person, as opposed to my mom, who’s more subjective”–had long been urging him to study accounting. Tim describes how his father came to the opening and overheard two Korean artists talking about the work, then came over with “a look of dismay on his face and said, ‘These guys are talking about your work, and it sounds like they think it’s really good.’ That was the first time he actually seemed to encourage me to pursue art as a vocation, and that made a huge difference to me. Part of the reason for his dismay was that my work then was more stylistically challenging. For someone who didn’t know very much about art, it could appear to be not well made.”
