My first sighting of Owen’s drawings was as a child at an after school club at Mortdale Baptist. I must have been about 8 years old. The yellow church buses would turn up at school, pick up the local primary kids and ship them to the church for songs, games and Owen’s Bible stories before delivering them home. I don’t remember much, but I do remember Owen drawing one year and just how engaged I was by those stories he told using the drawings.
When I later met Owen as an adult, it was at a children’s ministry conference in Sydney. I saw him drawing outside on his easel while people were having lunch in the autumn sun. I had a parable to teach the next day at kid’s church so I asked him if he could draw it…which he graciously did. It wasn’t one he had ever done before, (which is pretty surprising in itself given the amount of stories and parables he has done), so there was some initial hesitation, but 10 minutes later I had a couple of sketches in my head to take home and recreate the next morning. What amazed me was the economy of what he did. I wouldn’t need to rehearse with a cast. Nor organize any props. Nor would I need to work up 5 or 6 drawings. He made it the whole parable work on 1 or 2 pages. Wow! I haven’t looked back since.
I thought he was all about quick sketching, but what surprised me was his passion for puppetry. He would talk enthusiastically about sketching as a practical and effective method for presenting the good news. But He would ‘glow’ when speaking about the days he ran puppet shows at the Royal Easter show. Just to catch a glimpse of this bygone craft I invited Owen to present, (was it the last performance?) one of his puppet shows from ‘back in the day’ with his wife at the Kidzlink UV Festival in 2010. It was a delightful treat.
Owen’s style of puppetry meant there was no front man, no straight guy interacting with a crazy Muppet. He felt the Muppet style puppets were great for getting kid’s attention and very entertaining but weak because they couldn’t just come out and teach the Bible directly. He observed that as soon as the Muppet - puppet started to preach, the kids switched off. He was right. Instead for Owen’s style of puppetry, all the action and teaching came from smaller hand held puppets acting on a miniature stage with props and backdrops. In this way, the puppets could teach without being boring or it feeling out of character.
I’m not a puppet guy; I like to be out front. I don’t want to be stuck in a puppet theater. So it was his story telling with soft chalks that I have been drawn to, excuse the pun. After several years of trying many different methods of teaching kids the Bible, I saw that Owen’s quick drawing had to be one of the most economical. It was also the method that kept everything close to the text. You can just put everything into making the text come alive for people. You don’t have to create another parallel storyline for a puppet or an actor or whatever. It’s also a method that is free of props, doesn’t need a cast, as it’s all done with you and your chalk. It’s also wonderfully visual and kids need visuals!
Owen was always clear about not calling him an artist. He also knew his limitations. He’d say, ‘No, I’m not an artist, don’t call me that, Graeme Wade is an artist’ (Graeme is also now with the Lord). Owen would distance himself from any notion of being concerned for his sketches to be art: ‘I’m just sketching enough to get by and communicate visually what story I’m telling’. So Owen wasn’t precious about his drawings. He would discourage you from trying to be too concerned with your efforts too if it meant you were stalling the flow of the story by being too perfect with your sketches. It is meant to be quick drawing after all. I often get praise about my drawings but I know that they are pretty average. Does it matter? I’d love to be a better artist. But as Owen would agree, if the sketches have kept the story together, emphasised the right things and engaged the audience then the job of presenting the gospel has been well served. It’s easy to make mistakes in front of an audience when you are quick drawing…Owen would also encourage you to never highlight your mistakes…just move on.
What engaged me more than his sketches was his storytelling. The drawings, he would emphasise, are only aids. At a skills training course he emphasised to us all that we as the presenter have a lot to offer if we can attend to the details of the story and bring them out in how we tell the story. And that was Owen’s great concern, to attend to the text; mine the details to draw out the way the gospel is presented in that text.
Owen clearly loved teaching the Scriptures. He spent much of his adult life presenting the gospel to kids around Australia. But he was no mere lover of the word. What was clear to us all was that he loved Jesus.
