Joel Nickel is a retired Lutheran pastor and full-time artist living in Salem, Oregon. Over the course of his 45-year ministry, he served parishes in Detroit, Michigan; Chicago and Champaign, Illinois; and Stayton, Oregon. Alongside his pastoral vocation, he continually nourished his passion for visual art, studying at the Chicago Academy of Fine Art, Parkland College, the Oregon School of Arts & Crafts, and in workshops at the Grünewald Guild in Plain, Washington with noted enamelist Jean Tudor. Throughout his life and work, Joel has sought to merge the visual and the verbal—image and text, intuition and logic, the spiritual and the tangible. His art reflects this ongoing dialogue between faith and creativity, drawing upon a lifetime of contemplation, craftsmanship, and a deep appreciation for the mystery of existence. “I’ve been an artist for as long as I can remember,” Joel writes, “fascinated by the visual landscape, the sound of music, the smell of oil paints and lumber, a visit to a hardware store as well as an art museum, and the overwhelming urge to make things using whatever material was at hand. This urge has always been joined with the need to communicate a vision, an insight, a message—or simply an awareness of the miracle of love in the presence of life.” Influenced by the German Expressionists—artists such as Otto Dix, Emil Nolde, Ernst Barlach, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Max Beckmann—Joel admires their resistance to tyranny and their bold, spiritual imagery. He also draws inspiration from modern masters like Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, and Stuart Davis, whose innovations in line, color, and abstraction inform his own aesthetic language. “Art that maintains a dialogue with religion isn’t popular these days,” he reflects, “but much art devoid of the spiritual is shallow and trite. The major life questions—why are we here, how did we get here, and where are we going—have a deep theological component which I hope finds its place in my art. At the same time, I attempt to bring the modern complexities of color and form into my work.”