This paper proposes that Augustine's doctrine of creation offers a robust theological foundation for a non-dualistic account of artistic materiality — one that resists the tendency within both conceptualist art theory and certain strands of Christian thought to subordinate matter to idea. Drawing on Wesley Cray, Susannah Ticciati, and Carol Harrison, I argue that Augustine's understanding of creation is not a depreciation of the physical world but a profound affirmation of it: matter, rightly perceived, functions as signum — sign — pointing beyond itself to the presence of God. Central to this argument is Augustine's treatment of the Garden of Eden. His exegesis — particularly in De Genesi ad Litteram — constructs the garden as a paradigmatic site of sign-bearing nature: a world in which the material and spiritual are irreducibly entangled. Creaturely beauty is neither incidental nor merely allegorical but genuinely revelatory. This paper argues that Eden iconography across Western art represents not nostalgia but theological acts: attempts to image a world in which nature speaks clearly of its maker. Read through an Augustinian lens, this history becomes a history of implicit doctrines of creation. Augustine's doctrine suggests a posture of attentive participation — neither dominating matter nor retreating from it, but responding to it. Against the dematerialising tendency of conceptual art, a practice rooted in Augustinian creation theology recovers the significance of paint, surface, and bodily encounter with the natural world. If nature is sign, then the artist's attention to material reality is not incidental to meaning — it is meaning. The act of painting becomes an act of theological perception: a response to a world that, on Augustine's account, has never ceased to speak.