black and white

Yo folks, wanted to post about a couple of the paintings that I’m thinking about putting in the show so I can get some of your thoughts. Something screwy is going on with the posting of images so I have to wait and leave the writing on by itself for now. This’ll be long, so I’m splitting it into two posts. Hope the images show alright—they’re all about 6x7 foot, give or take a foot, so you’ll have to imagine it I guess. I’ve been doing my student teaching this semester, so creating through my students rather than directly, so my contribution to the show will have to be previous work. I’m posting 5 images, so I’m just looking for a couple thoughts on which work most with the theme of new life.

The black and white and gold images are an aesthetic approach that I enjoy because it involves both drawing and photography. The first two images are art historical ‘redo’s’—Rembrandt’s Three Crosses and Brueghel’s Way of the Cross. Obviously being about the cross they have to do with new life, but more than that, drawing on top of an image that looks sort of like a photographic blur is like how we ‘draw’ on top of reality—we think things about reality and sometimes that distorts reality (sinful and/or weak human thoughts) but it also is necessary because we have to respond to what is revealed and work to honor what God gives us. The black and white aesthetic is sort of a dark and depressing look which relates to how things are prior to new life, like the murky waters in Genesis 1. The third image is an image I’ve titled ‘Abortion 8 weeks’. I initially did it because I wanted to do a big issue painting, but as I’ve thought of the issue of new life, I thought about how abortion is as far opposite of the idea of new life as we can think because it is such precious life that is destroyed, often a creation incredibly small and not fully formed, as new as new life can be but just as it starts to live its killed. The image I did the painting from is a little strange, mostly because I didn’t want the image to be what you necessarily expect—the photographer used a quarter for scale, and moved the dead baby’s limbs. I realize its gruesome, but art is often about the business of making us notice things about the world (usually more attractive and beautiful things) that we wouldn’t otherwise notice, and so challenge our typical experience of life, so I hope that by looking at a painting of something so bad, our knowledge of the beauty and importance of new life is jolted out of laziness.