Faith Quest 2011_2

When I first started thinking about FaithQuest this year and the theme of God’s people travelling, I immediately thought of an artist named Jacob Lawrence.  He was an African American artist who came to prominence in the 1940s by painting a series of paintings based on the migration of African Americans from the South to industrial centers in the North.  He had a simple yet powerful style that strikes me in its forcefulness in the way he arranges his scenes and his color combinations.

Laundress by Jacob Lawrence

            So I wanted to try to imitate that simplicity and let the colors and arrangements carry the story.  So here we have Rahab living in the city wall, the spies hiding on the roof, and city officials coming to inquire about them.  Rahab bows in submission to the authorities while pointing that they had moved on down the road.  Her finger, and the road, leads your eye to the horizon- a phrase that Brian Simmons repeated, “Keep your eye on the horizon, looking for Jesus.”

            There’s all types of artsy things going on in this one.  Just like you learn in school to arrange your essays into paragraphs, artists have different organizational schemes.  One is the ‘L’ shaped composition- which I play with here (only here the ‘L’ is turned around upside down backwards- it follows the sky along the spies and drops down along the wall on the right.)  The trick is to relate the ‘L’ to the resulting inset rectangle.  Here I’ve used Rahab’s pointing hand to cross both areas and the wall extending up into the sky.

            Color also plays a role.  I wanted an anxious color as a backdrop to the city officials so a red-orange does the trick.  Rahab is also clothed in that color (the ‘lady in red’) which also indicates where she’s from.  But she has an underlayer of purple and skin tones to match the spies that she is aligning herself with. 

            Here’s something interesting that happened.  When you paint, you have a vague idea (sometimes) of what you’re trying to do.  But you also want to be aware, and ‘watch yourself’ while you paint.  Oftentimes you will see something in process that expresses more clearly your original idea.  In this case, I had started a rough outline of the spies in hiding, intending to fully color them in with colors tying them to Rahab.  But I actually liked the idea of them being somewhat transparent- almost hiding from us, the viewers, as well.  So I threw some color in to keep the color associations but left them primarily transparent. 

            I could probably go on with other associations and things I thought about – some premeditated, some discovered after the fact.  But the real point is the amount of thought that goes into a work of art.  Maybe we would do well to put as much thought into our own lives.  Both thinking ahead of time how and who we will be.  But also being aware (looking on the horizon for Jesus) and making adjustments in the process of living.