FaithQuest 2010 - "Jesus as Alien"

This series is regarding the paintings 'performed' during Faith Quest 2010.  The weekend revolved around a movie theme and the speakers played with different characterizations of Jesus as found primarily in the Gospel of John.  This painting was painted while Ryan Woods spoke on 'Jesus as Alien.'

Alien doesn’t have to mean strange creature. Though that’s how we feel sometimes when we’re alienated. We feel like freeks. And perhaps what is worse is that we feel we are hemmed in by that thought that we’re freeks. In other words, we feel we can’t get out of it.

I wanted to show a Jesus like us. Not some dude in a robe with a stylish beard. But perhaps- more like a young person, with generic shorts (purchased cheaply at a second-hand store, of course) that don’t indicate race or nationality or time period. Because Jesus is everybody, everywhere, at everytime.

I was also thinking about Picasso. His first style that was uniquely his, before he started all the cubism stuff that became his claim to fame, was called The Blue Period. Simply because all the paintings were blue. Poor people (this was his ‘starving artist’ phase in life), destitute in their hopeless situations, are literally blue- saddened by their lot in life.

Picasso has a painting, I think it’s called the ‘Old Guitarist’ or something like that, that I was specifically thinking about. Artists sometimes use underlying grid lines to line elements up in their paintings. It’s a way of organizing the picture- just like you organize writings into paragraphs, or songs into verses and choruses. Picasso’s painting shows that organizational system very clearly. And I wanted to reference that.

So I organized it with a lot of empty space on the left. That space is broken up into a big space and a little space. The little space, then, is about the same size as the little space above the head of ‘Jesus’. And ‘Jesus’ occupies the same as the large empty space.

It organizes the space into a nice symmetry. But it also hems Jesus (or you) in. It alienates Him/you into the corner. And just like the labels of freak or alien, they keep us trapped in a (seemingly) hopeless situation.

But we know there’s a way out…