FaithQuest 2010 - "Jesus as Warrior"

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 was speaking on "Jesus as Warrior."

You’ve heard that a picture is worth a thousand words.  You’re about to witness how true that can be.  I was asked why there was a green swipe on the ‘chain’ painting.  I couldn’t really answer that then, partly because it would have involved far too many words than he (or I) were prepared for at that moment.  But here are all the associations that come to my mind that led to the decision to have a green brush stroke across the painting.

Artists are constantly aware of their historical lineage.  Each painting is in a dialogue, so to speak, with every painting that has come before it.  And sometimes it’s in the sense of listening- artists in the past will have done something and I want to know why; I want to understand it better.  And for an artist, the way to understanding is to do it yourself.  So I’ll consciously put things in some of my paintings to see if I understand what it’s all about- to see if it works in my own context and my own ‘words.’

So in this case I was thinking about an artist named Gerhard Richter.  This guy’s work is all over the place in the sense that he does paintings that are as accurate and ‘realistic’ as a photograph, and other paintings that are totally abstract.  Most artists have a distinct style, he’s unique in that he has about a dozen distinct styles.  Anyways, he has a few abstract paintings that trouble me- I don’t really like them.  I don’t ‘get’ them.  Which means I need to do some of those paintings and try to understand them.  The green stroke is precisely that.

But there’s more.  Here’s kind of what he’s doing with the abstract brushstrokes and how I’m piggy-backing off that.  Way back with Picasso and people like him in the early 1900s artists started having an issue with the fact that they were trying to paint a 3-D world on a 2-D surface.  It became almost a moral issue with them- if you painted an illusion of 3-D space that was essentially a lie. It was dishonest because a painting is nothing more than paint on a flat surface and a true artist had to acknowledge that fact.  Abstraction arose partially to fulfill that conception- to not be something that it wasn’t, but to ‘be’ paint on a surface.  So Gerhard Richter works both with representational paintings and abstract paintings in an effort to make both of those endeavors equal.  Sometimes that happens in the same picture, where he has a ‘realistic’ painting with some abstract marks that lay on the surface and so the two aspects of painting lay side by side.

Yes- this is a painting.

What that means for me is a certain awareness.  That even when there is the illusion of space, there should be an awareness of the physical surface of the painting.  And so often we are like that in life.  We get so caught up in the illusion of things and life around us that we miss what’s ‘on the surface’ right in front of our faces.  So even though my ‘chain’ painting is mostly abstract, the abstract background gets subordinated somewhat to the chain.  It becomes like an explosion that is breaking the chain. And since it’s an explosion, it’s no longer abstract.  So the green serves as an abstract marking that has nothing to do with the chain or the ‘explosion’, but as something that lies on the surface and thus reveals that surface. It helps make us aware that there is more than the illusion.  It serves as a reminder to look at things a little different, to look away from what the world sees as ‘real’ and to see the literal truth right before our eyes.