Harm not done
is quite another thing
from love lavished.
"Do not harm your neighbour
as you do not harm yourself?"
But Paul’s love definition, too
has a negative side:
It keeps no record of wrongs.
It’s balanced,
in that it always protects, perseveres, trusts,
etc.
Wherever you go,
there you are.
Miss statue
waving her metal flame
doggedly this first of March
(whose weather Februarian remains)
scorns this rusted, worn, graffiti-bearing bridge,
sealed from its monstrosity by mist
in simultaneous terms of physics; spirit; history.
It is the same
on either side of foggy separation
this brand of liberty, which candidly
facilitates both polished empire and slum:
spray-can empire,
and the slum that is the filth
within the hearts of you and me.
(to be redeemed…)
I create spiritually-themed images that fuse the qualities of traditional art with the freedom of digital media. My work addresses themes of language, time, seasonal change, cycles, and growth, as well as resurrection and redemption. Drawing from a Reformed theological understanding, I explore the connections between art and Christian faith. My focus is to express the interconnectedness of everyday detail with and within a broader story, through a mapping of textural similarities onto one another. By blending traditional artforms (painting and drawing) with photography and sculptural elements, my prints are invested with a saturated, layered vitality.
Visual theology is a two-day event, opening on Friday, February 20th from 7pm to 10pm, and continuing on Saturday February 21st from 9am – 10pm. The venue is James North Studio, at 328 James Street North, in Hamilton Ontario.
Please stop by to enjoy, engage, and discuss. I’d love to see you there!
H.
It’s wonderful to reminisce over an old painting, and to look at it with fresh perception. I see this violent, searching, brooding, stubbornly-hopeful tree as a chapter in my own history where I learned much. The deep lessons of darker paintings and brokenness manifest themselves later in the nuanced ways in which further visual exploration (and living itself) thrives. The simple curved horizon, and flat barrier between soil and subsoil are a compositional structure that has remained appealing to me. They are simple, and facilitate the enclosure of more detailed organic forms. I’m doing this digitally now, with There is a River and Fall; Rise in more patterned and intricate ways… but this tentacled beast may well have been the starting point. I don’t project onto it the same (angry) emotion that I did three years ago. Today, a set of hooks draped over the edge, it serves as a gracious backdrop for my coat-rack. Peace.
Tree – Large Size
With a temperature in Ontario hovering around 20 degrees C below zero, there isn’t much of anything flowing around here, unless it’s natural gas towards the furnace. Flowing, however, happens abundantly, joyfully, in the pages of the Scriptures. Psalm 46: "There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God". We might also reflect with the author of the first Psalm in His description of the Blessed, "like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season". Ezekiel, too, encounters a river, in his vision of the third temple. Not unlike the gushing forth coerced by Moses out of a rock in the desert, this stream also originates at a solid place: the threshold of God’s house. And this river, too, is prompted by a strike: that of God’s glory, returning forcefully to the temple from the east, with a mighty sound, and with bright shining. Isaiah’s words describe what happens to the landscape when God blesses it: "the wilderness and the dry land shall be glad; the desert shall rejoice and blossom like the crocus; it shall blossom abundantly and rejoice with joy and singing." Eschatology has it’s own river too, as written about in Revelation 22:"Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations." In 2008, Jon Foreman, (referencing the river we metaphorically cross at death), sang this lyric: "Over the river, I’ll find my hope, in you." And in 2009, I see a visual connection between the river and the way the Holy Spirit works: carving out channels of life into us, weak vessels of God’s grace and glory. May His grace be with you, and fill your heart with joy. Praise!
These holiday weeks have been a wonderful time of reflection. And now I have come across a beautiful way to represent that calm. The green tea leaves were a Christmas gift, from my Chinese friend whose knowledge of medicines and papermaking astounds me. The tea leaves form the caring texture beneath my mirrored forehead skin; and thus I ruminate in these days of stillness. Praise God for blessings: for Jocelyn, for tea, and for filtered sunlight traversing coated optics.
Take a walk
to clear your head
of all the tinsel.
Leave behind
the mittens
that you lose.
Ponder anew
the grace of God
in sending us His Christ.
Relax.
Reflect.
Rejoice.
Discover
slow-paced
productivity,
And definitely
do something
useful with your hands
(yup, that’s a nifty trick
to help you overcome
those listless, aimless,
mind-soul-and-body-wrenching
home-for-the-holidays
blues).
Take for granted,
Take a breath of fresh sub-zero air,
Take stock, take care, rejoice.
Rejoice, the Lord is King! Your Lord and King adore.
Rejoice, give thanks and sing and triumph evermore.
Lift up your heart, lift up your voice, again I say rejoice, rejoice!
The Fifty Stems series is process art, in which the Ontario October becomes more than merely scattered, fallen detritus on the forest floor. These leaf stems have been arranged, photographed, and colourized, thus undergoing a transformation from the organic to the conceptual. Whereas I have elsewhere communicated the sublime in terms of sensory overload, with reference to C.S. Lewis’ characterization of heaven as a neverending spiral, or as irredescent colours in un-fallen worlds, here there is also an element of ‘zen’ present. It doesn’t have the same effect as a Rothko colour field, but it leans in that direction. It seems to me that a tension exists between kinds of spirituality: this minimalist aesthetic jives with eastern ideology, whereas my layered, laboured, works are more in line with the complexity of the Christian narrative of creation, fall, redemption, and glory. This general tension is specifically manifest in various conceptions of God. We don’t have the capacity to understand God as he is, so we describe Him in negative terms. He is immutable, incomprehensible, immortal, and so on. It leaves you with an image that abounds with negative space: very zen indeed. But when we think of our Saviour as Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father Prince of Peace… then we begin to stand in awe of the things we cannot depict. Still, I enjoy these calm, serene, and almost formal moments with leaves and colours. They may not be explicity Christian. But they do speak to me, almost as if I myself was once a dead leaf on the ground, waiting only to be picked up by God and used as his handiwork.
Critique - New Space - McMaster University
In response to Fall; Rise, I’ve been privileged to have many discussions with many people about their views on faith, life, and the afterlife. Some of the most interesting have been with atheists. In that connection, I believe it might be helpful to talk a bit about the resurrection, and its implications. As time allows my thoughts to gel, I’ll be posting more of the responses I’ve had in connection to this painting, which remains to date the most draining (especially spiritually and mentally) piece that I’ve completed to-date.
Richard Dawkins claims that Christians (who live in expectation of another life) lack a sense of urgency in this one. And He’s absolutely right, when it comes to half-Christians who no longer believe that our actions in this life have a bearing on the next. But if we follow Christ, we understand that God holds us accountable for all that we do, whether good or evil; and as such the life of a Christian has as much urgency as any.
In fact, I’m convinced that the Christian life actually has the most possible urgency. As Christians, we are given a higher calling than simply “living life to the full” – ours is a calling to glorify God. Cosmically, it’s not our own eternal life that is at stake here (or either our own selfish need to be comforted by the thought of a possible “second chance”) but the Glory of God, the Creator of the Universe, who is only giving us one earthly life in which to discover, acknowledge, and celebrate a glimpse of His majesty.
And a glimpse is all we get in this life. Our fallen nature takes care of that. (The reality of sin, by the way, holds true regardless of how old you believe the earth is, and even Dawkins still needs a solution for it). Part of what we can get a “glimpse” of is an understanding that in comparison to the scale of the universe, our own scale is almost infinitesmally small. But an even greater realisation, I believe, is the one that flows quite naturally out of the first: that the God who created this universe (whose paradoxical character is simultaneously locally detailed sensory-overload and complete global vastness, and whose glorification is the end and purpose of all things) is the same one who will ask each of us what we did with our talents.
But our talents are fallen. And we are to blame. And so I can only acquiesce in the reality that I am forgiven in Christ’s blood. Whatever I produce will be tainted, imperfect, scarred, and falling short even of “living life to the full”. I realise that a “full life” is impossible without God. And so I continue to depend… on Him.
