METAPHOR

Cropped portion of “A Glimpse of the Evermore”

I was recently listening to a podcast interview with Katherine Paterson, who wrote Bridge to Teribithia, and when asked what authors most inspired her work, she of course listed some famous ones: Tolstoy, Lewis, and Dostoevsky, but she also mentioned the authors of the Christian scriptures. I thought, “Yes.” There are so many authors who spark inspiration and so much in the natural world that influences my shapes, lines, and colors, but as a believer in Jesus, like Paterson, the Christian scriptures often breathe life into my work.

The Christian scriptures are full of poetry and metaphor, puzzling parables, and letters to dearly loved friends. I am thankful for the instruction they contain, but I also crave the poetry of the Psalms, the parables found within Jesus’ teachings in the gospels, the metaphors that attempt to explain the mysteries of who God is and how he moves in this world. They are beautiful and invite me to wonder and ask deep questions. I feel that God often meets me in that in-between space of question and unknown, not necessarily with an answer but with Himself.

The paintings in this Bedrock series, like many of my other paintings, feel like metaphors. I often start a painting or a series of paintings with a question, and the brush marks, scribbles, glazes, and shapes facilitate the deep dive into those questions, not always revealing answers but supporting my process of contemplation and meditation. If my questions exist in a bubble, my painting process nudges the interior surface of that bubble, pushing and stretching it, expanding the space where my questions reside to allow room for the Answer to take up residence with me.

The Christian church has a rich history of symbols and metaphors, and I think this must be because we as humans crave the visual and the tangible as a representation of ideas and concepts so mysterious that it’s difficult to understand them without metaphor or symbol. This series of Bedrock paintings is a humble offering, one sojourner’s attempt to bridge the questions and the unknown.