Portal of Truth

For the last twenty years, I have been trying to align my spiritual life and my painting career. This small group of “banner” paintings represents my most recent endeavors.

Like most artists of my generation, I was trained at the university in the tenets of Modernism, a style that was invented in the 20th century as a reaction to the “religious thinking” of the previous centuries. It is a style that places Man in the place of God as the paramount focus of the artist’s expression. So naturally I’ve been wondering if there weren’t some other styles and modes of expression which are better suited to address spiritual themes and specifically, the Biblical narrative. 

I went back to investigate forms derived from religious art such as tallits (prayer shawls) with their ziziths (tassels which represent the Commandments), icons, reliquaries, devotional talismans, flannel-graphs, chalk talks and banners. I wanted to see if these weren't better tools to narrate and express ideas about God and the Bible. I also wanted to use idioms that would speak more readily to a Christian audience that shared memories of some of these art forms used in their temples or  churches; Orthodox, Catholic, Reformed or Evangelical.