Out of Chaos

Two Summers ago I stretched a canvas that was about 4 by 5 feet and had it set up in my dorm room at the seminary. I began my typical searching out method to see what would emerge on this canvas, but I was dissatisfied: the room was too small to get anywhere on such a large field. I prayed, "Lord, I need a big room." And I thought that I might be able to find a spare room on campus that someone would let me use for a short time.
At this time I was preparing for and taking my ordination exams. During this time Katrina hit New Orleans. That such a disaster could hit a modern city and that the national and state response could be so tentative, faltering and lax, astonished me as well as others at the seminary. Brian Wren, the professor of worship, was planning a week of chapel services devoted to this disaster and he came to me, wondering if I had any artistic conceptions that could be incorporated. In the past I had done visual representations on dry erase board of a text. This time I realized that I had the perfect sized field for representation: the canvas I'd stretched in my room.
I brought the campus to the chapel and set it up, engineering it to a dry-erase board with lots of tape and twine. Over the course of the week's chapel service I painted a large abstract canvas, which resulted in the image posted above. I would come into the chapel at odd hours and work on it, so that it would be constantly changing. What people had seen was being constantly submerged under new layers of paint.
When I had finished the painting hung in the chapel of a month or more. For most of the the year it was displayed at the seminary bookstore. Eventually it was bought by a classmate of mine and now is displayed on a wall in her house.