Pentecost Banner

Before I began at Columbia Seminary I painted a Pentecost banner for my home church, First Presbyterian in Covington. I remember that it is a six foot square piece of loose canvas - I didn't stretch it. I painted it outside on the floor of the carport at my dad's. It is unhemmed. Red is the color of Pentecost as are blue and gold. The dove, the Spirit, descends into tongues of fire. It descends over a golden triangle - the Trinity. The bottom point of the trinity, where the dove is descending to, is the Chi-ro, the monogram of Christ. At the top of the painting, in a line, are the emblems of the gospel writers: angel, lion, oxen, eagle - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Blue is a color often associated with heaven. And there you have the iconographic program in a nutshell. What does it mean? It means the viewer has something to think about.
I hope that banners can be abstract in a Kandinsky or Klee kind of way. The Russian suprematist painter from early in this century, who painted a black square as his icon, his abstract window into the heavenlies, Malevich, is a good example to follow. Let's have a moratorium on rainbows and doves. I think dadaism isn't explored enough in banner art. The socialist graphics of the 1920s and 30s , El Lizzitsky and Tatlin and others offers a graphic guide to what can be. Herriman's Krazy Kat drawings would be a good way to go as well. I'm hoping that churches might adopt idiosyncratic ways of representing their faith - such that iconography avoids conformity to standardized expressions. That Orthodox icons are unchanged over 1500 years is not necessarily a good thing.