last sunday

When I'm not singing the hymns with added melody lines or adding language or tweaking the liturgy for humorous effect, I'm drawing on my bulletin, and last week Jami drew on hers. Here you see both of our efforts: mine on the left and Jami's on the right.
I drew an emblematic design centered on the cross given by the bulletin's cover. A female and male touch hands, with their heads centered on the cross's middle. Around them are the symbols of the four gospels - angel, lion, oxen, eagle (matt, mark, luke, john), symbolic animals mentioned in Ezekiel and Revelation. The female emerges out of the sea, symbolized by the whale or Leviathan; the male reaches down from the sky, surrounded by stars (the firmament). On the top I wrote the Hebrew YHW and on the bottom I wrote Tow hu voh bho hu. And it's in these last statements that my intricate design, containing many levels of symbolism, came into trouble. "Oh, so the female is unformed and needs the male to be made whole?" Jami said. I immediately realized the rhetorical nature of her question (statement?) and threw up my hands in surrender. No amount of biblical, mythological, liturgical, archaeological, form critical, or hermeneutical qualification and explanation would extricate me from my obvious dilemma.
Jami did a drawing of an owl and a pussycat, which I like. I think it should be our family coat of arms, along with a martini glass and a pork sandwich.
I continue to hope that I might create a set of Christian emblemata that are so recondite, convoluted, involved, erudite, spiritual, educational, erotic, cenobotic, hermetic yet accessible, that people's minds will reel around the images of the faith as on a mobius strip of wonder.

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.