Beyond the Ruins- Media
Oil on Door Panel 32x80”
Beyond The Ruins: Media
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
By the end of summer 2013 I was exhausted. I was nearing the end of my forth summer working on the series, many of my panels needed final details, and this final “Media” panel just wasn’t coming together. I felt like I was giving birth to something enormous, and the labor pain vacillated between moments of shear wonder and paralyzed tearful sobs laying on my studio floor. On one such afternoon of paralysis, after reaching out to my prayer team and asking for their intercession, I put my frozen brush down and just sat still in listening prayer. I was overwhelmed by an image of a young haitian (I imagined a girl) in the pounding surf of the ocean, head back, blowing a conch shell. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew it was the Lord’s answer to my prayer.
I will not attempt to tell you what these paintings are “all about”, as the best pieces of the work came through me and not from me. I invite you into the conversation, eager to learn from what you discover, and offer some ingredients of the imagery as a start to the dialog...
After becoming the capstone for the final “Media” painting, the “Freed Slave” helped serve to unify the series by finishing my first panel of the capital, “Government 1”, as well as becoming a “fractal” image in the “Religion” panel.
Here are three iterations of the image from the summer of 2013. It began with a swirl of galaxies and supernova explosions inspired by Hubble telescope images. My dear friend Corey Unger shared a concept of waveform movement inherent to communication that provided a foundation for the visual composition.
Surface Detail
It evolved into a fractal storm of triangles in chaos theory “waves” congealing into familiar vignettes of Media dissemination.
I decided to go down to my house and get reference images before starting, and was floored to find this figure of the “Freed Slave” was a haitian sculpture right in front of the capital building of Port Au Prince, Haiti. I’d been there multiple times, and never seen it behind the tent cities of earthquake victims! Not only was this a native Haitian symbol bearing the very DNA of what I was trying to communicate, but he was strangely positioned in a near perfect equilateral triangle! I went back up the hill to my studio and collapsed in relief. Though I had “miles to go before I sleep”, the final piece of the puzzle had been revealed! I felt the Father put His hand on my shoulder and gently assure me, “You are going to finish!”
