“أنَا لِحَبِيبِي، وَحَبِيبِي لِي.” Arabic = “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine” Song of Songs 6:3 NIV
“Beloved”. Oil paint, pen, and sand on wood panel. 48x29.5”. June 2020.
“Then the angel showed me a river with the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb. It flowed down the center of the main street. On each side of the river grew a tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, with a fresh crop each month. The leaves were used for medicine to heal the nations.” Revelation 22:1-2 NLT
Last night, Oct. 9, 2020, was the official “unveiling” of the painting “Beloved” during the launch of the Truth Collective’s “Ungallery”.
I have been working with founder Jami Staples and her team for the past several months to create a capstone piece to summarize the vision of our true beloved identity in the eyes of our Creator. The Truth Collective’s mission is to minister to women in the areas where untruth has robbed them of their joy, their freedom, and the confidence in their true identity. This painting is a vision of the Bride of Christ in a restored Eden, the new heaven and earth described in the book of Revelation.
This work is Lausanne Movement’s Pillar 2: “A Christ centered church for every community” (aka “The Bride”). What was originally going to be the capstone of the ungallery show was a large print of this work, which quickly was replaced with the idea of a full repainting, and then it became apparent that to capture this new vision a whole new work was needed. While Lausanne’s Pillar 2 shows the Bride of Christ made up from every tongue and tribe and nation, the Bride in “Beloved” is walking out from the desserts of the Middle East, bringing streams to the dessert places. The sand is actual embedded material from Dubai, Morocco, and Egypt, so she is metaphorically, literally, and prophetically bringing Eden into dessert places.
Isaiah 51 NLT
3 The Lord will comfort Israel again
and have pity on her ruins.
Her desert will blossom like Eden,
her barren wilderness like the garden of the Lord.
Joy and gladness will be found there.
Songs of thanksgiving will fill the air.
4 “Listen to me, my people.
Hear me, Israel,
for my law will be proclaimed,
and my justice will become a light to the nations.
5 My mercy and justice are coming soon.
My salvation is on the way.
My strong arm will bring justice to the nations.
All distant lands will look to me
and wait in hope for my powerful arm.
In strict Islamic traditions, artists are forbidden to represent figures, animals, or any divine representation in their work. Instead, artists have limited their expression to masterworks of calligraphy and tessellations, which are mathematical designs produced with a compass and ruler of infinite variety and complexity. As a teacher of Islamic Art in my global AP Art History class, I have come to love this work, though this is the first time I have ever adopted the vernacular and visual vocabulary of the muslim tradition to express the Kingdom truths of scripture to that subculture. I had the sense that I was taking on the culture, the language, and the posture of their tradition in order to make the gospel relevant and beautiful to their sensibilities. I absolutely loved the methodical, meditational, and time consuming process of recreating several iconic tessellations from the palace walls of Alhambra in Spain as the superstructure of the work. I do however clearly depart from the strict muslim tradition as the work is so figurative, the woman’s face is uncovered, and even her leg is exposed to the knee as she wades through the streams emerging from the dessert. Each of these themes is central to the dialog of female identity and restoration in the Truth Collective’s ministry.
Multiple squares are set up in the classic fibonacci sequence… each square a distinct Alhambra square Tessellation. This divine ration is witnessed naturally all through creation, and speaks to universal truths and harmonies that every culture can recognize and appreciate. It is seen in everything from the proportions of the human body (like the ratio of the various divisions of our fingers), to the height and width ratio of an egg, to the length of musical notes in a sequence, the twist of a conch shell… to the dimensions chosen for the Mona Lisa. It is one more nod to the heavenly reality I was striving to portray in the imagery itself.
Rather than impose the imagery onto the work, I “discovered” it from within the scaffolding of the tessellations. I took so much joy playfully finding how shoulders and arms emerge from the lines, how the star of David seems to sit upon the Bride’s forehead, how the upper corners become the two trees of life (rather than one tree of life and one tree of the knowledge of good and evil as in the garden of Eden). The entire effect is like a stained glass window, perhaps not entirely accidental in so many references to classical imagery of the divine.
“أنَا لِحَبِيبِي، وَحَبِيبِي لِي.” Arabic = “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine” Song of Songs 6:3 NIV