Introducing my newest painting:
"Seeing Through the Trees."

2.27.2010

For Thanksgiving last year I went with my family out to West Texas.  When we made it to Balmorea we found the most beautiful trees that were covered in bright yellow leaves. Immediately I wanted to paint one.  Further down the road we went hiking in a canyon at Davis Mountains State Park, I took a photo of this tree that had the same yellow leaves.  

As I was painting this I was thinking about this book I read by Francis Schaeffer ("How Should We Then Live").  It was talking about how Cezanne's paintings were painted from several perspectives at once and how this led to Cubism- where guys like Picasso made paintings of people and violins and made them completely fragmented so that you can barely tell what they are.  Schaeffer thought that this way of painting was a window into their philosophy of life: that the world was a completely fragmented place and that there was no absolute truth.  Thus they painted only fragments of reality.  And as I was painting this rather complicated image with layers and layers of branches and leaves and rocks and sky,  I realized that the truth I know tells me that the world is not  fragmented nor absent of absolute truth.  Instead, there is merely a lot to see through.  And by this I mean that there are many things going on all at once, many things that I do not understand, many things to see or that block what I want to see and thus my point of view is a limited one.   Limited by the fact that I am not an all knowing God that understands and watches over every facet of the world. (Gladly.) I am limited to what I do know and what I do see and what I do believe.  So this in turn gave me a direction in my artwork.  I want to further explore this idea of "seeing through" by using images with layers and obstacles that exist in nature and everyday life as I see the world in front of me.   There is truth to be found but  we must look for it to find it. 

 ^"Jesus answered, 'I am the way and the truth and the life. 
No one comes to the Father except through me.' "
-The Holy Bible, John 14:6

See this painting in progress here.

Detail of the painting.