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My strongest encounters with the spiritual have been through the death of loved ones, where I become painfully aware of a vast unfathomable space that now divides me from them. This painting is a depiction of the death of Christ to be contemplated during the season of Lent. However, I have removed his body from the familiar context of his passion and crucifixion and have placed him in another time and space, a liminal space between life and death. The figure of Jesus, the last impression of his person, is set against the sublime darkness that threatens to engulf him entirely. Rather than paint a realistic portrait, I reduced the figure to a silhouette to direct the viewer’s attention to the death of Christ rather than the person of Christ. The Jesus depicted here is the starting point for a meditation on his death in the time leading up to Easter.
There is a story within the Christian tradition, where at the moment of Christ’s death, the curtain separating God from the people was torn in two, from top to bottom. While being a symbolic gesture of intense grief that accompanies death, it has also become for me a visual metaphor of a moment where the boundaries between humanity and the divine were breached. The tearing of the canvas represents the torn curtain and the broken body of Christ that allowed divinity to invade humanity. |
