Category: art

Advent doodle 2

advent, Advent Illustrated, art

Rich pickings again (visually speaking) from the daily Eucharistic lectionary: Isaiah 11.1-10 and Luke 10.21-24.  Look away now if you don’t like snakes. Also, look away now if you’re not keen on poor quality drawings of people and prefer word-based art like yesterday’s doodle.

The picture is of three children (of different ethnicities) sitting on the grass near an old tree stump, which has started to sprout new branches. The children are, between them, cradling an enormous snake, and looking happy about it.

A shoot shall come out from the stock of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots….
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. 

At that same hour Jesus rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.

Advent doodle 1: Hills of the North, rejoice

advent, Advent Illustrated, art, holy communion, pictures, random thoughts, worship

I don’t know yet if I’ll try for (let alone succeed at) a doodle a day again, but here’s day one, based on the readings from today’s Eucharist (bits of Isaiah 2 & Matthew 8) and the hymn that seemed most to resonate with them.

We are those who come
from North and South
and East and West;
We are those who come
not in our own right,
but by the grace of God;
We are those who come late,
unclean, and unprepared;
We are those who, as beloved guests,
sometimes need reminding
that we do not own this:
it is a gift that we may come as we are
to become all we were created to be.

 

The one with the crumby dog

art, bible, pictures

I finally declared this picture finished…

It’s the story of the Syro-Phonoecian (Canaanite) woman who asks Jesus to heal her daughter (Matthew 15):

22Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.’ 23But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, ‘Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.’ 24He answered, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ 25But she came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’ 26He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ 27She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’ 28Then Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly.

She is a woman. She is foreign. She has a disabled/sick child. And she shouts. She’s a reject in pretty much every way. And she’s awesome.

In the painting I tried to do something different from my previous attempts at this story (which had focused on the ‘meeting of minds’ that Jesus and the woman reach by both stroking the hypothetical dog, but I was challenged to have a go at the moment of confrontation itself, which is much harder. So this is the moment when the woman grasps Jesus’ arm and makes him listen. She’s small, but mighty.

Here are some things I’ve tried to do in the painting:

  • On the left, there’s a small gathering of Jesus’ disciples, but they’re a group of individuals. On the right everyone is presented relationally. The woman, by touching Jesus, draws him into the relationality of her family. This, for me, is a mirror image of the usual pattern in which Jesus draws outcasts into relationality (often by touch).
  • The stones on the floor are a recurring theme in scripture. Here, they stand for stumbling blocks – the stumbling blocks that Jesus warned about (in Mark 9), the stumbling blocks that we must not put in the way of ‘any of these little ones’.  The woman demonstrates to Jesus that her daughter is indeed one of the little ones that come within Jesus’ sphere of protection and love.
  • The woman is dressed in blue because her confrontation with Jesus reminds me of the way that Mary, his mother, showed him that his time had indeed come, and that it was the right moment for him to perform his first miracle (John 2).
  • The older lady on the right is grandma, and she’s looking after her other grandchildren so that the woman is free to go and confront Jesus.
  • I’ve always assumed that there was an actual dog.  Dogs can enable people who wouldn’t otherwise engage with one another to reach a place of understanding and generosity.