Paint and Pixels

Final Advent Painting

This is the last video of the advent paintings. I feel that if I were a better painter I wouldn't need to preface it by saying this: Be sure to look carefully when all four of the paintings come together (that's why I intentionally set the slide length to be annoyingly long) and remember that "the whole is more than the sum of its parts".

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Originally, I tried to place the symbols of captivity and sorrow in the dark sections of the painting and the symbols of freedom, liberation and peace in the light sections. At the end, this division of light and dark values is how I formed the Jesus face. However, on about the third painting, I started to get confused about all my symbols, which I think lead to somewhat of a revelation. The symbols that I thought represented freeing things, like butterflies, airplanes, etc., began to seem like negative things in light of the fact that we are separated from them. I started thinking about how the very things that represent freedom to us, are usually what we are held captive by.

For example, I used the Rockstar Energy drink logo as a positive symbol in the second painting (the yellow star with two Rs in it), because of the feeling of freedom to accomplish more that I get when drinking a Rockstar. But the more I thought of it, the more I realized that it's really something I am held captive by since I am so dependant on it, and probably am never fully satisfied with the high it gives me. I am sure this is true of many different kinds of addictions.

Initially, all the flying things seemed like symbols of hope, but as I started looking at the characters in my painting (like the girl longing to fly on a bike like ET and the girl with homemade wings), I realized that this longing for something we can't have is actually something that will eventually destroy our souls, if we don't learn to be satisfied otherwise, which leads me to moral of the story.... And that is that humans are very near sighted things, often only seeing the many pictures within the larger picture. And the larger picture is Jesus- the only true Messiah who can rescue us from ourselves, from our longings, from our captivity, from our sorrow. Or atleast that's what I believe.