Saturday, January 17, 2015

A Prayer for Artists

From The Book of Common Prayer 
(17. For Church Musicians and Artists)
O God, whom saints and angels delight to worship in heaven: Be ever present with your servants who seek through art and music to perfect the praises offered by your people on earth; and grant to them even now glimpses of your beauty, and make them worthy at length to behold it unveiled for evermore; through Jesus Christ our Lord. 
Amen.



I have been working on this painting for my church for weeks, (actually 3 years for the full project). In two more days I will call it finished. A series of devotional  chapters on each of the Old Testament scriptures are being written by various authors and a professional photographer is being hired to take pictures of the entire project, all 10 canvases.  A booklet with Scriptures and explanations for each of the paintings including all the research references and symbolism that we worked with will be produced for Lent. This project has been worked on for a very long time and will be quite a satisfying conclusion to my Lenten journey.
The face of Jesus Christ triumphant and resurrected is the last part of the project for me to complete and I have put hours and days of time and prayer into this work.

(Here is the last big canvas in my living room ready to go back to the church).