Pulley Systems

All That Can Be Lifted High Acrylic on Canvas 36 x 24 2017 (click on image to see full size)

This is a non-representational abstract painting (abandoned on occasion). It has many layers of paint that at one time or another has had every color I could mix and not sure how many tubes of paint I used…but many. In my stash of ephemera I kept this small, shallow box with dividers that I knew I could use someday so paint and box came together in this painting along with a story.

If you have ever seen the St. John’s Bible, lucky you. I hope to see it someday. I believe it will have some grand place to view it in October 2017 in Minnesota. I’ve never been to Minnesota, but it will be a wonderful reason to visit. For those who don’t know, the St. John’s Bible is the first completely handwritten and illuminated Bible since the invention of the printing press. Each page is painstakingly created. I attended a lecture on the St. John’s Bible at St. Mary’s in Moraga, CA several years ago and the speaker told the most wonderful story. One of the scribes had left out an entire line from the page he had been creating. It was an expensive “mistake”. His choices were to recreate the page or come up with some way to incorporate the missing line. So he illustrated a pulley system drawn in the margins of the page that hoisted the omitted line found at the bottom of the page to it’s rightful place. The scribe salvaged his work and possibly added a message for the viewer. It made me value even more so, the artist who sees the potential and beauty in the world around us, to work through the challenges for transformation and to have a greater vision for what could have been lost.