Aslan

A couple of times in the last few months I have found myself thinking of Aslan so I decided to re-read the whole Chronicles of Narnia series. It had been years since I last read it but the books transcend time and were again pure magic when I read them. Because of that Aslan remained in the back of my mind and the link between Him and Jesus being the Lion of Judah perculated away slowly in my mind. I thought of the childrens relationship with Aslan in the books and that easy friendship that existed between them and Him and my relationship with Jesus and the friendship I have with Him and I wanted to capture that in some way. So I ended up doing two artworks featuring Him from that perspective, I hope you like them.

Aslan – not tame, but kind

In my secret garden

 

 

HOPE

HOPE

I was asked to paint a picture during the worship time in a Church we were ministering at the other day. As I thought about what to paint, one word came to mind – the word “hope”. At first I was a bit taken aback as I wondered “how on earth do I portray hope?”. So I just started getting paint onto the canvas knowing I would be guided as I went.

As I painted I thought about what the word “hope” meant. To paint “hope” meant I had to also paint the stuff life is made of – the stuff in which we sometimes find ourselves needing hope – health, finances, jobs, family – all these and more can be areas where we need fresh hope – I would use colours to portray the emotional feeling of these. I knew I didn’t want to paint a real situation but to do something abstract, something conceptual that could be read differently by different viewers, allowing them to feel the emotional substance of hope.

As I thought about ‘hope’ I realized that worldly hope is fragile – it’s a wishful thinking type of hope with no real guarantee of anything good really happening. Scripturally hope is far different – the hope God gives is robust, strong, guarantees supply, and turns any situation into something beautiful. In scripture hope isn’t wishful thinking, its confident joyful expectation of something good about to happen.

It is a joyful expectation that something good is going to happen for you because God is good. Scriptural hope boldly delivers, and it comes with the guarantee of God himself behind it. Hope isn’t just an idea, a concept, it has spiritual substance that goes to work within us, and it’s also found in a person – Christ! Christ is our hope and he is our guarantee of hope.

So in the painting the first couple of layers represents the “stuff” we go through in life so it is all sorts of colours, some dark and heavy, some light and joyful. yellow, green, yellow ochre, prussian blue, slivers of magenta, purple and some gold leaf. A lot of those colours no-one will ever see but they are there just as in life -there’s stuff people see and there’s underlying stuff; but the underlying stuff lays down the foundation for the seen to be built on. The top layers are done in white, cream, yellow ochre and little flecks of gold. This top layer represents both hope and glory overlaying all else causing the underlaying layers to become something beautiful – it represents God’s hope at work within us – making all things work together for good – coming together to present something beautiful, full of depth and rich in the fullness of Christ’s life within us. “Christ in us, the hope of glory” – Col 1:27