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| Contemplating the installation with Father David |
After my thesis I had the great opportunity to create the 14
Stations of the Cross for the Church of the Epiphany in Honolulu, thanks
to Donald Mtsumori, who has collected my work for many years and has
commissioned several portraits and landscapes from me. He is the
organist for the church and wanted to create a gift of the stations. The
plan was to create black and white wood block prints in order not to
compete with the colorful stained glass windows of the church. I carved
several blocks and did a lot of test prints, struggling, especially with
incorporating the biblical quotations.
I had to put the project aside in order to create work for the Koa Gallery show (see post below. Caution*Righteous*Thirst). In the painting groove, I thought I should try a couple of the stations as paintings. My friend and teacher Stephen Niles had pointed me towards the plywood rounds you can buy at the hardware store. Eventually I ended up stretching linen over the rounds. The project was finished in the fall of 2011 and in December we had a blessing in the church led by Father David Jackson, during which I had the opportunity to talk about the paintings and answer questions.
Below an excerpt from the booklet I put together for the blessing of the stations.
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| Donald Matsumori and me before the blessing |
Thoughts on the Paintings of the 14 Stations
First of all I like to give thanks to
Donald Matsumori, who gave me the opportunity to create these paintings. I also
like to thank Father David Jackson and Donald for the trust and patience they
had with me during the long process.
The history of the Stations of the Cross
began with pilgrimages to Jerusalem to visit the places of Christ’s life. The
desire to follow Christ’s passion at home gave rise to the recreation of the
passion as early as the 5th century in Bologna. The word station
originates with the English pilgrim William Wey, who visited the holy land in
the 15th century. The Franciscans began building out door shrines
during the 15th and 16th centuries, which numbered
between eleven and thirty. These developed into the ‘traditional’ 14 stations,
some of which had no references in the bible.
On Good Friday 1991 Pope John Paul II
introduced a new set of stations, which he called the Scriptural Way of the
Cross. He consequently celebrated this form many times. Pope Benedict XVI approved this set of stations
for meditation and public celebration.
They follow
this sequence:
1. Jesus
in the Garden of Gethsemane, 2.
Jesus is betrayed by Judas and arrested, 3. Jesus is condemned by the Sanhedrin, 4. Jesus is denied by Peter, 5. Jesus is judged by Pilate, 6. Jesus is scourged and crowned
with thorns, 7. Jesus takes
up His cross, 8. Jesus is
helped by Simon to carry His cross, 9. Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem, 10. Jesus is
crucified, 11. Jesus promises His kingdom to the repentant thief, 12. Jesus
entrusts Mary and John to each other, 13. Jesus dies on the cross, 14. Jesus is
laid in the tomb.
These paintings of the ‘14 stations’ aim
to be contemporary, representing my own sensibility and the desire to speak
also to the aesthetics of a younger audience. They are cinematic, as they must
be, since they tell a story and are inspired by the movie ‘The Passion of the
Christ’. The compositions and rendering are my own. When we study the long
history of Christian art we discover that the art work is always of its time,
yet my hope is that these painting show my respect and debt to all the artist
who came before me and are my inspiration. The more than two years of working
on this project allowed me to question and reflect on my own spirituality,
especially the concepts of self will and surrender
The following comments
describe my personal relation to these paintings and their story. They do not
represent the view of the church and I don’t know if they support or contradict
it. My hope is that these thoughts help you to appreciate my work and inspire
you on your own spiritual journey.
I.
At night, all is blue, Jesus
prays to his father; he sweats and struggles with what is to come. His
humanness shows when he asks his father to ‘take this cup away’, yet once he
said this, he surrenders with ‘thy will be done’. Jesus tells me to chip away
at my ego as well and to surrender to the divine. The stripes remind me of prison-clothing.
It also sets up what is to come, which is dark as well as light.
II.
Later the same night Judas reaches up to
kiss Jesus in order to identify him to the Roman guards. He has sold his soul,
but not everything is as clear-cut as it seems. Judas plays the role of putting
the passion into motion. The very moment of this picture can be seen as a hesitation.
Is the hand going to reach all the way or is it going to pull back? Do we
easily condemn Judas or can we also identify with him in our own doubts and
struggles?
III.
Kaiphas, the high priest of the Sanhedrin
interrogates Jesus. Again, Jesus is shown with the back to us. Kaiphas is
another character for us to recognize ourselves in. Jesus’ actions threaten the
Jewish religious aristocracy as well as the beliefs of many people in his time.
In fear we do not act true to our selves.
Peter is afraid; he doesn’t trust the unfolding of the events and denies Jesus.
This, I consider the most ‘classical’ of my paintings of the stations.
V.
Crucify him! The crowd actually condemns
Jesus, not Pilate, who wants to let him go. Of course the Sanhedrin would like
to punish him for questioning their authority, but just like the Rolling Stones
sing in ‘Sympathy for the Devil’,
“who killed the Kennedys? After all it was you and me.” How quick are we to
condemn those who think or are different from us, who threaten us, by daring us
to question our beliefs?
VI.
Now, Jesus passion has begun. The Roman
soldiers torture Jesus for being who he truly is. My aim is to pull in the
viewer with the close-up composition and the details in the painting.
VII.
This is one of two paintings that I did
first, about eight month before I started on the entire series. The other one,
a close-up of a nail driven through Jesus’ hand, did not make it into the final
selection. Both these paintings are rendered straight on wood. All the others
are painted on linen stretched on wood. I struggled with applying the paint to
the slick wood, even though I had applied three layers of acrylic gesso. The
result is thicker paint and rougher brush strokes, a slightly looser approach,
since I considered it a ‘test painting’. By the time the series developed to
station number seven I decided to keep it. From the pain of the person behind
Jesus, to Jesus’ own face, the rawness of his garment, the heaviness of the
wooden cross and the bloody hands clinging to the cross, the brush strokes fit
the energy of the moment. Finally, the white light on Jesus’ hands point to the
potential of transformation.
VIII.
By the time Simon from Cyrene is pulled
into the action involuntarily, Jesus is beaten up severely. In this painting
Jesus does not appear heroic. It is Simon through his steady determination, who
picks up Jesus and the cross, not just physically. Black, white and red
dominate and the cross is blue.
IX.
Jesus stops to talk to the women of
Jerusalem to tell them not to cry for him and that things might even get worse
for them in the future. In the painting Jesus talks to one woman standing for
all. He holds her chin to make sure that she is completely with him and she is.
What I understand here is that Jesus is ok with his lot, since he has
completely surrendered his self will. Are we ready to do the same? Are we ready
to surrender to the divine within ourselves?
X.
Jesus is crucified and my initial response
to this passage was to paint a close-up of Jesus’ face, extremely damaged with
one eye shut, and I did. I lived with these paintings having them hanging above
the windows in my living room/studio where I could study them all the time.
Something disturbed me besides the realistically rendered brutality of the
painting, which was justified for this moment in the story. After contemplating
this for a while and considering a different composition, maybe not quite as
close, I came to the solution, after reading the bible passage again. The
centurion is another character in the story to help us understand that not
everything is always as clear-cut as we like it to be. Yes, the Romans
brutalized and crucified Jesus, but this centurion has a revelation.
XI.
I did not paint the good thief. This is
the bad thief. After hurling insults he begs to be saved. Isn’t he close to many
of us? I personally love this painting. I am not a great fan of heavy metal
music, but I call this the heavy metal painting.
XII.
The mood is blue, but actually I consider
this moment as the beginning of the church, hence lots of white. Jesus creates
a union between mother and disciple, the beginning of the community that
eventually evolves into the church.
XIII.
Finally Jesus dies. The blurry abstraction
invites us to move beyond the suffering of Christ. Death is transformation; the
body is no longer the vehicle for our spiritual journey. Jesus last tear drops
onto the rocks and explodes in all directions. We are catapulted as well, into
the future. What do we take with us from Jesus’ passion?
XIV.
This painting shows the cloth Jesus was
wrapped in when put to rest. I took the liberty to move the story one step
ahead. Jesus has already risen and only the cloth is left in the cage, or is it
a mountain rising from the desert? I invite the viewer to move beyond the story
and the physical presence of Jesus.
The brushstrokes, the folds, ridges, valleys, what do you make of it? Can
you fill it with your spiritual longing, can you surrender?
