This Week’s Painting

I wanted to capture Nathanael’s quality of openness, improvisation, and honest confusion. I’m also exploring a visual theme of order and chaos in the small squares of color that comprise the column to the left and the right. I introduced these columns in an entirely abstract piece from last week, which I didn’t post about, but which you can find as the bulletin cover and as the first slide in the weekly slide show. In that painting, I was thinking about the way creation is simply a balance between chaos and order, and that if this balance was ever lost, creation would cease. In my own life, I don’t want to be either too orderly or too chaotic, but to hold that balance. This year, I intend to retain this visual theme across many paintings, in many different ways. At this moment, it strikes me as a very important one. I don’t want to dualistically reject either order or chaos. I need them both in my life, and I think that they’re the essence of God’s creation, the two strands of the DNA of everything, if you will.