Artist Edgar Payne writes: “We say a painting is beautiful because (the artist has painted)…deeper mysterious qualities that lie beyond the definition of man.” I believe this is true. In elementary school I hand-wrote and illustrated small comic books which I sold for ten-cents a copy. Building on these innate talents to write and illustrate, I became both a professional writer and an artist, twice blessed with a peculiar ability to hear, see and then translate. As a writer I often found it baffling to express in written word truths about the human experience that art so instantly and powerfully reveals in image.

With this painting, I wanted to express that the essential “story” of Jesus is love. For any person, in any path of life, the need to feel and express love is an innate need. I recently drove by the homeless mission area in an urban city and was deeply touched by how many elderly women I saw sitting alone on the sidewalk. It came to me that perhaps even in this situation, if women formed their own relief society, nurturing one another, each might share human contact they desire and the hope they so desperately need. I envisioned two such lonely, destitute women sharing the stories of Jesus, realizing as they did that even the son of God had no home on this earth to rest. Yet, His mission of love and His atoning sacrifice, transcends all earthly woes. 

 

I am sitting in my upstairs office looking out the window, mesmerized by the absolute mosaic before me. There are bare trees filling the viewing plane. The apple tree closest to my window. An elm tree in the next yard over. Some other kind of tree farther away. Bare branches shooting in every direction. Crisscrossing one another. One tree with branches a golden, reddish brown. Another’s branches nearly black. Another, ochre. Some of the branches are large. Some small. Behind all of them, a yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue sky lighted with sunrise which fills every large and tiny space between the branches. A stained glass picture only the magnificence of nature could create. 

There is only one direction for art to go and that is “out and about.” In other words, the sheer act of creating means something new has been sent forth into the world. It is a “given” which sometime, somewhere, will be “taken.” I think I love to paint and draw because once the mark is made on canvas or paper, it exists as something new and unique, to be shared as part of myself with others.