I am not a religious person.
I subscribe neither to the Christian narrative nor any other narrative. I do not pray to any God. I do not read the Bible. I have no reason to believe in any sort of afterlife.
But working alongside my uncle and my father in Duke Chapel, I achieved a sense of wholeness. Here I worked, perfecting a huge stony monument to a God I'm not sure I even believe in. Here I came to understand the meaning of "God" in the abstract. I realized that I was part of something bigger than myself. I admired how orange morning sun struck the masonry; how the row of repeating pillars seemed to rhyme; the deepness of the painted glass; how the rising and setting sun brilliantly illuminated different shades of glass in the windows, combining the natural world with the building. At a base level, I was struck by the deepness of the reds and greens and blues and yellows, and ultimately, the power of pure light. My grandfather, the stained glass craftsman at the National Cathedral for almost a half century, always spoke of color and light in this way. At the time, I was too young to understand him. Doing his work, I was finally able to understand how he took so much meaning from the work he did. With each trip up the scaffold, with the blisters and soreness and sweat, I found myself getting closer to his story. My spirituality is not based on scripture or sermon or prayer. It is based on a much more transcendental and less traditional kind of spirituality. Mine comes from heritage, from nature, and from a sense of place. I don't think stained glass will be my lifelong career, but it is a part of my story and who I am.
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the chonk, the whole chonk, and nothing but the chonk I continued to think about sense of place, nostalgia, and personal narrative. Technically, I thought about texture, color, and layering.
The premise was to depict a sense of place. This painting was based on a satellite image of a church parking lot in which I rode bikes and scooters often as a kid. Here I thought again about finding abstract spiritual meaning in places of worship. Before this, I had never made a big, ugly painting before and I wanted to try my hand at it. I will say, I don't love this painting and I probably will not do more like it. But there is something to be gained. Using a knife and gel medium, I was able to build more texture and activate a small amount of visual interest in the textural surface of the canvas. I attempted to desaturate colors and avoid using out-of-the-bottle hues, opting to not mix my colors and create more interest. I toed the line of abstraction in this painting, which I have not really done before. I think I will retreat from abstraction after this project, but I will apply the scale and textural/mixing techniques to my more realistic paintings. |