This was a digital picture taken out through a church
window during my dawn prayer vigil on Good Friday, 2004.
I was looking around for images of crosses, actual or
suggested. I was meditating on Christ’s willing
sacrifice on the cross, and how it is central to our
lives as Christians. As an artist, I see the shape of
the cross as the meeting of the symbolic vertical line
from heaven and the horizontal line of our earthly
existence. Noticing that the frame of the window formed
a cross, I took the picture of the opposite wall,
illuminated by a reddish wall light, and lined it up so
that the light just glowed over the cross bar. As I
started to work with the image in Photoshop, I began to
intensify the redness of the light and to make the
details of the wall more abstract. The effect made the
window frame stand out in contrast. I started to see the
cross as a visually negative image (in addition to it’s
negative image as a Roman instrument of pain and death)
and removed all details of the window frame. Then I was
inspired to fill the black negative space of the cross
with an outer space-like image, which to me, gave it a
surreal quality. It was like looking out the window to
the earthly light, but also looking through the cross
into the vastness of interstellar space. So, I saw
Christ’s cross, and Christ/God Himself as the center of
the universe and beyond that, the center of all
existence. I think it fits well into the sub-theme of
“All Things into Christ”.
