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”.
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