The Center of Everything
by John C Little
(Photograph, 2006)
St. Stephen’s-in-the-Fields Episcopal Church - San Jose, CA
apwgfx@comcast.net
 

 
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”.