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Steven Schroeder |
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Last Words Triptych Acrylic on birch panel |
Artist Statement: When I started what became “last words,” I did not have a triptych in mind. A friend of mine had told me she liked the bright yellow and green colors of some small paintings I’d done in the spring using acrylic applied to a birch panel with a wide brush and a staccato stroke. I thought I’d do something similar on a slightly larger panel – an abstract piece with nothing but color on my mind. But as I worked my way down the surface, I felt something darker emerging. Blue grew more prominent while yellow receded, so the green of this painting (which became the second panel of the triptych) took on more of winter than of spring as it moved toward the bottom of things. This seemed about right for my autumnal mood, and it had me thinking (as I often do) of Leonard Cohen’s line about how the light gets in. With an eye on the “crack in everything,” I added a white slash from top to bottom on the left side of the panel. Birch is a traditional surface for icons, which often take an approach to light that is not far distant from Cohen’s. I realized at this point that the painting had become a meditation on light. The single white slash splintered and grew cruciform, and I began to think of the painting as an icon with an abstract crucifix on a field of light that darkened as it descended toward the base of the cross. That interplay of light and dark in the presence of the cross brought the poetry at the beginning of John’s gospel to my mind, where Cohen’s anthem was still echoing – “there is a crack in everything.” The first words of John’s gospel (Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος) are often translated into English as “in the beginning was the word.” That, and the crack in everything made me think of a little collection of meditations by Stanley Hauerwas on the last words from the cross titled Cross Shattered Christ. Christian tradition has drawn on the four canonical gospels to make a collection of seven, but this icon that was emerging made one word leap out, the penultimate word in John’s account, and that became the title. Appropriately, to say that one Greek word (Διψῶ) requires two in English: “I thirst.” Say “one” and there are two, say “two” and there are three, say “three” and there are ten thousand things. Bio: Steven Schroeder is a poet and visual artist who lives and works in Chicago. More at stevenschroeder.org. |
