"Heroic Faith"

(sold)

"A life of heroic sacrifice will foster and leave a legacy for heroic faith." The quote today is by the senior pastor at Hill Country Bible Church NW...Tim Hawks. This piece is a commission to be given to a young man who epitomizes the quote. God's blessings on him and his family as he struggles for his physical life.

I generally do return to mixed media when the need arises to communicate a truth verbally and visually. So today, I would like to recap a few points about my own mixed media process. First of all, I love using old book pages in the background and then covering most of the text up, but leaving those bits behind that say something that goes with the theme of the piece. In this case, you can clearly read the Lord's Prayer in the bottom part of the old cathedral section. And therein lies the beauty of printing images on silk tissue paper and creating overlays in the work. The contrast between transparency and opacity is very compelling and creates a lot of depth in this type of work. 

There is also some inclusions of plain rice paper overlaying some of the text, as well as some mono printed rice papers (blue areas) that add color. It also creates an ethereal look to have a line engraved image overlaying the colored and revealed text areas.

Also included are areas of "deconstruction" where bits of colored rice papers and text pages were adhered to the surface and then removed to reveal the bits that stayed behind. One very effective example of this is in the upper right hand corner where text appears backwards over the blue to create an "echo" of the other background text and also break up the surface tension.

The last detail was the inclusion of a gold, embossed cross. The inclusion of a cross was the request of the client and so I included two, but the gold one will always catch the eye since it is gold and shiny against the blue background. And there you have it...a few more things to think about.