I do consider myself a Christian artist and I love attempting to fully integrate my faith into my art, as well as every aspect of my life— as I believe this is what the true message teaches. With God being the creator of the universe, it’s easy to portray many, many, many things as an outcropping of all of His majesty, splendor, and wonder-fullness, but one thing that’s always been a struggle for me to represent is God’s most prized possession— His Son, Jesus.
The biggest challenge is that Jesus has been represented many times in many ways and the fact remains that no one really knows what he looked like. Many artist have been criticized for making him too white or too black, but we do know that he was an ordinary, Middle-Eastern man who, “had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” [Isaiah 53:2]. Yet, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” [Colossians 1:15-20]
How do you represent this ultimate contrast of an ordinary human, containing all the fullness and authority of God? Maybe you can see why I’ve been reluctant.
This is what I’ve come up with. This is actually a study of Jesus, as portrayed by Rick Griffin. Rick is known mainly for his contributions to Surfer magazine, his key role in the San Francisco psychodelic scene as a pioneer of rock poster art and underground comics. Little known, he came to faith in Jesus in the 70s and produced a vast and beautiful body of Christian art, ranging from pen & ink illustrations to large-scale canvas paintings. He had a consistent way of portraying Jesus; a look that honored his Middle-Easternness, showed him to be an ordinary man, yet gave him a sense of mystery under the surface. All of Rick’s Jesus’ gave him shaded eyes; a subtle vailing of the splendor contained in His soul. He gave Jesus a hippy, homeless, wandering sage mystique that was common in the art of Rick’s time. This imagery speaks to me as I perceive Jesus to be, more than any representation I’ve seen.
So as homage to Jesus and Rick (who was taken back to his maker in 1991) I am doing studies of Griffin’s Jesus to make his look and portrayal of the Son of God a starting place for my own.
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