This six piece series was the visual component to my MA thesis in which I explored the intersection of incarnation and personhood through the lenses of C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces and Colin Gunton's theology of freedom. I examined what is at stake with the loss of the face as the idea of limitless, self-constituted freedom, and to show that freedom is in fact not autonomous, but rather a function of personal particularity, achieved through relationship, with the ultimate responsibility of enabling the other to be free. Each painting depicts a critical moment from the mysterious novel.
12”x15”
charcoal, acrylic, paint pens 2015
The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing- to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from… do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but going back. All my life the God of the Mountain has been wooing me.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
16”x12”
pen & ink, acrylic, paint pens 2015
He frightened me: the holiness of the smell that hung about him. I was afraid of his clothes too, all the skins they were made of, the dried bladders, and the great mask shaped like a bird’s head. It looked as if there were a bird growing out of his body.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
9”x14” acrylic, gel medium 2015
It would be better to rewrite it from the beginning, but there’s no time for that… What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant… The change which the writing wrought in me was only the beginning- only to prepare me for the god’s surgery. They used my own pen to probe my wound.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
5”x6”
charcoal 2015
I was like a condemned man waiting for his executioner, for I believed that some sudden stroke of the gods would fall on me very soon. But as day came after day and nothing happened, I began to see, at first very unwillingly, that I might be doomed to live, and even to live an unchanged life, some while longer.
My aim was to build up more and more of that strength, hard and joyless, by learning, fighting, and laboring, to drive all the woman out of me.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
16”x12”
acrylic 2015
There was utter silence all around me. And now for the first time I knew what I had been doing. While I was reading, it had, once again, seemed strange to me that the reading took so long; for the book was a small one. Now I knew that I had been reading it over and over- perhaps a dozen times. I would have read it forever, quick as I could, starting the first word again almost before the last one was out of my mouth, if the judge had not stopped me. And the voice I read it in was strange to my ears. There was given to me a certainty that this, at last, was my real voice.
At last the judge spoke.
“Are you answered?”
Yes. The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, “Child, to say the very thing you mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.” A glib saying.
When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time been saying over and over, you’ll not talk of the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
16" x 12"
book pages 2015
Now you who read, judge.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces