I believe the following are my most successful pieces from the semester:

"Remain" 32x48 oil on MDF board

"How many ways might we know Thee" oil and oilstick on birch ply 39x48

"As many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death II" oil and oilstick on masonite 24x48

"WE are called to that State in which such experiences are possible" oil and oilstick on birch ply 39x48

Reflections

I feel blessed.  I had a simple process.  I would sit and wait in the manner of Friends for the Lord to present a prospect to my mind.  And if such an image or word was stirred up within me so that I might feel compelled to rise and paint, then I would.  I did choose the process, but beyond that my creativity was removed from the paintings (so far as I was able).  I did not sign the works, and if I do it will only be on the back with a clause before my name, which clarifies I was the hand only. 

I cannot tell you how liberating it is to step back from a support and see a work and feel awestruck by its beauty without the guilt of feeling conceited.  I was never trained to paint abstractions.  I never took a class in drawing stretched-out distorted figures or Warhol-esq splatter-field paintings.  Each painting has had the joy of a new medium, an innocence, a freshness, an unknown, and a surprise. That is not to say I think all of the paintings were perfect—some were more successful than others—but rather that the process of making each of these paintings fed me, even if I failed to allow that power to be accessible to others.  The process of making these paintings moved me forward in my relationship with God.  The paintings force me to Trust God, and called me into Holy Surrender, and by the glory of God maybe some day I will Remain.

Usually when God presents me with an image to paint he throws it at me suddenly and all at once: all of the color, the composition resolved, and with the meaning fleshed out.  To visually enable a viewer to see literally what I have seen within my head is one thing, difficult but possible, but for me to show a viewer that same image and have them walk away with the same understanding is very unlikely if possible at all.  If we accept this juxtaposition as fact then we are left with several questions rattling around in our head. Does God want me to give priority to the image or the meaning?  Am I supposed to blend the two?  Should I simply paint the image as it was given to me and trust that God will guide other viewers to draw out the meaning?  Does the viewer need the meaning to truly understand the vision behind the painting?  Or is the meaning the only significant part of the vision?  Does God trust me to craft an image, which will be accessible to my culture?

I was an idealist when I started and I struck a middle ground with my proposal.  I said, “To paint this experience in a way that honestly represents my memory of the event while simultaneously making the significance of the event accessible to other viewers, I will need to balance visual realism with emotional realism.”  The simplicity is beautiful; but more is possible.  If we listen, and if we take time (which ultimately we can) God will guide us.  Literally speaking, I don’t believe that God cares whether we step forward with our right foot or our left, but if we listen He will give us direction.  For if we learn to hear His Will even while we do small things then how much easier will it be to Hear Him when it matters?  The act of painting can be as plain and trivial as walking, but if we let God guide our brushes, oh what marvelous meaning he will give to our marks!

So yes, painting an experience in a way, which honestly represents my memory of the event, while simultaneously making the significance of the event accessible to other viewers, does requires changing the original vision.  My error, accordingly, was in assuming that I should then take control and make decisions while the original creator was sitting right next to me.  This is the problem with our egos.  Our desire for control has been imbedded in human history for eons and lies at the root of our struggles with God.  I believe that “Adam” and “Eve” fled the Garden of Eden when they realized that they were completely dependant on God while they were there, that they had no control.  In fact, their lust for control was so great that they built a wall around the place to make sure they would never accidentally stumble back into such a state of Devine dependence. They said they would rather chose to farm and tend sheep, rather then allow God to provide everything for them even as he does for the fowl of the air and the lilies of the field (Mt 6:24-34).  And painting is no different.  I work in oils because the pigments are constant and the fixative is forgiving, I do not even want to share control with the medium.

While I was working on the final I realized that painting had became one of my primary disciplines.  I have learned more about God and my relationship to Him by painting this last semester than I did by any means in the previous year.  Painting calls me to Surrender and when have—when I am with God—painting coos to me and tells me to stay.  Painting has shown me that a deep, attentive, and worshipful relationship with God is not mutually exclusive with action.  We can talk to people, or cross traffic or ride a bike while Surrendered, but it is harder than Surrendering alone in silence.  Painting provides me with a safe place to practice listening to God while I move.  I am grateful for this semester.

 

Peace and Love,

Colin Bussiere-Nichols

final series of three: DONE

Here are the final three, each shown separately.  A photo of the three in a series is shown in the post above.

  

"Trust" 32x48 oil on MDF board

"Surrender" 32x48 oil on MDF board

"Remain" 32x48 oil on MDF board

final series of three (no quite done)

This is still a work in progress. But this is what has happened so far. I prepared three supports each 32x48 in. tempered MDF board. I sat before them in waiting worship. I thought about my proposal, which suggested that these pieces would follow my previous works by calling viewers into deeper relationships with God. Rather suddenly (as is often the case for me) it came upon me that the panel on the far left should say, “Trust,” the middle “Surrender,” and the right hand one “Remain”. I got a pencil and did this. You will notice that the first four lines on each panel run in a series from one painting to the next: ‘God knocks,’ ‘we answer,’ ‘commune together,’ etc. The quotes and statements, which follow those lines, are elaborations upon the unifying theme for the paintings: ‘Fear not’ extrapolates upon the concept of trust or at least offers us a quality of trust.


Trust
God knocks
God is always present
Believe that God has hour best
interest in mind
Fear not.
God does not want to be feared
Rather fear stands as an impasse before
faith (that is to say trust). (A leader who is
feared may be obeyed but they are no
respected). If I believe that God is ever present,
if I believe that God cares for me then fear of
suffering and sorrow reflects a lack of my faith
that “thou art with me” even in those moments when all
evil might face me. Though the flesh might be
beaten from my bones “ thou art with me” giving
meaning to my life in the face of all evil and
harm

surrender
we answer
we knock
turn over control of our
actions
to God
Smile! For we are Called
To a most joyous surrender
death of our will, which is apart from that of God, does not mark
loss of self, but rather a destruction
of all that which stood in the way of
us being who we really are
Beyond all the money and fear
we are all immeasurably beautiful, it
is this self, which God strives to
release
[written up the left side of this panel]
Ok, yes, Luther, by faith alone, but only if you concede that faith, which does not result in works, is not faith but a lie.


Remain
Commune together
He answers
help Him continue to dictate
our actions
“In the Light which reveals
all of this, Stand, neither
go to the right hand, nor
the left (Joshua [hb= the Lord is Salvation,
Gr. = Iesous -> En. = Jesus] 1:7)
What a blessing we have
that God is ever present
eternally yearning for our
return if we leave

Shortly after writing the ‘titles’ on the panels (“Surrender” etc.) I started getting images in my head of a series of corresponding images, which clarified or solidified between Trust and Remain. At this point I again reentered a space of waiting worship. BAM! I fell out of my seat (partially literally) and looking in the direction of the sound I saw a whitish pigeon falling away from my window. The pigeon being a city bird it left an oily print of itself on the glass, and I being and artist began to draw. From the contours of the squished bird arose another opening.
God becomes increasingly tangible as our awareness and relation ship to him grows.
Even at the point of Trusting God- God remains incredibly abstract, despite our glimmers of God and passing memories of past encounters.
Though we may have surrendered in the past and danced with God our memory of those encounters could barely hope to do justice to the shadow of those moments much less their reality.
It is this incomplete memory, which calls us home. We are left with a remembrance. There was something special, which cannot be recalled, and yet we have a sense of lacking.
The act of Holly Surrender sends God flooding back into consciousness. His potential is illuminated before us and though we can only imagine permanent residence in this state the reality of that possibility becomes evident and the joyous empowerment of that prospect becomes a lure before us.
Oh, and if we stay, if we let God steer our lives despite all social awkwardness and strife, whether it be physical or financial or otherwise. Oh then we will know God in All Glory—experientially.

I have attempted to show this by turning God into a pigeon (or rather by using that of God, which is ever present in pigeons, to illustrate our relationship to the Divine). The painting of Trust has a very abstracted painting of a pigeon—six lines—and drawn in saturated orange as an expression of hope, which is not necessarily grounded in experience. At the point of Surrender God is real, and the painting needs to reflect that but even when we are with God, God is so much more that I had to keep this pigeon small. I didn’t intend for it to be quite that little but I quite like it now. I consider these two paintings finished, which is always a good time to take some criticism (although I would still love to here that they are perfect). It took me a while to figure out Remain but ever since the eye presented its self it has felt great. The eye isn’t even present in Trust and its only a black dot in Surrender how fitting that Remain might show us all that we have been missing: the dry wrinkled curves of skill surrounding brilliant color. By the way I am not being creative with my color choices. When I started looking for pigeon eyes on the internet I was blown away by how many close up photos there are and then I found out that pigeons eyes are jogged in FFA competitions and the like.



"Trust" 32x48 tempered MDF board "Surrender" 32x48 tempered MDF board
"Remain" 32x48 tempered MDF board

Jacob and the Angel

Ok so here is the completed "Jacob wrestled the Angel of the Lord" oil on masonite 24x36 I believe that it was sufficiently explained before and that the final image was the missing piece save the color of Jacob and the Angel. In romanecs paintings red signifies the Divine and blue signifies the world thus you will see Jesus’ wearing a red undergarment with blue raped about him to signify that he his God clothed in a humanly form. Conveniently those colors also double as the classic signifier, which differentiate wrestling partners.