"little doodle" from jared

Though Jared has been done with this for some time, I am just now getting this posted. Jared's personal vision of heaven no doubt varies from what many would consider traditional, but it is always thought provoking and interesting work. This particular colored pencil work requires more than a cursory glance to take it in, since our eye is not drawn to what is most important in the piece, but that is entirely appropriate in this particular case.

The scripture that inspired Jared to create this is 1 Corinthians 15:25-26. "For Christ must reign until he humbles all his enemies beneath his feet. And the last enemy to be destroyed is death." Jared simply says, "This little doodle illustrates Christ humbling an enemy beneath His feet." What draws the eye in this work is what draws our eyes in this world most naturally as well, the enemies of Christ. Whether it's tempting lusts or frightening problems, our eyes so often are drawn away from the One who will crush it all beneath his feet, by the power of his death on the cross, which Jared illustrates in this work. Only by conscious effort do we see the naked foot in the pool of his own blood, the only way we will be admitted to heaven where Christ will eternally reign.

heaven is filled with trees

As the gallery show draws near, much is coming together, and there seems to be trees sprouting up everywhere. I have a couple of my own to share later, but today it's another tree of life from bead artist Sheila Stockton (hi Mom!) This is her "Tree of Life #5" which is depicted this time as a cherry tree. Once again, her inspiration for the series is Revelation 22:2, this time in the Contemporary English Version, "On each side of the river are trees that grow a different kind of fruit each month of the year. The fruit gives life, and the leaves are used as medicine to heal the nations."

peeking through heaven's door

Today we'll take another look at the doorway to heaven, this time through the eyes of Eileen Downes, who uses peices of paper to 'paint' with -

I have always been fascinated by doors, windows, portals, passageways and their symbolic meaning. I have saved such imagery for many years - photos from vacations, magazines, family member’s trips, my own illustrations etc... anything about doors really. I have used some of these fragments in the previous collages by layering them over each other, often intertwining them, into an artistic arrangement. Glimpses and views of wonderfully beautiful places symbolic of heaven can be seen though the doorways and windows. These pieces are complete art pieces in their own right, but they are also preparatory illustrations to the larger piece that I recently completed.

This large piece incorporates a real antique door that the viewer must actually open to reveal the imagery behind. This interactive art piece asks the viewer to make a motion, a decision to open, just like we are asked to make a motion to accept Christ as our Savior.

Doors and windows are symbolic imagery that I use in these pieces to convey the essence of heaven. We can pass though these portals of life like we pass from this world into our eternal life in heaven. The Bible references doors in several verses. For example:

Psalm 78:23 "Yet he gave a command to the skies above and opened the doors of the heavens."

Revelation 4:1 "After this I looked, and there before me was a door standing open in heaven. And the voice I had first heard speaking to me like a trumpet said, 'Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.'"

Genesis 28:17 "He was afraid and said, 'How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.'"

Although the following verse does not specifically mention “doors” it does so indirectly by indicating that there are many rooms in heaven: John 14:2 "In my Fathers house are many rooms; and if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you."


- Eileen Downes

doorway to heaven

Today we have a contribution from an artist you haven't heard from before, David Kiesewetter. Dave is still experimenting with different media, trying to find one that really suits him, as many of us do before we settle into one or two primary media. (Unless we just decide to mix them all up!) This piece is a wonderful pen and ink drawing, part of Dave's process for a larger work, but strong enough to stand on it's own as well.

Dave's inspiration for this piece, comes from Revelation 4:1, "After this I looked, and there before me was a door standing open in heaven. And the voice I had first heard speaking to me like a trumpet said, 'Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.'"

Here we see the door open to show a glimpse into heaven beyond, including some of the twenty-four elders sitting around the central throne of God, referred to in Revelation 4:4. In the foreground, you can see the water of the river of life, that flows out from the throne of God, as found in Revelation 22:1.

As we prepare for Thanksgiving tomorrow, I thank God that he is preparing this wonderful place to share with us. Blessings to all.

process and the river of life

Today I'm going to take you through the process for one of my mixed media photographs, "River of Life." I'll actually show you the step by step process I've gone through in my artist's journal I've been keeping just for this project.

The first step was reading through the book "In Light of Eternity" by Randy Alcorn and looking up all the scriptural references that he cites in his book. This has been the basis for all of the artwork done by all of the artists over the course of this past year. There were actually a couple of pieces of scripture that inspired this particular piece. First, in Revelation 22:1, it says, "Then the angel showed me a river with the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb."


One of the first things this scripture does is make me think of what river images I might already have, like this photo taken for no particular reason at the time but has been patiently waiting for me to print it. I made a digital copy to color and put in my journal, waiting for the next piece of the work to come together. You can see I also doodled some palm trees onto it, to see how I'd like to work in the palm tree element that I want to keep as a theme in this project.


Another verse helped influence this piece, Genesis 2:10-14, "A river watered the garden and then flowed out of Eden and divided into four branches. The first branch, called the Pishon, flowed around the entire land of Havilah, where gold is found... The second branch, called the Gihon, flowed around the entire land of Cush. The third branch, called the Tigris, flowed east of the land of Asshur. The fourth branch is called the Euphrates." I really like the link between maps of a place and the image of the place, and I've used maps for overlays before this project, so it wasn't a great stretch for me to think of a map of Eden's rivers to connect the River of Life in Heaven and the river that fed the whole earth from Eden, possibly even the same river? The thought intrigues me that there is a close link between Eden, referred to as Paradise in the Bible, and Heaven, also referred to as Paradise...


In my journal, I can overlap the photographic image and the map, to work out how the two will fit together in the darkroom, change it if I want to, mull it over, move it, or change it completely.


This is the black and white contact print, with the map and a single palm tree as an overlay. When you look at this image and the next one, you can see that the overlay can move around, making no two in the series exactly alike.


Finally, I use watercolors, then dry colored pencils to add the final dimension of color to the piece. In this case, I decided to make the sky yellow in a reference to God's light in Heaven, eliminating the need for the sun or moon, but not necessarily eliminating the sun & the moon themselves, as found in Revelation 22:5. "And there will be no night there - no need for lamps or sun - for the Lord God will shine on them."

So that takes you from beginning to end in the process. By the way, the first entry for this in my journal is dated February 2007, and I just finished it November 2007: about nine months, so I guess it's appropriate for me to think of the finished piece as one of my babies.

heaven opened

Today I have another image from Jared Konopitski, our colored pencil stylist, with an awe inspired piece from Revelation 19:11-16: "Then I saw heaven opened, and a white horse was standing there. And the one sitting on the horse was named Faithful and True. For he judges fairly and then goes to war. His eyes were bright flames of fire, and on his head were many crowns. A name was written on him, and only he knew what it meant. He was clothed with a robe dipped in blood, and his title was the Word of God. The armies of heaven followed him on white horses. From his mouth came a sharp sword, and with it he struck down the nations. He ruled them with an iron rod, and he trod the winepress of the fierce wrath of the almighty God. On his robe and thigh was written this title: King of kings and Lord of lords."

Jared has called this "My simplistic drawing of such a complicated image," but I would say he has distilled the image to something that we can grasp, and that he has done it very well. When I start to look at the image and read the passage, I see many things that I wouldn't grasp in the reading alone. I'm afraid that I'm such a visually oriented person, that it would take many careful readings for me to "see" the image in my head, yet Jared gives me the whole picture at once. It's not so simple that it doesn't takes time for me to grasp the whole picture, but it begins to help bring the scripture to life for me.

At first I felt that the relaxed pose of the rider and horse was incongrous to the sword and flame features of Christ, but it helped remind me this is the same Christ who humbly rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, then gave his life for us to share in his glory. And that is what heaven being opened to us is all about...

tree of life #4

Today we're bringing you the next piece in Sheila Stockton's beaded embroidery series, "Tree of Life #4." Her scriptural inspiration comes from Revelation 22:2, "Through the middle of the broadway of the city; also, on either side of the river was the tree of life with its twelve varieties of fruit, yielding each month its fresh crop; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing and the restoration of the nations." (Amplified) You can see that this time she chose to depict an apple tree, which has so often been how the tree of life in the garden of Eden has been depicted in western tradition.

If you would like to see the rest of her series, you can click on "Sheila Stockton" at the bottom of this post. You'll get a new page with all the posts that have that label on them, which will be all of her series for this project. Also remember that to see most images in this blog larger, just click on the image itself.

river of healing revisted

This is a pair of images I first showed some time ago as they appear in my journal, and now they're finally finished. They form a diptych, or two images that are considered one piece, and they actually have elements that run from one image to the next.





They were inspired by Ezekiel 47:7 & 9, "When I returned, I was surprised by the sight of many trees growing on both sides of the river... There will be swarms of living things wherever the water of this river flows... Life will flourish wherever this water flows." All this from a vision Ezekiel was having of heaven. Of course, we are also told about the river of life in heaven in Revelation 22:2, "It flowed down the center of the main street. On each side of the river grew a tree of life... the leaves were used for medicine to heal the nations." So the vision of John is different but certainly has commonalities with Ezekiel's vision.

The overlay images I used for this piece are actually maps of the rivers that flowed around Eden, or at least an interpretation of where they could have been, since Eden's exact location was lost to us when Adam & Eve sinned. It's thrilling to think that Paradise lost will become Paradise restored when Heaven is at last brought down to earth, which is what the maps signify in this piece.

I've continued that concept in the next piece I've finished, which I'll try to post tomorrow.