I love waterfalls. I love to paint. I love finding inspiration to paint.
This painting was inspired by a friend of mine Jonathan Reuel and his wife Christa. Jonathan wrote a song called Water Fall on Me which I listened to over and over while I was painting.
Christa has been a HUGE inspiration to me while I began painting. She is a prolific artist who inspires me every time I see her or her work.
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As a teen, I flew out to California to spend part of the Summer with my cousin. During that flight, I looked out the window as we were coming into the Los Angeles area. As we were making our descent, I could make out roads, then buildings, and then individual vehicles and finally people. People looked so small from that height. I felt so small.
I had a moment of incredible fear thinking about a Creator that was big enough to manage it all — a God who could know the thoughts of the billions of people on earth. I eventually reconciled these thoughts with a God that powerful — that is, until I saw the images that came back from the Hubble telescope. The same awestruck fear hit me — only greater.
When I was a kid, scientists wondered what was beyond our own galaxy. We had no idea the size of the universe. It still cannot be measured. In some of those images, what appears to be a star is actually a galaxy. In ONE section of the deep space images they have counted over 10,000 galaxies — with hundreds of billions of stars in each galaxy.
We ARE small — incredibly small. How anyone can look at those images of the universe and not have a sense of awestruck wonder is beyond me.
While I was painting this image, I keep thinking how fun it must have been for the Creator to make the universe. God is most certainly an abstract painter.
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To me, good abstract art conveys “passionate intentionality”. You should be able to feel some of what the artist was feeling when he/she was in the process of painting. Abstract is to fine art like jazz is to music.
When I began painting abstracts, the idea that kept running through my head was “beautiful chaos”. That’s the way I see creation. I see the beauty of a very intentional creator but there is also an element that looks pretty random or chaotic on a surface level.
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