Enclosed

Painting description: 30"x30" acrylic on stretched canvas.

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Artist's Statement

Enclosed was created between February and April of 2009. The visible and thick lines of the painting are bars that imprison hand and facial imprints. In between the bars rests stained glass, a notorious characteristic of Christian churches. The painting denounces the churches and religious leaders by illustrating their role of entrapping people. The varied hues of red symbolize religion’s bloodguilt – through its immoral support and instigation of war, its greed, its misrepresentation of God, its defamation of His Word, and its propagation of hypocritical and false doctrines. On the painting’s side lies a message that exposes a specific false doctrine which is the teaching that a loving and forgiving God would eternally torment souls in fire for misdeeds committed by a human life spanning less than a century. The nonsense of such an inequitable belief is expressed by the question: “The soul cannot feel the cold, and so it does not feel fire. Why do you go to your church to listen to a liar?”

Each person is responsible for his or her beliefs, including the willful or passive support of lies. The painting is a call to action to divest our lives of such lies.