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| When Portraits Fail |
Some of my favorite paintings that I've done have been those that were so bad at first that I completely started over. The painting above is one such painting. I call it "When Portraits Fail." It began as a self-portrait that went horribly, horribly wrong, so I painted over it. However, the paint I used was fairly translucent (as a new artist, I was unaware that some paints are translucent--and that the tubes are marked with symbols indicating the continuum of transparency to opacity). When I saw how the eyes showed through, I decided to roll with it.
I was quite pleased with the result.
Here's another painting that began with failure:
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| Judith, Disgusted in an Apocalyptic Dystopia |
Beneath the Apocalyptic Dystopia is a wonky cat that made it appear as if I had never actually seen a cat in real life. My friends, I have 10 cats. I see cats everywhere. The world is so full of cats, and my eyes have beheld them. I don't know what went wrong, but I'm glad it did. I love Judith.
Ephesians 2:10 says, "For we are God's masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things He planned for us long ago" (NLT).
The thing that went wrong with us was, of course, sin. Sin distorted us so that we were decidedly not the people God intended us to be. But when we allow the blood of Jesus to not just cover our sins but completely remove them, then God creates us anew. We become (and are becoming) a New Creation. We are His masterpiece. The old wonky cats are gone, ugly portraits replaced by beauty--quiet, gentle spirits that are free from sin's power, free to do good things as God intended.
