This monotype started out with a bit of a plan but lots more panache. I mixed up a pile of dark blue-black ink. Then I took my largest plexi plate and rolled a solid sky over most of it with a large brayer. I was thinking night sky and of the phrase “night to night reveals knowledge” from Psalm 19. I next chose to set some context. So I mixed up some dark earthen brown and more thickly laid that down on the bottom fourth of the plate. Marking into that brown base with a scribe, I suggested some distance with hill lines.

Then I cut a paper stencil to cover that brown section and prepared a fine mist sprayer of mineral spirits. This is where you hold your breath, for I could have ruined the whole with too much spray. The experiment held promise as I removed the stencil, held the plate vertical for a few moments to let the mineral spirits break into the ink by gravity.

Lastly, I lifted the plate up to the light over my head, looking through it to see if the ink layers had balance and enough interesting mystery on the top part. The cool thing about monotypes is that you are working with less control than direct painting. What you’ve worked up on the plate gets pressed onto paper under a huge roller on an etching bed. Magic or mess is what you see once the cranking of the press is done squeezing the ink you laid down. The paper is then finally freed to release off that painted piece of plastic. The paper is the recipient of all this process. And you as the artist get to see what happened in the pressure which had been applied on top of your marks.

Voila or…hmmmm: try again. In this case I had a keeper, and this painting on paper hangs in my home, not for sale.

This scene references a vivid memory I had when I was about 18, sitting on a log in Canada and peering up into the deep night sky. No one sitting around the campfire was speaking. I had no prior information about God which was at all meaningful, so I was not prepared with any assumptions or pre-conditioning. I just looked up silently at the dark vastness sprinkled with an array of stars. Soon, unbidden, I was covered with awe. The depth of sparkling bodies suspended way above me in the heavens was beyond beautiful. It was calling me in some kind of gentle way to awaken to what seemed suddenly obvious (!) that there was a Creator who was way beyond what I knew sitting there on the earth. I said nothing to anybody, but my heart gained something important that night.

The Psalmist says that this is the way God speaks, through what He has made. And He does this without words. He does this mercifully, continually; and He does this all throughout the earth in every generation. The sound waves are ever present, just aiming for receptors. “He who has ears, let him hear” It’s an invitation. It is done for us.

As I surveyed my monotype creation, the day it came off the etching press some 40 years after my night sky epiphany, I remembered how that 18 year old vision had awakened me. But then with this new image on my paper, I also wondered if what showed up through the mineral spirited forms in front of me was also a closing!

It’s as if human bodies are being lifted up in my painted version; multitudes joining the resurrection. This is in fact a promise for awakened believers, that the graves will one day release them just like the paper I pulled off my plate. Jesus who was raised from death right after Passover became the first fruits of a greater gathering to come. Hallelujah! Something’s coming that is far far greater than I know here on earth, and I am longing for His sudden appearing.