Ethereum

Folk Father

Collection

Divinize the Blockchain

Description

The inspiration for this image came from a medieval French book of hours - that's basically a (usually) heavily illustrated devotional book full of prayers, and then other things as well: occasionally charts, calendars, full miniature paintings - basically you can imagine a rich person in medieval times getting a small religious book for themselves illustrated and bound and personalized, so they vary quite a bit in terms of content and style. In one, I noticed way in the upper corner of an image, about the size of a coin, was an image of a bearded man in the clouds with angels peeking out from behind him, and the artist had put in small golden rays coming out of his mouth like the rays of the sun. Obviously, this was an image of God the Father. I thought it was cool and filed it away for later use. Over time this little image and its nature grew on me quite a bit. A big part of the space I like to inhabit is the overlap between what I would casually call official religion and folk religion. There's often a pretty wide gap between what the official highly educated philosophically inclined individuals say about a topic and what people on the ground actually believe. Who God is would be a perfect example of this in my mind - to me, it's the most fascinating example. If you dive into most theology (not all, but essentially all of the mainstream stuff), God the Father isn't the "guy with a beard on a cloud" archetype so often discussed - yet, on the ground level, this kind of is how many people imagine him. There's probably a reason this image so intuitively speaks to people as a picture of the Guy In Charge (tm), so much so that you find it everywhere from tiny illustrations like this to one of the most famous works of art of all time: the roof of the Sistine Chapel in the Apostolic Palace at the Vatican. So, I thought it would be fitting to take this small image slipped to me from a French painter several centuries ago and keep it moving along, passing the torch so to speak, from his small book of parchment or calf skin to the now mostly digital visual world we inhabit. It's obviously not an image "of God", which is why I titled it this. It's a picture about the general folk idea of the Guy In Charge, and what that says about us who were made "in his image" - although of course what that means depends on who you ask. (One small visual note here - most of the other images in this series are on black. On this one I put it on a color I would call amaranth, which I also intentionally used heavily in the other images. Amaranth as a color is associated with immortality in western culture. Not a huge deal but, thought it was interesting and adds more context so I wanted to mention it).