A Painting

When asked to paint a visual of the Book of Joel I had a hard time envisioning what picture to express. There is so much in Joel that could be brought out the various artistic forms. In truth, Joel itself is a descriptive and artful written word. The use of words describing the darkness that is coming followed by the hope of salvation in God is powerful and beautiful. So deciding what picture to pain was hard for me. I wanted to express all of these things, darknes, death, blood, light, dawn, joy, and life. So I decided to paint a picture that depicted these various points both in light of each other, opposing from opposite sides of the page.

I first drew a mountain, which Joel describes almost as a buffer. The light of dawn and the locusts come rising over the mountains to come down and swath the land in death. So above this I drew two emotional sides. On the left is a yellow to orange to red sunrise with white doves flying just above the peaks. This represents a coming light a joy killing the night. To the right, however, I painted a dark black and purple representing not only night, but the locusts as well. These dissipate as they approach the light as if the light is scattering the locusts and pushing them back.

Below the mountain base line I drew a river flowing down the middle. This river turns to blood as it gets closer to the viewer. To the left of this river, much like the sunrise, there is green. This is representing life in the lushness of growing things. To the right of the river is brown turning to dry tan. There are patches of green closer to the river but these soon disappear. This represents the death that the locusts have inflicted on the land, a scar that will take a long time to heal.