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The Four Holy Gospels
(paintings, 2011)
From the early centuries of the Christian era, manuscript illumination has been an art form that allowed the artistic hand to reflect reverence for the Scriptures while creating beautiful copies of the text. In our own times, with the mass production of Bibles, manuscript illumination has become a largely forgotten creative outlet. But one contemporary Christian artist has reinvented the form for today. Makoto Fujimura, an esteemed modern abstract painter, was commissioned to paint five large-scale images for a volume entitled The Four Holy Gospels, which would commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible. It was a huge undertaking. In addition to these five major works, Fujimura created abstract doodlings to accompany the pages of text and small paintings to illuminate the initial capital letters for each chapter of the four Gospels. The result is a great visual feast, a masterpiece in the form of a sacred book not unlike those created by medieval monks. And just as it was for the manuscript illuminators of old, the project proved to be immensely meaningful for an artist who speaks often of his love for the Scriptures and how he has been personally impacted by the story and person of Jesus Christ.
Fujimura’s central theme for the series of five central images was a focus on the tears of Christ, “tears shed for the atrocities of the past century and for our present darkness.”1 Each of the five paintings is unique, though they gain in impact when seen together in an exhibition or within the pages of the published volume. Charis-Kairos (Tears of Christ) is the introductory painting, a dark background upon which layers of vivid color have been built. The bright hope represented by these pigments seems to shatter the darkness. Consider the Lilies represents the Gospel of Matthew and is built up of over sixty layers of colored mineral pigments, including azurite and malachite. The only painting with a representational element, it subtly suggests a trinity of three Easter lilies. Water Flames is the painting for the Gospel of Mark, and it uses a visual language very similar to the artist Mark Rothko to represent abstracted flames that draw our eyes upward—flames that both consume and sanctify.
John: In the Beginning by Makoto Fujimura [Courtesy of Makoto Fujimura]
Referencing the familiar parable of the Prodigal Son, Luke’s Gospel is represented by The Prodigal God, a painting that Fujimura describes as depicting “my own struggle between the legalism of religion (the elder brother) and the reckless spendthrift nature of the Father’s love in the story.” The final painting, In the Beginning (the Gospel of John), is a work that evokes the dawn of creation and makes reference to both Christ as the Creator and to the mystery of his incarnation. Appropriately, it is the most mystical of the five masterful paintings, but all five paintings serve well as objects of contemplation, works that reward patient inspection to allow them to unfold themselves to the gaze of the viewer.
Makoto Fujimura was born in 1960 to Japanese parents living in Boston. Most of his grade school years were spent in Japan, but he returned to the United States at age thirteen. He showed promise as an artist early on, and remembers being inspired by a teacher who told him not to “waste God’s gift.” After being educated in the States, he spent six and a half years in Japan, learning traditional Japanese painting methods. The result of this eclectic artistic education is a style that bridges traditional Japanese art with modern abstract expressionism. He considers his work a hybrid of early Renaissance master Fra Angelico and American expressionist Mark Rothko. The style he has developed is completely unlike the realism of earlier Christian painting: thoroughly contemporary, and yet deeply spiritual in intention.
While studying in Tokyo, Fujimura began to attend church with his wife, who was herself on a spiritual search for greater meaning in her life. At first he was unimpressed, and rejected the teachings of the Bible as outdated and irrelevant. But at the same time he was experiencing a growing need for a sense of meaning and purpose in his life beyond making art. While art was very important to him, it could not answer some of the deeper stirrings in his soul. Ultimately it was the poetry of William Blake that nudged him toward faith and helped him to begin to make sense of the Christian message. Never one to follow half measures, Fujimura embraced his new faith with passion and with a fervent intellectual desire to understand what it meant to be a Christian in these modern times.
Since that time, Fujimura’s Christian commitment has been central to the making of his art. It has been reflected in his paintings and also in his desire to help other artists find a meaningful connection between their faith and their creativity. To that end he founded the International Arts Movement, an organization dedicated to helping other creative individuals wrestle with issues of art, faith, and living fully as human beings. He also has been a prolific blogger and essayist on such issues and has written a book telling of his personal journey, River Grace, and published a collection of his blog posts, Refractions.
On September 11, 2001, Fujimura and his family were living in New York City, in the very shadow of the twin towers, and were firsthand witnesses to the devastation of the terrorist attacks that reduced the towers to rubble. He lived only three blocks from Ground Zero, and this shattering experience has shaped his art and his worldview in the years since. A serious artist cannot ignore the pain, suffering, and moral ugliness of the times, but an artist of faith also knows that this is not the end of the story. God is at work in a reclamation project in which the artist can be a participant. “Despite our fallen nature,” he writes, “God desires to reflect goodness, beauty, and truth in us. God desires to refract his perfect light via the broken, prismatic shards of our lives. Art and creativity will end up being delivered back to the Creator’s hands in that pure light.”2
Following the ancient Japanese artistic practice of Nihonga, Fujimura grinds his own pigments and paints with handmade brushes. He sometimes accents his paintings with touches of gold and silver, applied to the canvas with glue made from animal hides. The process is traditional and very organic, emphasizing the textures, colors, and materials of the natural world. He applies the colors in a “semi-transparent layering effect that traps light in the space created between the pigments and between layers of gold and silver foil.”3 This layering creates depth and ambiguity and brings the surface to life. The finished paintings seem like living organisms, pulsing and breathing under the gaze of the viewer. In his art, Fujimura is constructing a new world from the elements of God’s created world. As he describes it, “Coarser mineral pigments, being literally sand, create ripples of color when allowed to cascade down. I stand the painting against the wall, and using broader strokes with abundant water, let the pigments cover the painting. When displayed in a gallery, the pigments reflect the light and shimmer like stars.”4
Among his other masterworks are a series of paintings that reflect on T. S. Eliot’s mystical poems in Four Quartets. These poems proved an ideal impetus for creating a series of paintings that are not only beautiful objects of artistic craftsmanship in themselves but also objects for contemplation. The patient eye taking in these paintings is well rewarded by the slow unfolding of all the work has to offer. These are not paintings of any recognizable object but are objects in themselves, ready to be read and experienced on their own terms. As Nicholas Wolsterstorff has said, “Fujimura’s paintings invite us to dwell within the painting. When we do, we experience shalom, not in going beyond the painting but in our enchanted dwelling within it.”5
Fujimura has taken the abstract metaphysical language of such acclaimed artists as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman and transformed it into something that carries a spiritual resonance. He does not see his own work as abstract, but as “a representational depiction of God’s space.”6 In his paintings he takes the elements of the created world, fashions them into something entirely new, and then offers them as an act of adoration to God. That is why he can say, making reference to the Gospel story of Mary Magdalene, “The act of painting with precious minerals is like Mary anointing the feet of Jesus.”7 In his beautiful abstractions, the spiritual and the physical come together in an incarnation of God’s beauty.