NEXT CHURCH NAT'L GATHERING 2017
ARTIST IN RESIDENCE for Wells & walls
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"thirst"
Lisle Gwynn Garrity
Acrylic on Canvas
36"x60"
ARTIST STATEMENT
“On Monday of the conference, I was struck by the woman’s remark, ‘the well is deep.’ So I wanted to imagine what happens when we are forced to stare down into a deep, deep well. What do we see? Perhaps we see a barrier, or a wall, and we hear the woman’s words as the excuses we are quick to make also. Or maybe we see a tunnel leading us to something—something that appears both far away or close at-hand at the same time. On Tuesday, I deepened the well. Because, ‘the well is deep,’ isn’t just a statement about limitation. It means this well has history; it has depth; it has the capacity to hold our life source throughout the ages. And now, today, I have been imagining what living water looks like. And my first impulse was to make the water bubble up and defy gravity and appear surreal and magical—and I think we like to imagine it that way. But as I continued to stare into this deep well, what I see is living water that looks like what we already know and expect: still, unmoving water. And maybe this feels jarring and disappointing at first, but if we keep looking, if we lean in far enough, we might just start to see our own reflections mirrored back at us. And maybe then we’ll know what living water really looks like when it comes to life in the world.”
"Wells+Walls"
lisle gwynn garrity
pastel on Vinyl
9.5"x13"
ARTIST STATEMENT
"This piece is a meditation on what happens when the walls we try to build intersect with God's living waters. The walls are encompassed and broken down by the water, becoming open and porous. In effect, they become like windows, widened to new possibilities."