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Evangelical

Discovering the Language of Lament

September 06, 2011 by Makoto Fujimura

Continued from Page 1

T.S. Eliot*, Four Quartets*

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Between Two Waves of the Sea -- Mineral Pigments on Kumohada

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

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12th Night, Collection of Sato Museum  -- Mineral Pigments, Platinum and Gold on Kumohada

12th Night was commissioned for a museum tour Nihonga exhibit in Japan (To-ki-Michi, A Survey of Contemporary Nihonga, Ueno Royal Museum, Hakodate Museum, Ishikawa Prefectural Museum, and twelve other museums throughout Japan). I overlapped a Shakespearian title with 12th, a day after 9/11. This is an elegy in the form of a weeping cherry, a Japanese symbol of ephemeral beauty and now my personal symbol of enduring hope during dark times.

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Water Flames, Vermillion -- Mineral Pigments on Kumohada

The Water Flames series followed Four Quartets in 2005, and was exhibited at Sara Tecchia Roma in Chelsea and Katzen Art Museum in Washington D.C. Water Flames took Dante's The Divine Comedy as an inspiration, and drew from the mystical tradition that states that the flames of judgment are in one accord with the flames of sanctification.

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Golden Fire -- Mineral Pigments, Gold on Kumohada

Golden Fire was exhibited in 2007 in Chelsea, New York City. Greg Wolfe wrote:

That the culminating work to this sequence should be a monumental piece entitled "Golden Fire" has a sort of epic inevitability about it. Gold is the quintessential element we think of as requiring the refiner's fire. It is a heavy substance that somehow lifts into what the writer Milan Kundera has called "the unbearable lightness of being." This element, found deep within the earth and created through the turbulent processes of change, becomes something that symbolizes the eternal and unchanging. Gold is the possession of kings, and yet we often speak of the common person as having a heart full of it.

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Charis—Kairos (The Tears of Christ) -- Mineral Pigments, Gold on Belgium Linen

Charis (Grace) Kairos (Time), takes the methods I developed for my Soliloquies series, which exhibited my large scale works with Modernist master Georges Rouault's paintings. Taking Rouault's indelible images as a cue, I decided to start with a dark background to illumine the darkness with prismatic colors. I write in the introduction to the Four Gospels' project by Crossway:

I painted the five large-scale images that illuminate this volume, The Four Holy Gospels*, using water-based Nihonga materials (Japanese style painting), with my focus on the tears of Christ (John 11)—tears shed for the atrocities of the past century and for our present darkness.*

Page: 2 of 2

9/6/2011 4:00:00 AM

Evangelical

9/11

Art

Columbine

Evangelism

History

Lamentations

Makoto Fujimura

T.S. Eliot

Christianity

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