Studies for a Psalm One Commission

Near the end of my sabbatical in 2021, I felt like God was leading me into a new season of life and leadership, which included much more time for creative expression. I began to intentionally rearrange my life, and the spaces where I work to make room for that. Along the way I was contacted about doing a larger scale commissioned piece depicting how our lives with God are similar to trees—Psalm One immediately came to mind.

A commissioned piece like this involves many months of work and study, doing many smaller sketches and paintings to work out the details and scope of the larger finished piece. I studied the roots systems of various kinds of trees, and I even found many tree-shaped things within the human body. I began to experiment with ways to include some wildly expressive calligraphy in the painting. These are a few of the hundreds of things I did over six months.