Prayer

Over the last month I've completed two paintings that deal with prayer. When I started them, way back in 2005, they were painted with something totally different in mind. However, as they stood leaned against the walls of my studio, they led me down a another path. And I remembered the graveyards in New Orleans, the many photographs I took of the scratched "X"s scored into the faces of the tombs. Prayers and hopes of the living asking for the help of the dead.

Now these paintings have been re-worked and this theme of prayer has emerged with more clear intent. At first, I was thinking that in some cases, when the situation is beyond your control, the only recourse is prayer. Feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness could be comforted by prayer. When nothing else could be done but worry, your only possible action is prayer, a calm, focused meditation with a positive intent.

However, as I begin my third painting (the first of which is presented in this blog) I have encountered a new idea. I was thinking that the act of prayer was essentially creating a conscious intention for an outcome to a situation. A loved one would become healthy in the face of dire illness. But now I'm seeing that what I am really doing with my prayer is gaining comfort within the bounds of a situation. Trying to create acceptance for some inevitability rather than attempting to change it.

I am a big believer in concrete action. If I can see that I can change a situation by action, then my mind turns to creating solutions. And often, I find myself trying to hold back the flood, bailing water with the tiniest of buckets for days, and weeks, and years on end. This seems senseless to me, although I have been guilty of this on more occassions than I wish to admit. Maybe this is why I have viewed prayer as an action of change, a tangible, material affect on the world rather than a mental affect on myself.

But however I reached this present moment in my ideas about personal prayer, I feel that prayer is a complex action and maybe there is much more to this mental exercise. I hope that through continued painting on this subject many new layers of meaning will emerge.