In the canonized account of Joseph Smith’s First Vision of God The Father and Jesus Christ, he tells of entering a grove of trees to pray to ask of God which church he should join in order to obtain eternal salvation. After he arrived at a predetermined location, he knelt to do what he had come to do. Joseph says that as he began to pray—his first attempt to give a vocalized prayer—he was gripped by an unseen power, “who,” he said, “had such marvelous power as [he] had never before felt in any being,” bent on his destruction. This power had such influence on him as to bind his tongue and plunge him into despair, but just as Joseph was on the verge of giving in to despair, he “saw a pillar of light…[descending] gradually” delivering him from this invisible enemy. In this pillar of light appeared two Beings: God the Father and His Son.

Drawing from this experience, I created the piece seen below, titled Light Descending—Delivered From The Enemy. It depicts that moment when the darkness has broken and that Light begins to descend upon Joseph. In that moment, Joseph came to know a few things, among them: God and Jesus are real and they will keep Their promises, in this case, quite spectacularly—he, Joseph, lacked wisdom, he asked of God, and God answered.

To provide a little behind-the-scenes information, earlier this month I wrote about showing one’s work, and included a photo of a sketch, a video, and a picture of the conceptualization of what would become this piece, and will be a foundational part of other works I have in mind. I mentioned that I was at the very beginning of a new body of work, or a new direction I feel I need to take, and was fairly evasive about adding any additional info. Today I feel like I can pull the curtains back and more or less announce just what I’m up to.

As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, I’ve felt a desire to create artwork that expresses my faith and beliefs, but haven’t known just how to go about it, being a photographer who really only works in the landscape. I had a few ideas, which I still plan to hash out and try to execute, but I don’t know how deep that particular well is. During the Christmas holiday, I had a storm of Inspiration: lumens and chemigrams would make excellent media for me to work with, and recorded all (I think I got them all) of my thoughts in my notebook(s): what topics or concepts to portray, what some of these images might look like (hence the sketch from the afore-mentioned blog post). Where I’ve settled, is a body, or bodies of work, largely devotional in nature, treating scripture, doctrinal ideas, and events from scripture and the early days of the Church. I’m cautiously excited about the whole thing. I say cautiously, because of the importance of these topics and events to me personally, as well as to millions of members of the Church, past, present, and future.

When I made Light Descending—Delivered From The Enemy, I sat down to just make a few “practice” pieces. This, and those “sketches” I made before and after, are chemigrams, and I began with the intent to expand on the conceptual sketch I had made, but I started swirling the chemicals and dripping them in a spiral on the paper. A fun part of making chemigrams (and I say the same of Lumens) is that they are highly unpredictable, serendipitous, and completely unrepeatable. This piece is all of that. What I set out to make was not at all what I ended up with. I didn’t know that I would end up with an image that I could call “complete” when I sat down that day. But that is what happened, and I’m really quite pleased with the image.

When I was adjusting and touching up the digitized image the other night, I had Jonah on my lap. He pointed to the bright swirl in the center and asked, not knowing anything about the image, “is that God?” As Jonah did, I hope you also see God in this image and feel Him in your life.