Yeshua (Hebrew name of Jesus) Poster

This art began life as a CD package for recording artist, Steve McConnell, who said he believed the package should be a rough board to represent Yeshua's earthy humanity; which triggered in me these questions: 'what did Yeshua's humanity look like?' 'he could have looked like any of us,' 'how can I show that he might have looked like any of us?' It came to me, as I was sketching in a free way, that it would be earthier to handwrite Yeshua in script, not block letters. Yud, shin, vav, ayin. I wrote it again and again in pencil, on the computer and then in paint, in my blue paint on raw cardboard. I liked the fluidity of the letterforms. I liked the rawness. Somehow I was getting near to something. The Hebrew letters, the individual symbols in my own hand - so ancient, so transcendent: the yud, the small pointing hand, the shin and its connotations of power and protection and blessing (though I'm not knowledgeable of its exact derivation), the vav, fishing hook, the ayin, eye (ah, now it looks like an eye). And the flow I was achieving, the yud's diminutive, curving slash, the rounded wholeness of the shin (I almost seemed to be looking down the wide end of a shofar), the bold verticality of the vav and the teardrop, vessel-like circularity of the ayin. I cut ten cardboard squares for painting. On the twentieth side I finally saw what I had been painting (my wife and partner Laura said, 'Oh, I saw that, I thought you knew'): that small, slight curve, the circle, the central vertical stroke, another circle. An ear, eye, nose, eye. A mask. A primitive mask. An unmistakable symbol of humanity. The more I looked, the more I was moved to look and try to understand: did I arrive here by my will? This is an accident of form? It's mysterious. Sacred. To me this is about as inevitable as design gets. -Lawrence Strauss