Be Set Free

Here’s another painting which has found a new home in the UK, part of the me I left behind. With pleasure. This is a painting I never expected to sell. At All. It is far too difficult a story. Here’s what I wrote about it https://www.elizabethgrayking.com/be-set-free. Fundamentally, it’s a story of control, of spiritual abuse. The model is a dear friend, a bit the way Andrea Kowch, hyperrealistic painter, paints her close friends to capture close reality. The story is from another close friend, so I heard it with painful empathy. For her sake, I painted this to get her story, anonymously, into fresh air. I worked in and around the edges of Safeguarding in my role with the United Reformed Church for a significant number of years and heard too many stories of the misuse of church for the benefit of those who chose to be abusive. I never expected to sell this painting, but always chose to exhibit it. The story might have helped someone tell their own story. As it turns out, that’s what happened.

The new owner had a number of personal stories I could have painted to bring them into fresh air and destabilise their historic power. Rather than the painting telling of the past for this gorgeous new owner, Be Set Free speaks more loudly to them about the future and a future free from historic shackles. The owner says, “2 Corinthians 3.17 is one I associate with the painting and my life and ministry - ‘where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom’. This freedom speaks to me through the painting Be Set Free because the way of Jesus is inviting and not controlling, colourful and beautiful in its challenges not enclosing nor gripping tightly. There is a song by Vicky Beeching with the words from the verse in Corinthians and yet they were written when she was in the closet. She has not been able to sing her songs since. I think partly that’s to do with the rights to her songs and the Christian record label who ‘own’ them. Being set free means from previously held expectations. Being set free by God is a moment by moment unfolding which invites immersion and devotion to God and to the life God has already given each one of us in community. Breaking chains which confine and harm is part of that. For me they are theological and embodied and there is a long way to go so all can be set free and live as free people.”

I am moved beyond imagining that Be Set Free continues to speak and to participate in much needed healing.

One

I promised some while ago that I’d tell you where some of my paintings now live after their wondering to new homes after the 2023/2024 exhibition tours. This is One, finished in 2013. My story of it tells you why I write ‘finished’. https://www.elizabethgrayking.com/one. It is one of my favourites and it keeps giving. All the the poeple in it continue to have conversaitons and if you have a print called Foothill, or Headspace, or Membrance or Conversation, or Loom, or Plait, or Stance, or Burble, or Well, or Floe, you have a part of One. They all have something specific to say from this glorious human form made of hundreds (at least) of other humans of every colour and kind and time. People have told me that they see DNA lines at the bottom and Saints in the sky above. I am deeply moved by what people tell me that they see.

One went to their new home in September 2024, and is hanging in a private collection. I generally prefer public collections, but this particular collection is owned by some very public committed people and have visitors from around the planet for glorious hospitality. The collection has a number of EGK originals and prints and I am told that they generate much conversation. I’m delighted. That, I discovered more than ever last year, is the point of my work.

The owner writes, “My love of it is to do with connectivity, of being part of something bigger but connected. The small print we have is gorgeous in its own right but it is part of a whole. The “whole” is even more striking.“

Yes, the origninal is no longer for sale. But prints of the whole and of One’s smaller details hang in a good number of collections already. You may order any at any time. I still have my fine art printer connections in the UK and in the USA. I’ll find one in Australia soon.

Residencies

Sometimes I get asked, or have been asked, to be the artist in residence at a conference or event. I have to say that this is my number 1 favourite art commission. I simply love it. Before Christmas, I asked my wonderful WebWizard to create residency pages for me from my files and so far, there are two residencies there.

On the introduction page, I’ve explained my process https://www.elizabethgrayking.com/residencies. I turn up, listen, let my brain and heart translate what I hear into images, then I transfer those images into the medium at hand. When I started, the medium was always onto paper of varying colour and texture depending on the atmosphere of what I heard. I used watercolour pencils mixed with felt pens, using the damp felt pens as water to mix with the pencil to make new colours and textures. It was/is so incredibly fun! I use erasers of various sizes to take away colour, often, quite specifically to create light rays as I did in this book illustration called Beauty:

Sometimes I’ve used my Surface Studio computer and Adobe Creative Suite to listen to a digital event and respond digitally. Again, I listen, but this time, I translate via any stroke or colour I can create on Adobe Illustrator. The fun of this method is that if I create a shape I like, I can copy and use it again in multiple ways. This is fabulous for image clarity which I use in my illustrations for web or print.

On some wonderful occasions, I have painted as events unfold as I did at the United Reformed Church General Assembly 2012. I used oil paint mixed with a drying medium to make sure that when it was all done, I could carry it away! The page, thank you WebWizard, is here.

I am Your Neighbour and the work of DARE

Way back when I lived in the UK, I had a schedule for what I was going to blog to you as the weeks rolled on. That was before the world turned upside down and I started staring north to the equator and not south to it. My posts since then have been about that world and the ways life has changed, then have included the turmoil coming out of an envigoragted totalitarianism across the planet. I go back to my schedule today and find that my plan is spot on for this moment. Who knew?

Back on September 2, 2024, Pete and I were working our way south from the last exhibition of both tours, stopping at various places to drop off paintings to new homes. Our first stop was to the Darwen Asylum and Refugee Enterprise, DARE. DARE is part of the East Lancashire Missional Partnership, North Western Synod, United Reformed Church. I wish I could rattle on about various members of it, naming names, but that’s not right for the work of such a group or for those who support it from the organisations which with they are connected. Amazingly, connectedly, lovingly, DARE gathers in all those named in their acronymn - Asylum seekers and Refugees - and joins them with the local community with the other word in the DARE name - Enterprise. This includes respect, recognition and help with daily living in every way you can imagine. Pete and I left the receiving event with wonderful food from across the planet made right on site in Lancashire. What a fabulous contrast to so much we read in other social media.

The painting we left behind is I am Your Neighbour. I confess to being shocked that DARE jumped on selecting this as soon as I made known the she could be available. It’s a hard picture with a shrapnel spattered woman staring out from quite real fence posts and nails reminding us all that she is our neighbour. I didn’t think people who experienced anything like what she is experiencing would want to be reminded about what they left. Quite the contrary it seems. People wanted the painting to remind them of their personal courage. They had power to remind anyone who met them that we are all neighbours and the people of DARE have the courage to say to newcomers - ‘you are our neighbour’. So this dear woman now speaks from her painting in the front hallway of DARE in Darwen in Lancashire. When you can, please stop by. The welcome you’d receive is mind blowing and world changing. We need this hopeful reality to speak to the incredibly weird time in which we live.

A new year, new threats, new hope

I keep hearing that Hope is, well, hopeless. That to hope is perhaps a way not to engage with the activism and participation needed for the current state of our planet and our peoples. It’s too late for it all, so it’s hopeless. You know where I’m going with this. The opposite of hopeless Hope as a start. If you haven’t come across it, I recommend Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World . The data tells us that we’re in a much better state than media, social or otherwise, wants us to know. We’re actually near the peak of how bad it can be and are in the position of making a more sustainable planet - right now. There are some things we need to do first and to me, the first of them is to resurrect, or let the Divine resurrect, our hope.

The image below is an image made for a book called the Origins of the New Testament. It was done over ten years ago now, when I was in the process of being the Visual Theologian in a group of three theologians, one of the others quite internationally famous but now deceased. My hope was that the book would come to fruition with this female visual theolgian’s work standing as a voice of a theolgian, not illustrator. This image is about the apostle Paul, who was utterly bound in the religion he knew and at the same time, caught in the life of Jesus.  In the image, he is almost of a piece with the scroll of the Judaism in which he grew, yet the colour of that history swirls him up to wonder at a new light.  And the light is surrounded by layers of colour.  It was impossible to draw separate images; Paul is utterly bound in his past and caught completely in the shock of his present.

As are we. Caught in our past with decisions made by others, imacts on us from others, living inside of systems made without and sometimes with our permission. And the present shocks us. Amidst the political to the right shifts of awfulness, there are so many incredible things people are already doing to repair, restore and make new. Our necessary psychological response to what is happening around and to us is to decide what to do, then do it. As is quoted so often, we can’t change what happened but we can change how we respond. Let’s not get caught in the no-hoper mindset. We can see light when we look for it, so lets get together to let it shape us and move us to action.

How to decorate for Christmas?

Yes, it is Christmas time in Australia, as everywhere. Duh. But. It’s not cold here, it’s not winter, the notion of light in the darkness doesn’t hold very well because, well, there’s so little darkness in early summer. Again, duh. But daily, I’m seeing the usual UK inflatable Santas, snowmen, green wreaths with red bows and twinkle lights. Searching on the internet for other warm climate Christmas ideas, I see similar things; Christmas trees, yet decorated with flowers and not baubles, funky Santas with surfboards, twinkle lights in the Caribbean (as ever, for a warm tropical evening). The Christmas message of Jesus, Mary and Joseph? Not a lot to see on that front.

If we ever needed to know, Christmas isn’t the incarnated Christ in a child, it is a presents, drink and food celebration at the end of a the calendar year. People in the northern hemisphere made the season images and they’ve been transported across the planet. Many in the UK have spoken about going with the flow, leaving the message to churches and changing all the celebrations to Winterval. This lets us celebrate light in the dark, cosy families around fires and warm tables. But Summerval doesn’t’ really cut it in the same way.

Me being me, I wanted to join the celebration, but to do a decoration which somehow told the deep message we Christians want to share. I’ve battled this for years in preparation for living here, but came to nothing. It was being here which made me get to the core story. The incarnation is about God getting deeply involved with people, becoming a yowling baby, colluding with humanity to bring the Divine truth. Earth and heaven connected in real time. I started collecting and making stars.

On the front of our lovely new house is an old basketball hoop, long since unused, but still there. It became the holder for my ideas as I reached for my installations box, recently arrived by ship in our container. Here is our Christmas decoration with heaven and earth colluding, stars tangled with the green of earth. I’m not sure what anyone else makes of it, but it cheers us up!

Street Art is almost everywhere

We can’t walk out of home any day without seeing it. Everywhere. Now that’s not true because it isn’t everywhere, but my word it feels like it is. Any surface seems to be fair game; someone’s fence, post boxes, vacant shops, the hoardings of active shops/restaurants/theatres, bus shelters, tram stops, walls in car parks; anywhere. Graffiti. Some of it looks more like artwork than other of it. But one can’t be anywhere in Melbourne without getting used to graffiti. There is no respite. Interesting that I chose the word respite.

As a North American and European fine artist, I’m struggling with a sense of the ‘right’ to have a public space for art. Apparently, this is one of the reasons given for why there is so much graffiti. I’m not used to the concept of a right to public space to do anything but to gather and to walk. In my prior two resident countries, even that is under threat. My experience is that rights to space are conferred by the one who owns or manages the space. Sculptures in public places were commissioned and permitted. They are at risk of public reaction to them, but they don’t go up without some kind of legal arrangement. I have certainly learned in the UK that every bit of land is managed by someone. Perhaps that isn’t just or good, but it is the way it is. It is interesting to me that in a country where space managed and honoured by peoples for tens of thousands of years and unceremoniously taken by settlers now is a country with the sense that there should be a right to any space for public art. It confuses me. So much simply looks like vandalism. I will learn why it seems a good idea, I hope. The rest of my life will include it! Anyway, our ship has arrived. Our personal contents will be with us in a few weeks. Most likely the lorry bringing it will be sporting graffiti :-)

I’ve taken photos and share them below. I have no way to ask the artist’s permission. I’m not sure about that either…

Here’s something about why there is So much Graffiti in Melbourne.