King Me

Several weeks ago, I was sitting next to my brother in a church pew as our dad preached. He opened his sermon that week with the history of the game checkers. Apparently, the game has been around so long that biblical figures could have been passing the time moving the pieces back and forth until someone could claim the victory. This realization struck my brother and me, and we began our own dialogue in hushed tones from the congregation. We started to laugh at the mental image of different biblical figures playing the game together. Our favorite one was Daniel playing checkers with the lions in the den. As I continued to think about it, I realized it was actually a pretty powerful image. Daniel placed so much faith in the Lord’s ability to keep him out of harm's way that I think he probably would have played checkers with the lions.

I get a lot of questions about the cigarette. It came into play when I wanted to make sure the lion was not being interpreted as the Aslan, lion of Judah figure, instead of a dangerous lion you would not wish to encounter.

Reduction printmaking is a technique where the artist creates a multi-colored print using a single block. It involves carving away parts of the block for each color layer. Each layer is dependent on the previous one, and once a layer is carved away, it cannot be reprinted, so there is more risk involved in this process. I used registration tabs to aid in lining the layers up correctly while printing. However, I still experienced some challenges along the way.

Woodcut (2023)

27” x 22”