2007
A cup of suffering - the price for a cool refreshing kingdom

I began this work in 2005 for a christmas competition, in a 3d software program called Terragen, where I sculpted the mountains and made the valleys low enough for water. I added atmospheric conditions so that the sky became red and set the water to make it icy. I was wanting to put some land in a cup and when I revisited this image in 2006, and looked at the snowy mountains it suddenly looked like a cool refreshing drink, a sherbet in a wine glass.....so I took it into Photoshop (computer software program), where I used the mouse to draw a wine glass.

As I looked at the image I was making I thought: "Blood red from pure white". Colour on a monitor is different from pigment colour because it is based on light. If you mix the primary pigment colours you get a muddy brown, but if you mix the RGB colours, which are used when choosing colours for showing on a monitor, you get white….white light. White is made from the highest values of red, green and blue. I thought of all the kingdoms that had been paid for in blood and wondered how many people when thinking of a kingdom thought only of a circular crown and what can be held in the hand and not of all the roots/branches that come out from one….all the effects of being “King of the castle”! I thought of leaves and the seasons of kingdoms. Then I thought: “How like God’s kingdom this is.” So I took some of the clouds and turned them into flame wings to represent the Holy Spirit.”

So here I have a little piece of the land of mountains and snow and a little piece of the land of sky and fire…… Now that is like New Zealand, the land of my physical birth (beginning) and Australia, which is the land of my spiritual birth…. Kiwi land you can own…hold in your hand but Aussie land you can only lease! In 2007 I put the image onto a hand. Fingers make a pattern like sun rays so I placed them on the sun - the hands of the Son of God. His kingdom cools the angry heat of violence hurled towards us and is like a refreshing drink. The separating curtain between God and people has been torn. I added another image I had created in Terragen manipulating it by blurring some of the cloud edges and emphasizing the rays to represent some of the tempest and added a pattern of nails like the boundary of a prison fence as another symbol for human violence.

2007:The image was used in an Easter church service (view).