Bessie Gotto's 90th Birthday

A special lady who is very dear to my heart turns 90 years old today: my maternal grandmother, Bessie Lee (Gray) Gotto.

My siblings and I orchestrated a big birthday celebration for her this past weekend as well as a surprise gift, both of which called for some custom design work by yours truly. First the invite to the party:

My Granny has written a handful of verses over the years, until recently recorded only by her own hand in various notebooks which she kept. As a birthday surprise, we decided to have them “published” and presented to her in a book-length format. I created a custom-designed photo book—hard bound with a dust jacket—which features one of her poems on each right-hand page, complemented by photos of her, my late grandfather, and other family members on each of the facing pages.

As expected, the book was a big hit not only with her, but also with many extended family members and friends who attended the party and were able to view some sample copies that were on hand. Orders for several more copies were placed at the gathering, beyond the initial set which was ordered for my Granny and for the immediate family. A pdf of the entire book (minus the back cover and dust jacket flaps) is available for download here.

As a final tribute to my Granny on this day, I will close with the following bio, taken from the inside flap of the book’s dust jacket:

Bessie Lee Gray was born March 8, 1921, in Davidson County, Tennessee, to Alex Turner Gray and Annie Elizabeth Hulan. Her parents, both having survived their previous spouses, brought a total of seven children into the new marriage, thus making Bessie, the only offspring of their union, the eighth child of the household and the baby of their blended family. Her mother died in 1936, just a month after Bessie’s fifteenth birthday. On February 28, 1938—just a few days shy of seventeen—Bessie married Clarence Gotto. Together they had one surviving daughter, Cheryl Janice. The couple spent most of their years together living in Nashville, Tennessee, until Clarence passed away in the summer of 1976. The sadness of her husband’s relatively early death tinges much of the poetry in this collection. But, despite this tragic loss, Bessie is recognized by all who know her decades later as a lively personality and an uncommonly quick wit—one who enjoys nothing more than a good time, spent with loved ones, and filled with smiles, laughter and fun. She continues to live out her remaining years in the company of her daughter and her family, which includes five grandchildren and (as of this writing) ten great-grandchildren.

Steve Jobs on Soulful Technology

Technology alone is not enough. Technology married with liberal arts, humanities, yields the result that makes our hearts sing.

—Steve Jobs, at yesterday’s iPad 2 unveiling

I don’t (yet) own an iPad, nor an iPhone. In fact, I personally have never even owned an iPod. (There has been, since Christmas, an iPod Touch floating around our household somewhere, but I “touch” it only rarely.) But I’ve used Apple’s computers day-in-day-out for almost two decades now, and I believe Steve Jobs’ grasp of and commitment to the above principal is the number one reason behind the company’s phenomenal success and zealous customer loyalty.

Rookmaaker Syposium

The Christian arts blog Transpositions is hosting a week-long online symposium on The Life and Work of Hans Rookmaaker, best known for his seminal work Modern Art and the Death of a Culture. Daily posts by noted scholars will chronicle Rookmaaker’s enduring influence on Christians who are devoted to practicing the arts as an essential God-given means for cultural transformation.

HCSBSB: Herod's Temple, Interior View

It is very interesting to compare this rendering for the HCSB Study Bible of the interior of Herod’s Temple with the earlier one for Solomon’s Temple and to note both the points of continuity and discontinuity. As was noted in the post on Solomon’s Temple, the Scriptural descriptions are rather extensive, even if they are difficult to interpret on a number of points. With regard to Herod’s Temple, we have virtually no Scriptural information to go on. Our primary extra-biblical source, Josephus, gives a fair amount of information but it is quite selective, in some respects raising more questions than it answers.

Drawing upon Josephus, one overarching trend can be noted as a helpful guide to the would-be reconstructor: there seems to have been a Pharisaical trend towards austerity, simplification and abstraction that governed the decoration of this Temple. For instance, in the Holy Place, there seems to have been a return to one table and one lamp stand, after the manner of the original Tabernacle, whereas Solomon’s Temple had boasted ten of each. It also seems, based on some of Josephus’ comments, that any creaturely or quasi-human representations (e.g. cherubim) were deemed inappropriate (an interesting example of numerous and infamous Pharisaical attempts at a sort of “holier even than God” severity). With this as a backdrop, questions regarding the overall mode of decoration of the Holy Place, on which Josephus is pretty much silent, can begin to be begin to answered, at least with a fair amount of educated guess and conjecture.

Since the interior of the earlier Temple was decorated richly with garden and floral motifs, it seems reasonable to assume, given the symbolic importance of this imagery (Eden re-attained) and given that botanical representations seem to have escaped the pervading Pharisaical proscriptions, that these would have been retained in some form. We know that the Temple’s exterior employed the Greco-Roman Corinthian order, so it would be reasonable to transfer this to the interior as well.

Drawing on these assumptions, I developed a vision of the interior, worked out in the above elevation, which employs a three-tiered scheme of Corinthian pilasters interspersed with relief carvings displaying vegetative motifs. A good contemporary source of inspiration for these latter details can be seen in the Ara Pacis, in Rome.

The floor plan of Herod’s Temple followed the same dimensions as Solomon’s earlier temple, but the height was apparently even greater, which would have made for a very tall and slender sanctuary. Partly to help me get all the dimensions and proportions correct for the illustration and partly just for sheer personal satisfaction, I constructed a rough scale model and photographed it to use as starting reference for my sketches.

The Arch of Titus, also in Rome, which was built to commemorate the subjugation of the Jews and the destruction of the same Temple considered here in 70 A.D., includes a depiction of the lampstand, quite probably based on the actual artifact.

The publisher specifically asked that the veil separating the Holy Place from the Holy of Holies be featured prominently. The gospel accounts make special mention of this veil as being torn in two from top to bottom at the moment of Christ’s death upon the cross, indicating that man’s alienation from God had been overcome. The writer of Hebrews (4:14; 9:23-34) explains that Jesus, in His death and resurrection, “passed through the heavens” themselves, into the very presence of God as our true High Priest, and thus fulfilled in reality what the temple and the earthly High Priest merely represented in shadowy form. With this in mind, it is very interesting that Josephus states that many of the items depicted here had cosmological or astrological associations: the seven lamps of the lamp stand represent the seven “planets” that the Ptolemaic cosmology of the time recognized, the twelve loaves of showbread the twelve signs of the zodiac, etc. With respect to the veil (there was also another one of similar design at the outer entrance of the Holy Place), Josephus specifically mentions that it was woven with some sort of design that incorporated the twelve zodiacal signs (though again, the depictions were apparently abstract or symbolic—no literal pictures of lions, virgins, rams, etc.). He also associates the colors used (blue, purple, red and brown) with the four “elements” of air, water, fire and earth. Inspired by these descriptions and associations and drawing upon other sources, I created a design that incorporates a symbolic conception of the universe that was pretty common at the time: a square-shaped earth in the center, surrounded by seven planets in concentric orbits, in turn surrounded by the twelve signs of the zodiac, beyond which lies the ethereal fire of the “third” or highest heavens.

ACS Warriors Logo

Here’s a new logo design, for the athletic program at Agathos Classical School in Columbia, Tennessee. Go Warriors!

R.I.P. Charlie Louvin

Country Music Hall of Famer Charlie Louvin passed away last night at his home here in Tennessee at the age of 83. He and his brother Ira (who sadly and ironically personified many of the duo’s sin-denouncing numbers and who preceded Charlie in death by over 40 years) became legendary for their inspired harmonizing during the years in which they performed and recorded together. Charlie had a number of hits as a solo artist during the '60s and, in recent years, enjoyed newfound respect and a revival of his career thanks to his re-discovery by a new generation of old-school country and gospel music fans. But I will always remember him as the co-creator of this absolutely unforgettable piece of album cover art.

HCSBSB: Herod's Temple, Exterior View

This exterior view of Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem would be a serious contender for my favorite out of all the illustrations I did for the HCSB Study Bible. The whole process, from research, concept sketching to final result was particularly enjoyable and highly satisfying for me.

There are a number of models and illustrations of Herod’s Temple in existence and they all bear a good deal of similarity due to the fact that detailed and accurate descriptions of the Temple’s appearance (primarily in the writings of Flavius Josephus) and even a few representations (albeit rather simplistic and crude ones—mostly from coins and ossuaries) have been preserved from antiquity. In spite of this overall continuity, however, I was able to identify at least a couple of aspects that lent themselves to some interesting interpretations which, to my knowledge, no other illustrator or reconstructor has exploited.

Virtually every modern depiction I know of presents a facade with a relatively small outer doorway of rectangular shape. There are two things that made the possibility of a more open and revealing facade an appealing interpretation for me. The first is the description Josephus gives of a vast ornamental vine wrought of gold which apparently occupied the space within the vestibule between the outermost entrance of the facade and the inner (veiled) doorway into the Holy Place. (It isn’t clear whether this was fully three dimensional or some sort of relief sculpture, but I chose to imagine the latter.) Especially given that the vine is a typical biblical metaphor for the nation of Israel (cf. Psalm 80; Isaiah 5:1-7) it seemed implausible to me that such a beautiful and potently symbolic piece of art would be entirely tucked away out of the general view behind a miserly opening. Secondly, I found this one ancient coin (above) which seems to depict a relatively tall outer opening with an arched rather than a horizontal top. This sent me off in the direction of having not just the doorway but the entire Temple facade conform to the proportions of a classical Roman triumphal arch. This solution was especially appealing given the fact that Herod himself was such a fawning afficionado of all things Roman.

After sketching it out I found that the measurements could be made to harmonize with Josephus and I went on from there to produce a complete front elevation (above). I chose a dramatic low angle for the final perspective rendering in order to emphasize the grandeur of what, at equal height and width of 150' and a surface finished entirely with white marble and gold, was no doubt a very imposing edifice.

Take that, all you two-spacers!

“A page of text with two spaces between every sentence looks riddled with holes; a page of text with an ordinary space looks just as it should.”

Writing for Slate, Farhad Manjoo lucidly explains why typing two spaces after a period is not only completely unnecessary, but a crime, in fact (typographically speaking).

HCSBSB: Babylonian Invasion

One of the items on the list of illustrations that Holman wanted me to do for the HCSB Study Bible was some sort of depiction of the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonians which occurred in the sixth century B.C. This could have gone in any number of directions: a battle scene, a view from behind the city walls looking out over the surrounding armies, another long view from above showing the layout of the city and estimated positions of the Babylonian forces, etc. However, upon considering the various options I felt strongly that, since most of the other illustrations highlighted architecture, it would be nice to do one in which people took center stage. After hashing this out with the publisher, it was decided that a depiction of the defeated captives leaving the destroyed city of Jerusalem on their way to exile in Babylon would be a fitting theme.

I wanted to convey not only the sorrow and despair but also the horror and brutality that no doubt attended such an event. The initial sketch above assumes a viewpoint somewhere close to the foot of the Mount of Olives looking back across the Kidron Valley toward the Temple Mount and the city of Jerusalem, with multiple columns of smoke rising ominously into the sky. Haggard, emaciated and stunned captives file by in a long column, past the dead and mutilated bodies of victims, with threatening—tormenting, even—Babylonian soldiers lining the way. Siege engines are visible beside the breached city walls above and the landscape bears the typical scars of war: sparse vegetation and the twisted and splintered stumps of hewn-down trees.

Not utterly to my surprise, my initial sketch pushed the envelope a bit too far. I was asked to refrain from showing dead bodies and any actual brutalization on the part of the Babylonian soldiers. I needed some good photographic reference of folks of all ages for this one, so every member of my family got to help out with modeling. (My kids love this part, and my wife—she REALLY loves it. The neighbors no doubt find it amusing as well. Oh yeah, and while I’m at it, I might just as will head any potentially snide comments off at the pass by acknowledging that the shirtless guy in the foreground of the above photo collage doesn’t exactly look “emaciated”. If this means a few blows to my vanity then hopefully it ratchets up respect for my skills as an illustrator to a commensurate degree.) The results of our back yard photo shoot are assembled in Photoshop®, and this serves as the basis for a revised, tight sketch. This second sketch is approved without further changes and so I move onto the final, which is executed on an 8"x10" piece of Claybord®, with color applied digitally after scanning.

Starbucks: the Logical Next Step

With the unveiling of a new logo this week which features the brand’s iconic mermaid image sans the company name, or any words whatsoever, Starbucks Coffee has finally joined other luminaries such as Nike and Apple in attaining corporate identity nirvana—and it only took them forty years to get there. I’ve had more than one client over the years who had trouble accepting that a few hours and a few hundred dollars (or even if it were a few thousand, for that matter) for a logo design couldn’t exactly guarantee them a comparable level of branding gravitas right out of the gate.

HCSBSB: Hezekiah's Tunnel

Well, I’ve mentioned my aversion to cutaway views before. This was actually one situation where a cutaway view would be really cool if someone could figure out how to pull it off, but I admit that I wasn’t up to it. (During my research, I actually did come across one or two attempts by other illustrators at a cutaway view, but they were not very successful in my opinion.) The difficulty is that the path of the tunnel—an engineering marvel of its day—is so circuitous that it practically defies representation in two dimensions. This would be a great project for a video-based or interactive virtual tour, and I’d love to see someone capable tackle that.

As it is, I used it as an opportunity to emphasize the growth of the city of Jerusalem from David’s time to Hezekiah’s with a dotted line representing the tunnel’s underground route beneath the Old City. This illustration appears on page 1183 of the HCSB Study Bible.

A God and Yet a Man

A god and yet a man?
   A maid and yet a mother?
Wit wonders what wit can
   Conceive this or the other.

A god and can he die?
   A dead man, can he live?
What wit can well reply?
   What reason reason give?

God, truth itself, doth teach it.
   Man’s wit sinks too far under
By reason’s power to reach it.
   Believe and leave to wonder.

—Anonymous Fifteenth Century Verse