"Didymus" acrylic on canvas, 2025, 73x73 inches

This painting depicts my repentance, after which I became a Christian. I took a large dose of LSD (which I do not encourage or condone at this point in my life) and it revealed to me my fallen soul trapped in darkness. Somehow, by the grace of God, I was made free from all of it, because I was given the option to turn to God in my heart and I did. I made the decision to completely devote my life to God, and to make my life about the glory of God instead of trying to glorify myself (which I had been doing up to this point). When I came down from the experience, I committed myself to not back down from this. A week or two after this experience, I bought myself a Bible and the first book I read was the book of Romans, which really explained my experience very well, and it explained what Christianity is to me, and it presented to me the Gospel. When I read that "if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved" I decided that I was all in. It hasn't always been easy or clear to live that out, but God's glory has been my target ever since.

To create this painting, I started with a pattern from the Mandelbrot set projected onto the canvas. This pattern is the direct source of the composition as well as the halftone lines. However, I didn't want the finished piece to be about the Mandelbrot set. It served as the foundation that I built everything else upon, but is not directly seen in the final image. The pattern itself turned into faces and zigzags that are inspired by, but not present in, the original pattern. I got the idea to do this by learning that the master painters of the Renaissance often based their compositions on geometric shapes.

This is stretched on the highest quality metal stretcher bars, with high quality linen canvas, and was professionally framed with a black floater frame.