more paintings have been completed since my last entry. however, my camera broke two months ago so i haven't been able to upload any pictures. but do not fear, i did some black friday shopping and my new camera will arrive in a week or two.

in the meantime... i decided to explore the internet for some interesting christian t-shirts. most of them were pretty cheesy and i had just about given up when i stumbled across this site.
i like that most of their stuff doesn't scream "i am super-christian." i would say that most of their stuff begs you to sit and ponder the image, which i think is what good art is supposed to do.

although i said that i was christmas present shopping, i definitely got myself one too. :)

this painting is called gridlocked. this painting seeks to inform people about human trafficking and also represent how it is present all around the world. the strips of paper on the painting contain facts about human trafficking as well as testimonies from victims themselves. the bottom left corner is a verse from isaiah 61:1.

artistry and international justice mission had an event called celebration of freedom where the painting above along with other paintings were auctioned off to raise money for preventing human trafficking. along with auctioning paintings, they were selling jewelry made by women who used to be trafficked in Asia. the money from selling the jewelry goes to these women who were victims in order to help them have a source of income. the group is called starfish project and the jewelry is beautiful so i bought one for myself.

it amazes me that human trafficking is present in every country, even here in the united states. yet it brings me joy and hope knowing that God is also not okay with that and wants to partner with us in bringing change and stopping this modern form of slavery.

the last time my accountability partner and i met up, instead of having a regular accountability time, we decided to make a collage about the lessons that God taught us this past year.
this was my collage:

this year has been interesting. after an intense fall quarter of reaching out to new students and building community, i was totally burnt out from ministry. i didn't want to do anything and so that was exactly what i did. nothing. i stopped visiting people, stopped going to community hangouts, stopped everything ministry related. once i decided that i needed to pull myself together, i was afraid that it was too late to do any effective ministry in sunset. but God taught me that it's never too late to come back into community, to be a part of people's lives, to do ministry. he also taught me that there is even more to come than what i have already seen from him.

this is only one lesson of the many that God has taught me this year. i'll just let the collage say the rest.

last month, campus crusaders for christ at ucla ran an experiential exhibition on aids called acting on aids. there was this huge tent that was set up and people would get mp3s and walk through the life of an actual child who has been affected by aids.

in the evening event, they had speakers come and talk to people about aids, what we can do, and what God's response to it is. during this evening event, two people and i were up on the stage painting what we thought was faith's response to aids.

this is what came out of it:

we started off painting the background with what we thought represented death, pain, and suffering. then, we moved on to "heal" the painting by portraying hope, love and faith.

back in my senior year of high school, i took studio art. one of the projects we were assigned was to combine several paintings to portray the philosophy of Freud.

i chose to combine two paintings, an impressionist painting and a realist painting, to create this piece called, "The Voyeur."

the man in the painting is actually stalin. original painting can be found here.



this painting is the same project that i did for my brother when he took the class. it combined three paintings. you probably recognize the two figures in the paintings. the original paintings that they come from are quite famous.

the bathing woman is from an Edgar Degas painting and the other figure is from a Munch painting.

ever since i entered college, i stopped doing art. yeah sure, i'll sketch random things here and there, but that would be it. recently God has been reintroducing my long forgotten love for art, especially in response to the things he is teaching me through his word.

through this blog, i hope to pursue this journey back to the arts.