Many of my paintings have “frames” painted around the image area, especially the paintings in the Genesis: Sunrise-Sunset series, which deals with how the physical universe is created (both theologically and scientifically) and then how we personally perceive that reality.

The frames are usually painted with gold or silver paint. They are placed a bit inside the background color, which then surrounds the outside of the frame. Sometimes the frame seems to hover within the edge of the image so the image continues past the painted frame.

The frames are usually created from the words of psalms, because psalms are prayers. Our reality is created by our beliefs. These beliefs may or may not be consciously held or chosen.

Our unconscious and unexamined beliefs are often in conflict with other ideas that we have chosen intellectually, but struggle to make real on an emotional or deeper soul level. When confronted with the perception of a new reality, we sometimes use denial, until we can filter and process the new reality. For instance, a child who is raised to feel inferior and worthless will not immediately resolve those feelings by the Judeo-Christian teaching that he or she is created in the image of God and is the apple of His eye.

Prayer (affirmations, visualization, positive thinking by other names) helps us to create new and better beliefs, to believe in new possibilities for ourselves and others. Praying encourages our ability to consciously choose a new reality. When we pray for someone who is ill to recover we are acknowledging the illness, just by the very act of praying for recovery, since no one prays for the very healthy to recover. By praying we are visualizing the healing we want to occur.

Scientifically, we know that speech creates sound vibrations and that these can be measured. Thus, they exist. Likewise, thoughts are also measurable, and have been measured in many experiments including some done at Yale over twenty years ago.

Our thoughts do create our attitudes, and to some degree our physical and mental health. So our prayers, whether spoken or thought immediately effect our perceptions of the world. If we stretch and pray beyond our known realities and experience, we expand our inner vision of reality. So, if I am feeling inferior and I prayerfully ask to be shown how I am the Apple of God's eye, if I ask to walk more in God's reality than mine, I am stretching the boundaries of my personal understanding and vision.

By my reckoning, our prayers reach further into the ultimate, into the spiritual realms or heavens than any of our other thoughts or communications, since by the very act of being in prayer, which means communication, we are furthering our alignment with God. The frames are painted to show our prayers at the boundaries of our reality.

However, there is reality that we do not comprehend. It exists beyond our reality. As we grow we understand, actively believe and see more of this reality, but there seems to always be more that lies beyond us. It beckons but eludes us. Communication is a two way street. Many people think of prayer as a way of talking to God, but it is also a way of learning to listen to “that still small voice.” God (The Higher Power, Great Spirit, etc.) speaks to us in many ways.

Often what we refer to as our conscience or a gut reaction to someone or something, or a “feeling” that urges us to do something uncomfortable, but good, such as donating money or being friendly to a stranger and risking rejection. Sometimes, God speaks to us through the counsel of many. Of course, depending on one's religion, there are holy texts, such the books of the Bible , which are considered to be the Word of God.

I often use the words (Hebrew letters) of a psalm for the strokes in a painted frame, because when we pray a psalm, we know that we are aligning ourselves more with the Lord. In some of the paintings I have the psalm facing outward, from the reality of the image (our reality), in some of the paintings, the words are facing in towards the image, depicting the Almighty One communicating to us. The Dock Less Traveled, uses both Psalm 19 facing out and Psalm 27 facing in to us.

The frames are in the paintings to depict and remind us that we consciously or unconsciously create the boundaries of our reality with our beliefs and that we are always able to reach God through prayer, even when God seems to be as far away as the edge of reality.

May 9, 2006