happy day after easter. (and passover weekend for my jewish friends)

i hope yours was delightful in every possible way.

family, pork products, reese's eggs, booze, jesus, etc

have you ever heard of salvation mountain?

i hadn't either until i went on an inspiration search.

yeah, searching out inspiration sounds pretty lame to me too.

but i did it and i am still here and still cool.

the internet is a goddamn goldmine of inspiration.

i saw an image of this place behind a model on a photo shoot and thought it was spain.

haha! SO not spain.

i went into a black hole trying to find out what this place was. on this journey i discovered how it came to be and just kept finding out more and more about this dude.

the gist of it is that this guy, leonard knight, at age 35 accepted jesus christ as his savior..you know...he was "saved". he made it his life's calling to spread that word. but he declared accepting jesus could be done easily and efficiently. many churches said it was more complicated and it couldn't be done so easily. i hate churches btw. after a few attempts and failures he built a small mountain (more of a hill really) only to see it crumble. so he built another, stronger one and the rest is history.

for the full story click here.

the heart of this story for me is leonard's tenacity. but also how he became an artist through it all. he admitted that he never saw himself that way. but i whole heartedly disagree. to me this mountain is a giant folk art installation. yes, for him it was his calling. and somewhere in the middle of all that i related.

i didn't grab these images and say...i am going to interpret them.

the images came later and i was a bit surprised at how the colors are all there.

i read this story and watched a few documentary shorts and was just sucked into it.

what i painted was created as a result of what i took in.