BFH Painting For a Sunday Afternoon (bumped for weekday crew) – IOTW Report

BFH Painting For a Sunday Afternoon (bumped for weekday crew)

Monday, 17 October 2022, 10:49 BFH Uncategorized 24

This was commissioned by an iOTWer.

It’s an actual place in the Smoky Mountains.

24 Comments on BFH Painting For a Sunday Afternoon (bumped for weekday crew)

  5. Good morning BFH, glad you posted this up. Told you I’d say too much about this too, so sorry in advance…

    ..the place this is is not just A pretty place, but its THE Pretty Place. Seriously, that’s the name, Pretty Place Chapel, in the hills of South Carolina. It’s run by the local YMCA and is at the end of a series of camps, but none close enough to intrude on its peace. If you want to know more about the actual facility, here’s a link, but be prepared to do a LOT of driving and don’t be surprised if your phone and GPS quit working for lack of signal before you get there…
    https://www.campgreenville.org/pretty-place

    …I came to it because this is where my wife wanted to go to start our anniversary trip, Number 26 and counting. We got there on a quiet Wednesday when the camp was empty and so early no one was around, and walked into the scene in the cool of dawn that BFH has accurately rendered here. The mist hadn’t lifted out of the fields well below us as you can see, and the cross stood out in relief against the backdrop of the creation that Him that it represents made, almost shocking in its sudden beauty as you walk into the rough-hewn shelter.

    You go past those stones behind the Cross, and you’re looking a thousand or so feet down. Its pretty much on the edge, so much beauty to see but out of reach at the moment, like a dream of Heaven in the slumbering mind of a living man.

    The place is fairly broad but all the focus is where it should be, on the Cross. We attened no service there but you could feel His Spirit in the place, like a piece cut from Eden that the devil hadn’t tainted, sanctified by the millions of prayers and praises that place has known, and secure in the many more praises to come. My wife and I prayed as all do there, and as a neat counterpoint a young couple drove up as we had finished, came in, paused in awe as seems to be common here, then advanced to this rough alter to hold hands with each other and prayed as they knelt at the Cross themselves.

    They did not see us, but almost perfectly mirrored us, almost like God was keeping the continuity going even as He gave me hope for the future at the sight of YOUNG people kneeling at the Cross.

    Satan hasn’t got to them ALL, it seems. God bless them.

    …it was some time later when I approached BFH about solemizing it in oil. I have commissioned his talents before of course, in rendering various fur and feather babies, but I wasn’t sure he wanted to do a landscape with no protein in it. Turns out he DID, but kind of a funny thing finding that out. I had emailed him about it you see, but he wanted to nail down more aspects of it than he wanted to write, so he texted me to call him, which struck paranoid ol’ me as pretty odd. I told him later I came REAL close to responding with “OK Fed, what’d you do with BFH” instead, but happily I chose to actually connect and, all I can say is that if they went all the way to making BFH do a painting for me in jail, the FBI is REALLY down with the lie.

    It was a bit awkward because I’d missed some before and HAD to talk to him, but it was while I was at a Chipotle’s WITH MY WIFE I WAS TRYING TO SURPRISE, so poor BFH may have found the conversation a bit cryptic.

    Still, he evidently got what he needed, and the proof is in the work you see before you today.

    The picture doesn’t really do it justice. The picture I took for him to base it from was muddy and dark, and you couldn’t see the texture on the Cross or the quote on the beam. I had to send him some stock pictures to reference for details, that’s how bad my picture was. But he captured all that and more, and the wife was delighted when I finally freed it from the Rubik’s Wrap job BFH had done to successfully protect it in shipping and she laid eyes on it for the first time.

    If I wanted a picture I could have just printed my thing, stuck it on the wall, and called it done. But something about canvas and paint breathes life into it, like the artist spends some of his own soul in awakening the image. I think he felt that too because This he actually held it for a bit after it looked done to ME because HE wasn’t entirely happy with it. I’m glad he takes his muse seriously, because it was well worth the wait. This is a place I’ll likely never see again in life, but its a good memory for us that I now have this wonderful tribute to that can take us there in our minds any time we’d like to go.

    Thank-You for that, BFH.

    …so right here on my wall, in this one painting, I have a reminder of 4 things I like;
    *Jesus.
    *My wife.
    *The mountains.
    *iOTW and its guiding light BFH.

    Pretty good milage out of one commission, nicht wahr?

    And I thank the Lord that led my wife to that place on that day for all of them, and so much more.

    “1 I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.

    2 My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.

    3 He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber.

    4 Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.

    5 The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.

    6 The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.

    7 The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul.

    8 The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.”
    Psalm 121

    Fitting that this is carved in that place.

    Because that view of His creation spread out before the foot of His Cross helps to carve it in my heart.

    God Bless,
    SNS

    31

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