In November 2005 I began a fascination with the creation of electronic art.  As I did so I began to create some art that came to me in a variety of ways.  

I will add to this as I complete more.  I will always place the newest stuff at the top of the page.

Lurking
September 4, 2007

I have written up the genesis of this piece pretty extensively in my ramblings section (The "Art" of a GFX Signature) so there is no need to redo it here.  This piece though is a bigger piece to the one I originally designed as a small signature piece.  I just love this piece.  Yes, it is a bit "dark", but it is a truth of who we are and I don't think we, as Christians, say that this is a real struggle even after we are saved.  I think it is an important fact that needs to be spoken.  I will do it.

This first series is what I have labeled as the Life is a Puzzle series.  This series contains three pieces.  The idea came to me one night as I was thinking about this life and all the complexity of so many pieces coming together to create what one might deem to be a "successful" life.  God took this idea and started to twist and turn it in my head.  I thought of my own life and how I had had so many of the pieces that the "world" says you must have in order to be a success --- and yet at 40 I knew there was something missing.  It wasn't until the God of the universe reached into my very life that I realized what was missing.  So that sparked the idea of the first piece in the series.  I call this, simply, "Life is a Puzzle" as there was NO intention of going any further with it...

This became a "series" when a friend of mine from my gaming clan ( a non-believer by his own admission) asked me a very interesting question.  He asked, "Cross, do you have all the pieces?"  Now, I'm not sure what his intent was with the question but it started another session with God where He showed me the truth that I certainly do NOT have them all (not that I was under the impression that I did), but I DO have that one piece that matters most.  Out of that question came the second piece entitled, "The Most Important Piece".

Then I finally thought I was done.  But God wasn't.  He again used my own life to remind me of how I had spent my entire life putting together the "puzzle" of my life using the world's wisdom and it struck me of how like the putting together of a real puzzle this looked.  Most of us, when building a puzzle, start with the edges.  After all, it's easy to find the pieces with the straight edges.  So it is with the thing we call life --- every day we are pounded with repeated messages of how to achieve "success" so we chase after them and begin putting together our own puzzles.  But, like with a puzzle, our life seems hollow and out-of-focus without the middle of the puzzle complete.  Christ is the center of all and it is in Him that the "edges" of this life come together and begin to have meaning.  Hence the third and final piece of the series, "The Center".

Jerusalem Daily Herald series
June/July, 2006

The genesis of this series came to me at work one day when I received an e-mail entitled, "Jesus' Obituary".  I thought the idea was brilliant.  I thought to myself, "Hmmm, I'll bet I can recreate this in a little better fashion than the copy I received."  So that night I began working on the first piece, "The Obituary", which is essentially a recreation of the e-mail --- with some minor textual changes --- with my own "art" behind the piece.  The setting is approximately 30 A.D. and the three pieces of the series are as if the Jerusalem Daily Herald were posted about town.  The first is simply an obituary which could have been seen...

From there, my mind went wild with the idea of how the "papers" may have reported the events of the following days.  So, I decided to go with the idea.  Again I stuck with the Jerusalem Daily Herald theme and simply write the reports as if from a "neutral" reporter of the events.  This story however, moved from the "obit page" to the front page as this was big news!  The second piece is entitled, "The First Easter".  As I wrote the script, I used actual scriptural accounts interspersed with some "creative license" to create the news story (i.e. the account of the Roman soldier).

That sparked the third in the series.  This one continues the reports that this "story" just will not die (no pun intended of course) and that reports of a risen Christ continue unabated.  This piece takes us to several days after the resurrection.  As reports of His appearances continue, authorities get a little more "desperate" to shout "conspiracy!" and the disciples of Jesus grow bolder and bolder in their insistence that He has risen!  As I wrote this, I noticed that the tone of the "Herald reporter" seemed to be drifting from that of neutral reporter to one of, at the very least, interested observer and open-mindedness about the possibility of these reports being truthful.  This one I entitled, "The First Week".