Idols

“You Shall Not Make for Yourself an Idol” (Exodus 20:4)

Worship your figures, worship your forms. Give them life with each veneration. It's the dedication to dwell on your own finger's creations that make a good piece of art great. Have faith in the clay, its ripples of silica, it's blocks of alumina.  It's good for the art and for you. Praise be to the clay and its maker. 

 I remember sitting there in those pews, my legs too short so as to wave above the carpet. I remember hearing the shall nots and the shall musts; Overviewing all of us, that oh so graven image. A man I never knew, from a place id never been, bleeding and dying like I could never know. It's what the eyes turned to naturally. A body so weak and a scene so violent it either added to images of torment or distracted from the scenes of miracles. That figure sticks to my mind like wet cardboard dipped in honey. 

I don't consider myself religious but seeing that figure at that Newport Chapel tickles a part of my brain nothing else can. A sculpture is never a solid form amassed of brass or marble but an empty vessel filled with our emotions and feelings. Images only speak 1000 words because we read into them so much. 

The bible forbids Idol worship because it knows we will do it, the impulse too strong, the reaction all too human. I've given into my natural impulses. The images I praise now are of my own making. I writhe in my own artistic ego like a pig writhing in it's own filth, gloriously. I venerate each mound of clay like its the Mother Mary. 

Hey wait a second! Its catholic guilt calling... he says he's with Moses, he's got some commandments he wants you to have a look at.

 You know what?! Fuck you Moses! I'm going to fuck the neighbors wife and steal his OX! I'm going to work on Sundays for double pay,  and every time I return to that blob of clay I'm going to make something I idolize.

“Their land is also full of idols; they worship work of their own hands,that which their own fingers have made”

Isaiah 2.8