Assembled here are most of the paintings from the series, with a few now in private collections. The earliest of these works, A Cross So Big You Can Hardly See It / A Cross So Small You can Hardly See It / All the Stars in Giotto's Night Sky, is an example one of the first paintings, and clearly set the tone for most of the others in the series. A love for manuscript illumination and fresco painting can easily be seen in the group.

An overall theme of the series is the human perception of stars as a metaphor for the mystery of creation and a portrait of the Divine framed in time. Art history has provided an extensive vocabulary of star images which span both culture and time, and serve as a rich source for appropriation into modern tableau about our conceptualization of the Infinite God. The large new piece, Sidereal Time, best exemplifies this idea, and starts with a 19th century Mennonite quilt star from Ohio, and ends with a representation of space as understood by Hubble space telescope photographs.

The Fuller's Art might seem to be out of place here, but you can see where the idea was born when comparing it to All Things Become New. While all of these paintings have references to Art History, this painting about the process of sanctification is an homage to Brice Marden's painting, Three Deliberate Grays for Jasper Johns.

Star Manuscripts, 1989-2000

I began making paintings of stars after the example of Giotto in 1989. My family had just visited the Arena Chapel in Padua, Italy to view the Biblical narrative paintings there. While Giotto and his assistants produced one of the most immediately understandable cycles of pictures on the chapel walls, it was the ceiling that captured my attention. There, presiding over all of this careful iconography, was a mathematically rigorous field of stars, painted on a fugitive azurite blue vault. To me, this was a powerful image of the Creator, and the Creation -- and stood for "everything else" that hadn't been painted on the walls. This fits very well with my ideas regarding contemporary art and faith, because I have described my artistic interests as "everything else" in light of the Biblical narrative.