Three Paintings
by Jennifer Anne Moses
Jesuses and Horses in a Field. Mixed media on paper.
I've been on a God-search pretty much as long as I can remember. So it came as if directly from the Divine when one day, in my early forties, I felt compelled to start painting and picked up a paintbrush. At the time I was living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and working as a volunteer at a home primarily serving Black, full-Gospel AIDS patients, where there was a lot of talk about Jesus and faith. As a Jew, I didn't participate in these conversations, though when I started to paint, I understood in a new way what Christians talk about when they talk about the "holy Ghost," which in Judaism can be roughly translated as the Shekinah, the Divine Presence.
Listen to My Words. Mixed media on paper.
Faith and Hope. Mixed media on paper.
This same Shekinah is what animates my written work as well. I'm the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, and as my friend Jennifer Levine—herself an astonishingly wonderful painter—recently pointed out to me, both my paintings and my written work combine elements of the joyous as well as sadness, loneliness, and longing.
The subject of all the paintings in this sample is longing for being in communion with God.
Jennifer Anne Moses is a writer and self-taught artist. Both her visual and written work is informed by the many years she lived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her most recent book is The Man Who Loved His Wife, a collection of short stories.
