Religion II
Religion 2 was created in a time when I wasn't thinking about titles to my paintings much. Also, it was a time when I was still struggling with Christianity. After high school and in the early stages of college, I really enjoyed getting drinks with my friends and doing all of the bad things that go along with drinking. After a night of partying, I would feel awful about how I might have acted or about the things that I might have said the night before.
This painting symbolizes the easy choices that are clearly the wrong things to do and the difficult choice...to stop all of the nonsense and live for God. The sleek elevators represent a one way trip to Hell. They are the bad decisions in life. The stairs represent a more difficult route to something better. In the painting, this man believes that after his difficult journey of living right and making the difficult, often not popular, choices that don't involve drinking and misbehaving, he will become whole. Meanwhile, evil is still pulling him down and persuading him to live poorly.
I think more people have had this struggle than just me so I feel that it is a good idea to paint about these struggles and tell the stories. If we learn to talk about these types of situations with each other then the decisions become much easier.