The-Gardener-gold-sky-

The Gardener / Tenderly Sown With This

$5800.00

oil and wax and gold
36 x 48 inches
The Gardener breaks the horizon with his bowing head. He came to tenderly care for his garden that he has planted. Although we must suffer and be buried like Christ, the “holes in our lives’ are for our good and we will be resurrected to new life.
The passage in Isaiah 61 that Jesus read in the temple is particularly relevant.

“The LORD has annointed me. . . to grant to those who mourn in Zion, to give them a beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning…
that they may be called oaks of righteousness,
a planting of the LORD,
that He may be glorified.

This painting and its title is inspired by Suzanne Rhodes’ poem called The Gardener.

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The Gardener

I haven’t talked to you about
a dark space I dug up.

Clods and rocks I can pick out of soil,
blue veined clay I can nourish,
weeds yank up, shade, cut back.

But this
hollow where no seed is meant to grow
astounds. I go back to basics,
trusting my hands to find the dirt
as it always was, humid and maternal,
easily worked to hatch seeds,

But this
breach of earth voids every breathing
speck so that the spade in my hand weighs
more than death and the leaves that
I touch are still born.

Tell me,
must I keep tending,
must I turn this
blank into myself and vanish
or is the hole the entrance
into some new ground that is yet
familiar, tilled and fertile, vast
as my loss, tenderly sown with this?

Suzanne Underwood Rhodes