[Next picture] Official website

Becki Jayne Harrelson

Healing Spiritual Wounds
By B. J. Harrelson

I'm self-taught. I started painting as a very young child. Just knew how to do it. I'm in good company being self-taught. So were the Old Masters. I decided against a traditional art education to let art and the process of making art teach me. I've studied contemporary artists such as Phillip Pearlstein, Chuck Close and Dali, plus the Old Master art of Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Michelangelo and other Italian Renaissance artists.

By scrutinizing a painting, I can see how it was painted and learn, why I went to Amsterdam in 1998. I want my current oil in progress (Stoning of the Drag Queen) to have the feel that Rembrandt's Night Watch has. Art, as stated earlier, was a natural born gift. I have a sketchbook from when I was six years old. Has my first Jesus drawing in it. Sketches of pretty girls too. Guess some part of me began symbolically to associate Jesus and my love for girls in positive way at an early age, thank God.

I was reared in a Christian fundamentalist family: Mom was a Pentecostal and father was the son of a Baptist pastor. Mom sang in a gospel quartet and many, many of my male family members are Pentecostal ministers. So I've had to work through a mountain of anti-gay religious stuff ("Dear God, save me from the people who believe in you.")

In 1985, I quit denying to my mother that I was gay, which opened up the entire religious debate for me. Mom called me demon-possessed, a Sodomite and I got a regular dose of old-fashioned hellfire and brimstone. It stirred up my deep hidden anxiety about whether or not I'd go to hell and I wondered about the nature of God. So began earnestly seeking truth in the late 1980s and by the 1990s resolved my gay spirituality. Mom got over her condemnation too and made a 360 degree turnaround. It was as if the minute I resolved my fear of God, Mom got it.

I changed our relationship by changing myself. For every action, a reaction. Cause and effect. Today, I believe in God but I'm much more spiritual than religious. A Course in Miracles is one of my favorite spiritual guidebooks. More so are the Conversation with God books by Neale Donald Walsch. I wouldn't call me Christian or any other religious label.

I'm now 47 and first fell in love with my best girlfriend at age 17. She sat next to me in U.S. History class in high school. We were lovers for only a year since she, being a Catholic, felt we were going to hell. See, this religious stuff has interrupted a lot of gay harmony, broken up many a gay home. And "they" say "we're" undermining family values! The nerve.

GAY ANECDOTES ABOUT THE ART
I use real people as models and they are all gay. Two of my best gay guy friends posed as Jesus, Judas and other divine characters. The blonde lover in the Madonna oil is my partner of seven years. A dear girlfriend of mine is the angel in The Raped Virgin. Another gay male friend is in The Last Supper. And so forth.

I've had lesbians upset that I was painting men. But I think of Judas Kiss and The Crucifixion of Christ as a statement about feminism too, since a man lying with other men like a woman can get him killed. Under the patriarchal paradigm, it's considered sexy for a woman to "act like a man" sexually as opposed to a man "acting like a woman" in bed.
 
Please don't misunderstand that I'm saying lesbians "act like men." No way! But through the distorted vision of the patriarchy, which asserts males as superior, to behave womanly is strictly taboo and too threatening. Have you noticed how being lesbian is somewhat chic within the mainstream? But not the reverse? And, two women together is every straight guy's favorite sexual fantasy, right? Male homosexuality, I think, besides the obvious religious condemnation, threatens the patriarchy too much. And I think that's because it's considered feminine and therefore, inferior. Of course, these lesbian reactions pre-dated Matthew Shepard. Kind of eerie how prophetic the crucifixion painting seems to me now.

MADONNA AND THE TURKEY BASTER BABY JESUS
Note the natural sunlit halo around the blonde figure vs. the traditional stylized halo around the Madonna. Kind of my statement about spirituality vs. religion; and being gay as a natural diversity of the human species vs. the traditional role of wife and mother. Also, you can't tell from the website image but there's a turkey baster concealed in the bushes, lower right. A visual anecdote about the Immaculate Conception as well as lesbian motherhood (artificial insemination). Oh, Mary.

An interesting tidbit: I finished the Madonna, Lover & Son oil precisely on Mother's Day, 1996. And I didn't plan it that way. Also, what inspired me to create the Madonna painting was the Sharon Bottoms custody battle in Virginia, the lesbian mom who lost her son to her own anti-gay mother. I just had to speak up as I did with canvas and paint.

GAY COMMUNITY REACTIONS 
We gay folks have been Bible-thumped to death, sometimes literally to death. Consequently, the religious props conjure up negative feelings in a lot of gays. We've seen far too many God hates fags pickets, heard too many Jerry Falwell diatribes. But that's exactly why I'm painting this religiously- themed art. The path to healing a spiritual wound begins by knowing where one is on the road. Often at the edge of one's comfort zone...

If it weren't for the courage of Wayne Snellen, Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman of Leslie-Lohman Gay Arts Foundation, I'd might still languish in obscurity. If the art isn't known, it can't be sold, so I'm enormous grateful for Leslie-Lohman. They saw my art as political, the right to free expression and free speech being at stake and embraced me. I've participated in two art exhibitions at Leslie- Lohman, one in 1995, VulvaVision, an annual lesbian show and another show entitled, "Religious Content in Contemporary Lesbian and Gay Art" in 1998.

In Atlanta where I live and work, I'm de facto censored. Even gay gallery owners won't show my art for fear of "having a brick torn through my windows" or worse, a bomb. Atlanta is heartland of the Bible Belt. By the way, I paired Jesus and Judas (1993) as lovers in my art long before Terrence McNalley did it in "Corpus Christi." And Terrence received many death threats when his play opened in Manhattan, of all places. Dangerous stuff to mix the gay thing with Jesus. I understand why gay folks distance themselves from my art. America isn't exactly a gay Oz.

WHY RELIGIOUS GAY ART?
First, let me say, I'm not attempting to convert people, especially GLBT folks, into diehard Christians. Whoa! That's certainly not what I'm up to. To some, the imagery is uplifting, empowering and helps them heal some sort of alienation or self-loathing (Great! I love it.). To others, it's the devil (I've heard that for just being gay, so what!). I let people make their own meaning of my work and that's the real joy for me, my own fascination with how people think and what they believe.

My artistic goal is purely to challenge people into a self- awareness, to make them think, and in some cases, to cause them re-think their philosophies and their politics. After all, we're talking about mythologies. It's not like we can tune into ABC's Nightline, get the definitive scoop on God or see an interview with Jesus.

HOW I GOT STARTED
What started me painting this particular genre of art (Feb. 1993 over "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" military policy) was and still is the alarming influence of Christianity on our government and culture, especially laws and politicians who have used and still use religion to oppress GLBT people, women and virtually anyone who is a non believer. To subvert their influence (not that I can single- handedly), I appropriate religious iconography, fighting fire with fire, to expose the ignorance of literalism by showing how absurd it is with my own absurd use of religious props. To take me literally is to make the same mistake of taking the Bible literally. To hell with the dogma. I'd march with atheists to keep prayer out of public schools, the issue, for me being, whose prayer will it be?

Historically, myths (as with religious ones) have caused much bloodshed and ignorance. We suffer their imposed regulations, taboos and influences and that's why my art. Until such time that humans practice agape without mythology, I'll challenge the religions we have. I think religions have done more harm than good in bringing people to a deeper spiritual understanding. Now that's a sin.

Art lets me protest non-violently. Art may erupt opinion but so far, hasn't killed anyone. I also support soulforce.com, an organization I truly admire for its non-violent approach.

GAY CHRISTIAN RESPONSE
By accident or divine synchronicity, my art seems to reflect the concurrent emergence of the gay- affirming Christian movement. I've heard from gay ministers who rave about my art (Rev. Paul Smith at Broadway Baptist in Kansas City, MO, for example). Six of my prints hang in Rev. Smith's Faces of Jesus gallery. And get this. For Passover 2001, Paul developed his Lenten sermons around my art! Projecting slides of it in his church to his gay/straight congregation. My art illuminating the walls of a Baptist church! You've got to laugh at the irony.

So with as much rejection I've gotten, the reception from gay clergy has been great. What keeps me motivated to paint art that's often censored and labeled sacrilegious are words such as these from Rev. Smith: "And it does have to do with being sacrilegious ‹ the very same style with which Jesus blasted away Spirit confining stereotypes and oppressive religious traditions in his day... The Spirit's fresh wind is blowing across the world today in Harrelson's 'break open our hearts with truth' art." See his review online at: http://www.beckijayne.com/pages/clergy.html

GAY ART HISTORY
To quote gay art historian Wik Wikholm: "The paintings don't reject myth in the atheist way, but they aren't fawning expressions of belief, either. Instead, they play with Bible stories by rewriting them so that they are more inclusive than the ones we were raised with. I can see that some would experience your paintings as an expression of ambivalence about belief, but to me they seem like visual creations of new stories that appropriate not just the props of Christian art, but its power, too. The size, the color palette and the skilled execution of the paintings demand that they be treated with as much reverence as any painting hanging in a church." He thinks I have a lot of courage to take on the Christian Right in such an in-your-face manner, right here in the belly of the Bible Belt. Wik's an atheist now (reared as a son of a Calvinist minister) so he was able to see beyond the overt religious narrative.

However, he also said, "Having been reared a Christian, though, I can still see the paintings with a believer's eye, an eye that sees sacrilege. The Bible never says that Jesus was called a faggot, that a woman raised Christ from the dead, or that the Son of God protected drag queens. I imagine a self-righteous preacher growling 'How dare you!'"

© 2002 Becki Jayne Harrelson