The Good People of SUNDAY joyfully proclaim their first exhibition: Bible Paintings by Ed Blackburn. Allowing for the possibility of faith while remaining leery of it, Ed Blackburn mines the Bible’s stories as a fertile and usable part of our collective psyche.

The question for Blackburn centers on the dilemma of the Bible as cultural cliché played against the Bible as searching spiritual force. He investigates that dilemma by using both of the visual languages that have expressed each side of the problem – namely, the language of cliché, which is the “popular” language of American media, and the language of spiritual urgency, which is the “high” language of modern painting from German Expressionism. In doing so, he grapples with the role of the Bible in terms that are relevant and compelling to contemporary art and culture. – Excerpted from “Both Edges At Once” by Wayne Roosa for Image Journal.

Speaking about the shift that occurred in his work during the late 1980s, Blackburn states:

I got this renewed thought about biblical stories. I thought this must be a valuable thing; they will always be valuable as art and I had a renewed interest because it seemed like a time where people had a need for some clarity – not only in the world in general but the art world in particular. The word that came to my mind for these stories is that they are something substantial.