The wall is built of jasper, while the city is pure gold, clear as glass. The foundations of the wall of the city are adorned with every jewel; the first was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, the fifth onyx, the sixth carnelian, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprase, the eleventh jacinth, the twelfth amethyst. Revelation 21:18-20 NRSV
New Jerusalem Wall painting process first four foundations
Amid a flurry of year-end paperwork, I’ve been diligently exploring how to paint the colours of the foundations of the New Jerusalem walls—and painting them. I wanted to attempt to capture the luminous qualities of light glowing through and bouncing off this variety of precious and semi-precious stones.
Since this body of work is largely abstract or abstracted realism, I chose to represent the “adorn[ing] of the walls with every jewel,” with a stripe in each gemstone colour. To create the appearance of translucence, I mixed a little of the paint colour with acrylic glazing medium, building layer upon layer, varying the brushstrokes for visual texture of crystal formations in some of the gems. However, the character of paint being what it is, not all colours, such as red-orange and yellow lend themselves to transparency. Some of the stones themselves, such as lapis lazuli (sapphire) are entirely opaque.
New Jerusalem Wall Foundations Painting Process
It’s a joy to watch the vibrant colours emerge—what a combination! The majority in any one colour are a version of green—four out of twelve, so it seems that the answer to the age-old question of God’s favourite colour is green. According to Pliny the Elder, a writer and historian of the first century, jasper was green—the entire wall above the foundations is jasper. Sometimes different sources have different colours for the same stone and some, like beryl can come in red, yellow, blue or green, as in emerald; emerald is already the fourth foundation so the eighth—beryl, can’t be the green one. We’ll see.