Q: Why did you make Sacred Memories?

J: Honestly, these past two years have been some of the hardest in my life. I started the Sacred Memories book project after creating a short collection called Lamentations, which, not only shows where my head was at, but also clearly phrases I would describe my experience of this past year (as well as the experience of many others). However, instead of creating another collection, I wanted to create something that people could physically feel the weight of. Something you cannot simply unfold, but something that you would experience in the act of turning pages one by one.

I also wanted to bring people on a journey with me. On one hand, Sacred Memories is a journey through the creation of 150 paintings, as each page is ordered chronologically; and through my own textual selections from the actual, sacred text of the book of Psalms, and how I crafted the placement of each selection on every page.

On the other hand, however, Sacred Memories is a journey through the pain, suffering, lament, joy, and gratitude experienced in very real, visceral ways by authors spanning 500 years. That’s five centuries of experience catalogued in this anthology titled Psalms.

I would read & meditate on each Psalm before interpreting my own meditation into a painting. This became my rhythm: read, meditate, paint. Read, meditate, paint. 150 times in 10 days. So the fun thing about looking through these paintings from cover to cover is that you get to see how the style of my artistic hand changes, literally, across time. And with that comes a really meta exploration of time: past history, present history, and future creation… But that’s for another time.

While I can never fully understand the experience of those specific authors, the act of meditating brought me deeper into a book that I used to read only in my dark times. Painting then became a way through the meditation, to physically process and channel my un-nameable thoughts and experiences onto paper.

Q: Who do you think should purchase this book, Sacred Memories?

J: That’s a hard question. While my knee-jerk response would be: ‘everyone, everyone should experience this book!’ I think I would follow that with: anybody who struggles to hope.

Well, that was me, actually. Creating Sacred Memories was what gave me hope in what, perhaps, was one of the darkest periods of my life.

But really: Sacred Memories is for people who want to breathe. To hope. To journey to a deeper place in their soul. To journey outside of their soul. To experience healing. To reconcile what has been lost. Sacred Memories is also for people who have given up altogether, whether it be on life, on relationships, on religion, on family.

While the sacred text, the book of Psalms, that Sacred Memories is inspired by has its roots in Jewish & Christian spiritual traditions, Sacred Memories has no religious agenda. In my intention, Sacred Memories is about the experience of the human condition over centuries. I feel like, in that way, this grounds us in a deeper reality that transcends the linearity of time. So I’m really excited to share something that can connect the dots of past, present, and future, because that’s really how I see the world.