Cherubim

Holders of the throne of God

First of all, thank you so much for all of the new subscribers! I am so grateful you are here. If you follow me on the socials then you may have seen this reveal, but I invite you to revel in the cuteness a second time. There’s quite a few of you who aren’t on all of the socials so you get to see it for the first time. Hurray!

Behold - the Cherubim. He is finished!

I just have to start this off by saying that I am legit obsessed with Biblically accurate angels. Like whoa, right? Not this much later version of all white-clad blonde supermodels you see on Angel Oracle card decks and truck stop calendars. Oh no. Give me the flaming toroidal many-eyed multi-winged awe-inspiring monstrosity that knocks you flat on your back any day. I’m kind of a junkie for big spiritual experience, can you tell?

I had the idea for this painting right when Baby Hawk was born. But I had to wait. I wanted him to get old enough so he had the proper baby rolls and folds that this image so required him to have. Too young and it wouldn’t quite work. He had to look like a Renaissance Putto (no, that’s not the slang word you think you know the meaning of, read on). What is that you ask? It’s what we think of when we hear the word, “Cherub.” Cute chubby baby angels became all the rage in Renaissance Italy mainly it seems because of Donatello’s depiction of them. Taken from the Latin word for boy, putti (pl.) were actually found on children’s graves in the 2nd century but fell out of use during the Middle Ages. Around the 1400s, they started popping up in art from sculptures, paintings and decorations for the next several hundred years.

But Cherubim are one of the highest classes of Angel. They literally carry the throne of God. Derived more than likely from an Akkadian word karibu, the one who blesses, this was also one of the terms used for the Lamassu, the either winged or bull-bodied protector dieties of the Assyrians, who incidentally used to be a Goddess named Lama of the Sumerians. Sheesh! SO who or what are these class of beings? When so many cultures and so many people have encountered the same or similar type of creature, it makes you wonder.

Cherubim Biblically are described as having four heads, one of a lion, one of an eagle, on of a bull and one of a man. They are mentioned in Ezekiel (by far my favorite book of the Bible - yes, I have literally read the whole thing cover to cover), Genesis, Kings and the Book of Revelation. Psuedo-Dionysus places Cherubim only second to the Seraphim as the highest of the angel rankings. They are kind of a big deal.

But how then did this incredibly intense, high-ranking angel get neotenized into our contemporary Cherub?

That being said, something I think about along these same lines is how did Eros, who in Hesiod’s Theogony was literally the fourth God ever to come into existence, get boiled down to the cute and chubby Cupid? And how did a Cherub and a Cupid end up as practically the same thing in today’s conception? Crazy. Does that mean Eros and the Cherubim are energetically related? These are the things I think about.

Baby Hawk reached prime Cherub Putto-ness at 8 months old. I bought several yards of red satin and I did a photo shoot that resulted in some of the best photos I may ever take of him his whole life. There will be other Cherub paintings of him down the line, I can promise you that. Settling on this pose was practically impossible because so many would have also been perfect. But keeping in line with his chubby Cherub cheeks, I wanted to make the heads of the Tetramorph be babies as well. So that is a lion cub, Highland Cow calf and an eaglet. I added the Bernini-esque glory rays in 24kt gold leaf as the final touch and the whole thing came to life.

I wanted the background to be moody, you know, like God peaking through the clouds on a blustery day. I wanted this Cherubim to be both awe-inspiring and cute, both terrible (as any proper mystical vision should be) and adorable. This Living Creature arrived in my life and has utterly changed it just as though I was visited by a Biblical vision. Because I have been. The spiritual ecstatic lightning that comes from witnessing the sheer power of the cosmos ripping open and revealing Truth is what the mystics of yore refer to when they describe seeing an “Angel.” I have one running around my home every day. I have been electrified with purpose and my eyes have been opened. Painting this cheeky painting could not have been more prescient and accurate a description as to what would unfold personally for me over the 9 months it took to paint it.

But that’s how art, like true vision, works often, isn’t it? It holds us by the hand and opens the door for where we want to go.

---

I will have prints available of Cherubim in the coming weeks so you too can have an inspirational Living Creature in your home. Gold leaf embellished canvas prints will be available too.

---

---

Here is this week’s YouTube video. I go through a tri-color mische technique painting from start to finish in about 15 minutes. I used this painting as a demo for my online class with Vitra Academy this fall. The class, along with some really great extras, will be available to purchase soon if you are interested in diving in not only to technique, but some monster anatomy analysis. More on that soon.

This is the technique I use for the majority of my paintings and is one of my all-time favorite ways to paint.