My most recent series of paintings reflects on the interaction between the natural and human-made worlds through two characters, Qohelet and Sophia, and their animal companions. The title, Vanitas + Viriditas, can be translated as “vanity and vitality.” The twenty-three paintings and drawings are an extended reflection on two approaches to wisdom. Each of the hyper-surreal shaped oil paintings can take hundreds of hours to complete.
I have trained under accomplished artists and studied masterpieces in museums around the world. I have also been shaped by unconventional influences for a painter, studying theology and ecology alongside art practice. Broadly, I see my work as a contribution to a paradigm shift: a loosening of secularism’s grip on the contemporary art world and an increasing recognition of the importance of spiritual traditions to many artists’ identities.
My work is also informed by my family history, which includes a long line of theologians, ministers, and missionaries. I’m of Jewish heritage on my mother’s side, and my great-grandfather was the only Holocaust survivor in his family of twenty-three. On my father’s side, I descend from Mennonites who were chased around Europe before settling in North America.
Several years ago, I enrolled in a course on the wisdom books and songs of Israel, including Job, the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon. I soon began thinking about the possibility of a visual interpretation for divine wisdom.
The Vanitas series features a figure named Qohelet (Hebrew for “teacher”). Inspired by the book of Ecclesiastes, these works represent the vanity of human striving for power, wealth, and knowledge, which often comes at the expense of the earth. Vanitas painting, a genre popularized by seventeenth-century Dutch masters like Edwaert Collier, took its name from the refrain in Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” These highly detailed still-life paintings often used skulls, moths, fading flowers, and other ephemera to remind viewers of the temporality of life and inevitability of death.
The Viriditas paintings all include a figure named Sophia (Greek for “wisdom”), inspired by the personification of wisdom in Proverbs. They espouse virtues like simplicity, humility, wonder, and awe, which are vital for cultivating ecological wisdom.
Refracting Infinity, 2020. Oil on Baltic Birch. 36 x 24 x 2 inches.
In Ecclesiastes, Qohelet warns that the pursuit of knowledge, wealth, and all pleasures under the sun is nothing more than vapor. The figure in Refracting Infinity, whose silhouette is reflected in the window of an old university science lab, is a modern version of the ancient teacher, a disenchanted wanderer in a world of smoke and mirrors, pondering what might be the cure to the banality of existence, which Pascal described this way: “On all sides I behold nothing but infinity, in which I am a mere atom, a mere passing shadow that returns no more.”
My Qohelet is intrigued by complex scientific theories and concepts. This painting offers an imaginative depiction of string theory, the idea that at the subatomic level all of life is interconnected through vibrating “strings” of energy. Having read modern cosmology, Qohelet is dismayed by the inevitable heat death of our universe. Seen through the window, a whimsical sunflower like those painted by van Gogh captivates Qohelet. Despite his depression and sorrow, van Gogh saw glimpses of the divine through nature. Likewise, Qohelet is fascinated by the spiral pattern of the sunflower florets, which reproduces the golden ratio of the Fibonacci sequence—a constant that recurs throughout the cosmos, from nautilus shells to galaxies. While tempted to deem life absurd and without meaning, Qohelet is not wholly satisfied with that answer. He prefers to press into the mystery.
Will the divine elegance that science reveals in nature provoke wonder and a re-enchantment of his world, allowing him to break free of the reductive frame? Or is it merely an evolutionary survival instinct to ascribe meaning to what Richard Dawkins calls a universe of “blind, pitiless indifference”?
Sophia, 2020. Oil on Baltic birch. 24 x 24 x 2 inches.
In Proverbs, Lady Wisdom sings:
The Lord formed me from the beginning,
before he created anything else.
I was appointed in ages past,
at the very first, before the earth began….
I was the architect at his side.
I was his constant delight,
rejoicing always in his presence.
And how happy I was with the world he created;
how I rejoiced with the human family!
We often think of wisdom as head knowledge, but in Jewish wisdom literature it is better understood as practical knowing, extending even to botany and music. The book of Kings describes the wisdom of Solomon this way: “He spoke about plant life, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of walls. He also spoke about animals and birds, reptiles and fish. From all nations people came to listen to Solomon’s wisdom.”
My character Sophia was partly inspired by the twelfth-century Benedictine abbess, polymath, and mystic Hildegard of Bingen. Hildegard was the first to use the term viriditas, which might be translated as a “holy greening power.” With a deep respect for creator and creation, Hildegard is said to have founded the study of natural history in Germany. Also a pioneering composer and painter, she allowed nuns under her care to perform morality plays, let down their hair, and wear colorful dresses. I drew these strands of inspiration into Sophia.
Here she is accompanied by an endangered species of hummingbird. The marvelous spatuletail lives only in the Andean forests of northern Peru and has iridescent plumage and extravagantly long tail feathers tipped with purple discs, similar to Sophia’s colorful outfit. Throughout the series, Sophia’s adventures illustrate that, now more than ever, we must embody divine wisdom in our relations with one another and the earth. The otherworldly façade behind her is my interpretation of Hildegard’s vision of the House of Wisdom, inspired by the Gothic Revival mansion Strawberry Hill House in London, which incorporates Persian motifs. The circular format hearkens back to the Renaissance tondo form, often employed for paintings of the Virgin Mary, such as Michelangelo’s Doni Madonna (1507).
Swallowed by Knowledge, 2021. Oil on Baltic birch. 30 x 40 x 2 inches.
After a lifetime of pursuing knowledge, the biblical Qohelet concludes: “Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.”
Søren Kierkegaard criticized his predecessor Hegel’s belief that humans could arrive at objective truth through a rational, systematic approach to knowledge. Instead, Kierkegaard emphasized that we are finite and temporal beings, and that the best we can do is take a leap of faith with “fear and trembling.”
Here the barren, black Icelandic sandscape represents the epistemic nihilism that threatens Qohelet in his quest for understanding. Today, with access to the sum total of human knowledge literally resting in our palms, we experience what Charles Taylor termed the nova effect: a rapidly increasing array of life philosophies on offer.
Qohelet discovers that what we need is not more information but true wisdom. Reading is no guarantee of virtue; some of history’s worst eugenicists and dictators were highly educated. When we seek our entire purpose and meaning through the acquisition of knowledge, we delude ourselves, rejecting a relationship with the omniscient creator who can help us discern true wisdom.
Qohelet’s place within the ribcage of a massive sperm whale alludes to the story of Jonah. Whales have brains six times the size of humans, but they suffer the same fate we do (their deaths historically exacerbated by commercial whaling). The theme of finitude is reflected in the pocket watch at the bottom left corner, based on one I inherited from my great-uncle Percy.
All Creatures Lament, 2022. Oil on Baltic birch. 26 x 26 x 2 inches.
Hildegard’s call to awaken from our collective apathy and rise toward justice resonates with me. She argues in De Operatione Dei that if we fall deeper and deeper in love with creation, we will respond to its endangerment with passion.
The second-century monastic text Physiologus was a predecessor to medieval bestiaries extolling the moral symbolism of real and imagined creatures, accompanied by lavish illustrations. One of its legends is of a mother pelican who pierces her breast to feed her young during extreme drought—a visceral image that became a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. In the Gospel accounts, Christ likens himself to a mother hen: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem…how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.” Over the centuries, many cathedrals have adopted this symbol of the pelican and her chicks in colorful stained-glass windows.
All Creatures Lament depicts a mother pelican’s valiant attempt to rise from the oily muck to save her chicks. I had in mind the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The largest marine oil spill in history, it affected brown pelicans on the coast as well as white pelicans many miles inland. This intentionally unpleasant and sobering painting is meant to elicit compassion and spur us to action out of love for creation. Looking into the face of an innocent suffering creature, we also look into the face of Christ, remembering that we are called, as he was, to stand with the oppressed and marginalized, no matter their species. (See Matthew 6:26; 10:29; Luke 14:5; and Psalm 84:3–4.)
Greening the White Cube, 2023. Oil on Baltic birch. 23 x 40 x 2 inches.
When I was in my mid-teens, a friend of my parents gave me Modern Art and the Death of a Culture by Hans Rookmaaker.
While I don’t agree with all of Rookmaaker’s conclusions (see Jonathan Anderson and William Dyrness’s Modern Art and the Life of a Culture), his critique of the nihilism and ugliness in much of modern art helped me make sense of the art world. Several years later I came across Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word, which skewered the absurdity of New York galleries, museums, and collectors. He echoed some of Rookmaaker’s concerns, but with a satirical slant—something I’ve tried to channel in this painting.
The works of art included here are among the most famous of the twentieth century, all by white men, including Willem de Kooning, who famously admitted, “Beauty becomes petulant to me. I like the grotesque. It’s more joyous.” Designer Ingrid Fetell Lee, in her book Joyful, writes that high modernism had a “near-allergic reaction to organic forms,” aspiring to a “rationalist mode of design free of sentimental flourishes.” Thankfully, artists who didn’t share that allergy—like Hilma af Klint, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Eva Zeisel—are now more widely celebrated, and beauty is making a comeback.
Alpha and Omega, 2022. Oil on Baltic birch. 31 x 47 x 2 inches.
I first sketched the concept for Alpha and Omega seven years before I began the painting. Later, I envisioned this scene as the culmination of both series, where Qohelet and Sophia finally meet. Qohelet comes from nobility, which has afforded him the opportunity to pursue “everything under the sun” in his search for meaning, including wealth, sensual pleasure, entertainment, knowledge, religion, philosophy, and science. As a lone wanderer fighting demons of despair, he meets Sophia—Lady Wisdom—who beckons to him from within the portal of the new creation.
Throughout this series, the Zen rock garden is a recurring motif. A prominent idea in Zen Buddhism is kire, or “cutting,” which refers to the practice of letting go of the root of life to recognize the radical impermanence of reality. Zen gardens are created as dry landscapes absent of organic life that exemplify the nothingness of physical matter and thus can aid us in attaining enlightenment. While Qohelet is attracted to a way of life that compels him to let go of all worldly attachments, Sophia draws him back to everything that is true, good, and beautiful. She carries a sapling, symbol of the Tree of Life, representing the wisdom that may also grow in Qohelet.
The twelve stones in the arch bear monograms for the twelve tribes of Israel, and the Chi-Rho stone at the top points to Christ, “the stone the builders rejected [that] has become the capstone.” Sophia herself is also a signpost pointing to Christ, whom Qohelet comes to understand as the Wisdom of God. For Hildegard of Bingen, salvation had a healing, greening power: viriditas. She writes, “In the beginning all creatures were green and vital; they flourished amidst flowers. Later the green figure itself came down.” Speaking to Jesus, whom she calls Greenness Incarnate, she affirms “that the fullness you made at the beginning was not supposed to wither.”
For Qohelet, everything in this world is fleeting. For Sophia, the path to wisdom is the re-enchantment of the earth through its creator, manifested in embodied, skillful living. While Qohelet and Sophia’s paths differ, the former wrestling with the enigmas of life and the latter delighting in the blueprint of the natural order, both affirm, with the author of Proverbs, that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” While some may chafe at the notion of fearing God, Qohelet and Sophia’s fear is a reverential awe for the creator, a reminder of our human limitations and creatureliness.
What would it mean for us to live up to the name we have given ourselves: Homo sapiens, “wise humans”? Eco-theologian Steven Bouma-Prediger writes, “The virtue of wisdom is shot through with an abiding awareness of life’s precariousness, an understanding and prizing of the excellence of life, and an unwavering sense of thanksgiving for the sheer gift of life.” When we align ourselves with the wise grain of the universe, we can ensure that this planet is stewarded for generations to come, focusing not simply on what we should do, but on the kind of people we should be.
The complete Vanitas + Viriditas series and accompanying text can be found in Josh Tiessen’s latest monograph, along with a soundtrack by his brother, composer Zac Tiessen.
Josh Tiessen is a professional fine artist based near Toronto, best known for his hyper-surreal paintings that draw on eco-theology. His work has been exhibited in galleries from New York to Los Angeles. His latest art monograph is Vanitas + Viriditas.
