Advent, Day 8: A Voice Cries Out

LOOK: Baptism by Water by John Patrick Cobb

At the 2021 Christians in the Visual Arts (CIVA) conference in Austin, Texas, I got to experience local artist John Patrick Cobb’s Ikon Chapel, a traveling, custom-built wooden structure housing twenty of Cobb’s egg tempera paintings depicting his friends, family, and neighbors as saints and prophets in our modern world. The young and the elderly, farmers, water well drillers, artists, teachers, nurses, Holy Cross brothers, custodians, the unhoused, people with disability or mental illness—these are among those he honors in paint and gold leaf.

Baptism by Water is, along with its companion piece, Baptism by Fire, the largest painting in the series, at over six feet long. It is a lakeside scene portraying John the Baptist—the long-haired, bleach-blonde guy at the far right—calling folks to repentance. Several men climb down the rocky shoreline to enter the cleansing waters and be raised to new life. The models are all associated in real life with water—surfers, plumbers, fishermen. And this is a local setting: Hippie Hollow on Lake Travis in Central Texas, a famous nude swimming hole.

Jesus, says Cobb, is the young man with the black hair and black trunks. Cobb deliberately made him indistinguishable from the others to emphasize his full humanity. He looks beyond John the Baptist, perhaps mentally preparing for the solitary forty-day fast in the desert he’s about to embark on.

In the wall text in the Ikon Chapel, Cobb describes the seated, shirted man in the foreground as reminiscent of the Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5:1–20):

The figure in the near ground, clothed, was a man who lived in the nook of the sea wall in Galveston and slept in the nearby graveyard at 61st Street. On the worst winter days I would bring him a coffee, and finally asked him one day if I could include him in my painting. He would sometimes drink himself into a frenzy and yell and scream at the cars in horrific anger. His leg had been broken and had healed in a precarious angle. I felt as though if there were anyone who deserved the peace and the Holy Spirit, it would be him.

At the bottom right, one of the figures twists away, rejecting John’s call. The model’s name is Jonah, so Cobb wanted to use him as a Jonah figure, resisting (at least initially) the divine plan.

In the background Adam and Eve are skinny-dipping.

Detail, Adam and Eve — Detail with Eve and Adam in background

Detail of a local unhoused man with a leg impairment and alcoholism, for whom the artist wishes God’s peace

I was fortunate enough to get to know Cobb a bit over lunch one day while I was in Austin, and then later at an outdoor gathering he and his wife, Tina, hosted on their property. At the time, he was preparing for an extended trip to Italy to restore some Renaissance frescoes in a village chapel.

To learn more about this remarkable body of work, see the book Chapel Ikons: Biblical Meditations on Living the Spiritual Life in the Modern World (Treaty Oak, 2020), which reproduces all twenty-five paintings in full color with detailed commentaries by William Y. Penn Jr. The postscript says that Cobb and Penn are looking for a permanent institutional home with resources to preserve the chapel ikons for public viewing and study and that if interested, you should contact wpenn@me.com.

I also commend to you the article “Art on Board: John Cobb’s Panel Paintings Hit the Texas Highways” by Ginger Henry Geyer from Image no. 47 (Fall 2005), and for a quick video tour of the Ikon Chapel, see the first forty seconds of this video from Austin’s Mexic-Arte Museum.

LISTEN: “A Voice Cries Out” by Nicholas Andrew Barber and Ken Canedo, based on Isaiah 40:1–11 (2020)

Refrain:
A voice cries out in the desert
Come prepare the way of the Lord
God is coming, make straight for him a highway
Come prepare the way of the Lord

Every valley shall be exalted
Every mountain shall be made low
Then shall the Word of God be known
All the earth shall proclaim
The glory of the Lord [Refrain]

Go upon the highest mountain
Zion, herald of good news
Lift your voice, cry out with all your soul
Jerusalem, proclaim
Glad tidings in the Lord [Refrain]

Have no fear, O cities of Judah
Here is your God
See, the Lord is coming now with power
Our God is here
The mighty and the strong [Refrain]

Like a shepherd, he feeds his flock
He gathers the lambs
See, he carries them gently in his arms
So tenderly
With a mother’s love [Refrain]

This post is part of a daily Advent series from December 2 to 24, 2023 (with Christmas to follow through January 6, 2024). View all the posts here, and the accompanying Spotify playlist here. “A Voice Cries Out” is not on Spotify.