ABOUT THE PORTRAIT COLLECTION
Kreg Yingst
“Everything Could Be A Prayer: One Hundred Portraits of Saints and Mystics” (excerpt from the book introduction)
I began creating icon-style portraits as a New Year’s resolution at the beginning of 2013. Creating them was a means of confronting the darkness around us — more specifically, as a direct response to the Sandy Hook school shooting. Through my art, I wanted to bring light and healing: something tangible that could be seen and held. Prayers that the viewer could speak. Images that contemplate that might offer a sense of peace and solace.
My daily devotional routine was to find a prayer — one per week — and then meditate on it, draw it, carve it, print it, and paint it. Each block print featured the saint or mystic who had spoken the prayer. By the end of the year, I had completed 52 prints.
In the ensuing years, I’d occasionally do one, but my work on these portraits was sporadic at best. Then, in 2020, the pandemic struck, and many of us encountered solitude in a new way. George Floyd was murdered by police, and the country and the world faced a renewed reckoning with the persistence of injustice and racism. In despair, and dogged by a sense of hopelessness, I decided to again focus on this spiritual discipline. I needed models of faithful Christian witness in times of suffering and fear. This time I searched for the wisdom of self-imposed hermits and leaders from marginalized communities.
The collection that emerged features portraits of people of faith: saints and mystics from different periods, cultures, ethnicities, genders, and denominations. They are contemplatives and activists, well-known and obscure, Orthodox and Protestant and Catholic... Their commonality is their love for God and their enduring awareness of God’s love for them.
The saints and mystics in this book share a deep and abiding devotion to Christ, whose essence shines through them. But not all aspects of their lives are commendable. Like the writer of Hebrews names as ancients commended for their faith, they were certainly not perfect. Yet, put together, these saints and mystics offer us a colorful light spectrum seen through a God-shaped prism, each an individual piece of glass. When the pieces are assembled, they form a stained-glass window that reveals the imago Dei: the image of God written into humanity.
