God is in the Details

Emilie Buck Lewis

Sitting with Discomfort

8 x8 inches, acrylic and oil (first in gallery series)

God is in the Details

6x6 inches, acrylic and oil

It all started when…

My initial concept was to explore the stress put upon the relationships in my household as a result of the Covid-19 quarantine. Currently, my family (my husband and two sons) live in my parents home. We took care of their house while they were away on a mission, and have been unable to find affordable housing in our area since their return last December.

The quarantine put added stress upon us and we felt a bit trapped, with nowhere to escape to “our own” space. That, in turn, put pressure on the relationship between my husband and myself. To say that we have been in supplication to the heavens for a release is an understatement. No physical answers have come. However, relief has come through changes of attitudes and working with one another rather than against one another. 

I felt the perfect metaphor to explore this through painting was to incorporate the philosophy behind the Japanese art of Kintsugi in my paintings. In Japan, when a piece of porcelain breaks, it is often repaired with resin mixed with gold or silver. The result is a fixed dish with beautiful gold seams along the repair lines. The repair makes the vessel stronger, more aesthetically pleasing, and is also considered more valuable after the repair than before. For me, it is a perfect metaphor for how Christ mends us through His ordinances which bind us to Him. My family and I are all broken. Fissures in our characters create fissures in our relationships which can only be healed by trusting that the Savior’s solutions will work (i.e. turning outward rather than in, putting love of family above love of self.) These solutions literally come to us through making and keeping our covenants.

I had anticipated creating six figurative works of my family, doing mundane and totally normal things around the house, all with Kintsugi-like gold repair lines running through the figures. You will find each of these six paintings in various stages of completion. As I began educating myself more fully on white privilege in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder, I began to consider the possibility that using this visual metaphor could be a form of cultural appropriation.

It bothered me so much so that I decided it was best to suspend work on this series (at least for now) until I can objectively evaluate what impact my use of the metaphor would be. (No matter how much I feel like I’m being respectful, I felt like trying to decide this issue while completing the project under deadline would have compromised my objectivity on the issue.)

I turned instead to another concept. This is only one painting, but is in harmony with what I have been painting most recently, which are portraits of our Heavenly Parents. “Sitting with Discomfort” is an image of Heavenly Mother comforting a crying child (editor’s note: this image is pictured first in the gallery above). The painting came out of many places in my soul. Right now during this moment in history, our nation as well as every individual has been sitting with some sort of discomfort whether it be through the pernicious plague of racism, dealing with sickness of Covid-19, dealing with isolation, or any number of other problems.

Personally, I had a very hard time with the concept of being a mother. When I was 16, I was the first one to tell you I would not be having children. I resisted the idea that I had to sacrifice all the rest of my God-given gifts to become a mother, as I had been socialized like so many other Mormon girls. When marriage (and motherhood) finally came for me in my mid-to-late thirties, it did not come naturally for me. I loved my children! But I missed my career terribly and resented a lot of the work of motherhood. 

For me, this portrait (and it is a self-portrait) encapsulates the difficulty of sitting with whatever personal discomfort you may have. It touches on the holiness of sitting with that discomfort long enough to to tend to the need of another’s discomfort. That one crying loudly to be comforted is not an enemy, but part of your own family, and only when that one has been tended to do you realize that your own discomfort has been healed.—Emilie Lewis, 2020

Emilie Buck Lewis

was born in Utah, and raised in Colorado. She holds a BA in Humanities from Brigham Young University and an MA in Art Education from the University of Cincinnati. She pursued a career in Museum Education before having children and deciding to take a break from the museum world. In 2015, she made the decision to make space in her life for her own creative expression by opening her own studio, and now considers herself a full-time mom and artist. You can follow along with her work and journey @emiliebucklewisstudios.