Please note that a number of details referred to in this interview have evolved since the time this interview was published.

And This Too is God: An Interview with Artist Bryce Widom
By Charlotte Z. Rotterdam

Embracing my hot cup of Tulsi Chai Masala, I sat down to talk with Bryce Widom about his grand undertaking: to paint ’1000 Views of God’. Why 1000? And why God? Inspired by Japanese artists Hiroshige’s and Hokusai’s ’36 views of Mount Fuji’, and Hokusai’s more ambitious ’100 views of Mount Fuji’, Bryce decided to up the ante. “One hundred just didn’t seem enough”, he says with a smile. Not enough to hone the skill that is developed in painting 1000 paintings, and not enough, perhaps to capture what, if anything, we might experience as ‘god’.

But why choose to paint views of ‘God’, the ultimate in loaded words? “I tried on other titles, like ’1000 Views of Spirit’ and ’1000 Views of the Divine’, but ultimately they all felt like watered-down versions of my original intent.” Raised in something akin to an agnostic household, Bryce became aware that his search for another word was fueled by his own discomfort in naming “God”. Acknowledging this discomfort, he decided to stick with his original vision. “’God’”, Bryce notes, “can be used to refer to three perspectives of the divine (as described by Integral Theory’s ‘Three Faces of Spirit’): the ‘Great Perfection’ manifesting as ‘It’, the ‘Great Other or Beloved’ manifesting as ‘Thou’, and ‘Pure Awareness or Presence’ manifesting as ‘I’. Ultimately, he acknowledges, “God is everything – including the emptiness from which everything arises.” The inspiration to begin this series – which prompted him to resign from his full-time graphic design position at Whole Foods – as well as the inspiration behind every act of creating comes from that divine impulse or urge that runs through all existence. The source of that urge as well as the movement it engenders, Bryce points out, are both ‘God’.

And so the act of painting becomes a spiritual practice, one that he admits is incredibly “humbling” and that calls for “full surrender through my heart.” Only so can that “larger current move through me.” Bryce points to View No. 6, in which a dove gliding over a cathedral is juxtaposed to a curled up, fetus-like figure below. He remembers sensing the presence of divinity in European churches and the “palpable feeling of my heart opening,” a feeling he hopes to evoke in his viewers as well. All of the paintings in this series share some form of text that may point the viewer in such a direction, as for example, View No. 3 which reminds us to ‘surrender everything.’ “This is, first and foremost, an exploration into unknown territory, to deepen my understanding and experience of God, and to share this journey with the viewer”, he remarks. “When sitting down to create the next View, I surrender to whatever it is that inspires me most”, and the work bears witness to that state of inspiration.

In choosing to paint 1000 Views of God, Bryce admits the potential enticement to picture only the transcendent, the all-glorious, as emblematic of the divine. But, he explains, part of the practice of ‘viewing God’ must be to “bring everything” to the table. For himself, this means “calling back in 1000 pieces of myself, pieces that might hurt, that I don’t necessarily want to see, feel, befriend.” For the viewer it means that darker ‘shadow’ elements are as much a part of the painting as what might traditionally be considered ‘spiritual’ images.

Take, for example, View No. 1 in which a serene Buddha face is encroached by a black widow spider. While the Buddha image served as a kind of “security blanket” for the monumental first painting of the series, it also clearly represents a figure of enlightenment, compassion, wisdom. The Buddha is also evocative of the “emptiness” at the source of all being, and thus a metaphor for the inception of the series, as well. Inspired by his four-year old son’s love of spiders, Bryce spontaneously painted the black widow, and upon further reflection realized its significance as a symbol of the “moment of death” and the eventual and inevitable return to emptiness. On another level, he suggests, this painting points to both the wisdom of religious traditions as well as the “spiritual webs or traps” that too often lead a believer to commit horrific acts in the name of his or her ‘God’.

These pieces are “snapshots,” glimpses into the paradox that is the divine. Bryce’s work reminds us that “god is not just the creator”. View No. 10 2/3 is considerably larger than other works, most of which are painted on 8”x12” pieces of wood, but shares their color scheme – hues of orange, red and yellow with stronger elements in black. (These larger pieces, titled with fractions, are part of the sub-series “1000 Views of God: Calypsos”, “hidden” paintings tucked into the series of 1000, enabling Bryce to explore across a larger surface area.) A woman breathes out onto her hand, where broken egg shells point the eye to young doves flying above. Bryce confides that “something was missing” before he painted the bird of prey that circles above them. The airships which hover in the distance call to mind their wartime role, dropping bombs and delivering devastation from seemingly impossible heights. They too are God – powerful, huge, and frightening. The religious scholar Rudolf Otto noted that the sacred was as much the ‘mysterium tremendum’, the tremendous mystery, as it was beautiful and fascinating, and Bryce’s work picks up on this theme.

So, I wonder, is anything not a view of God? Bryce points to View No. 17, which depicts two figures on a battlefield, targeting some figures in the distance. From one perspective, the scene can simply be described as “me vs. the enemy”, where God always and paradoxically resides on “my side”. But the background text (‘On a hazy battlefield, I fire upon my beloved’) invokes a larger perspective – that “not only am I firing on my enemy, but I’m also firing on the ‘Great Other or Beloved’ (God), who in turn is none other than my very own ‘Self’ (God, again).” Bryce’s intention, and perhaps that of all spiritual endeavors, is to “widen our embrace, to get to a cosmo-centric view” in which the divine is not limited to any particular aspect or image of reality: “Nothing is outside of God”, he notes. We are left sitting with the paradox that while “all views of God are not equal,” that we do have experiences that seem more sacred than others – nonetheless, God is “the very fabric of everything”. So, my tea cup empty, I leave my conversation with Bryce wondering: where are the blind spots of my view, where do I not see God?