This is the first of three pages (‘Faith‘, ‘Rose‘ and ‘Two Roads‘), telling our side of the story how we came to know Eliza White Buffalo and her mission for the world: Two Roads. It all started when I (Wim) meditated on ‘Into the West’…
Faith started with another painting: Into the West
In 2001 my love Linda died, shortly after we agreed that she would inspire me… if possible. In 2002 I started making paintings, one of which (Aura Healer) displays the very first image of the Akaija. But I created other paintings and objects (you can find them in the gallery of this website) and every painting tells a story. Faith tells one such story.
In May 2004 I was concentrating on this painting: “Into the West”. Finally I was doing myself, what I advice other people: to meditate on it, because Into the West is a meditation object.
I think it was after a quarter of an hour that I started thinking about a certain shape, a Holy Grail within a Celtic Cross, or something like that. That is my common comment ‘something like that’, because I never get things finished in my mind. But this Holy Grail should not be seen as a nice looking bowl pictured from the front, but from above! So now you see the contents. But then the image had to be tilted… well… let me show you the sketches I made in the computer.
The making of Faith
Back then I wasn’t used so much to this ‘inspiration-thing’ as I sometimes call it, not knowing how ‘They’ (the ones who inspire me) work, as I can’t see nor hear them. Meanwhile I’ve learned that they give me an… idea, and then I start working on that. Then, when I’ve ‘got it’, I’m ‘given’ the next step. When I did this more or less right it feels like a click or a feeling like that’s it. It’s like pieces suddenly fit neatly together.
So I started with a Celtic Cross within the circle of the Holy Grail as seen from top. The Celtic Cross has 4 equal legs surrounded by a circle.
Next I rotated the image horizontally in the computer. That’s what I love about computers. When you do something wrong on paper you need to stuff things out, or start again. In the computer you simply press CMD-Z. What I hate about them is that they are awfully complicated, where using a pencil is so easy…
This looked better, but it didn’t make a click, so I needed something else. Now let me see… what options do we have in Illustrator? Ah yes, adding perspective!
Then I was amazed by what I saw, because the Celtic Cross had transformed into a Christian Cross. Don’t you just love it when such things happen?
Now I ‘pushed’ the middle part of the cross down, to create the bowl-shape of the Holy Grail. That’s what theh computer to help me with, but now I had to set my mind to the next problem: how in Heaven’s name am I supposed to materialize this into an art-object? But let me save that for a sculpting workshop or whatever in a distant future.
Here’s what I created with use of the computer-sketches several months later.
The object is horizontally 110 cm (44”) cross. It’s made of wood and plaster and suspended on an invisible wire there’s a red stone, fitted inside the shape of a big golden Akaija. The stone is a 3 cm (1.2”) synthetic ruby. It felt like there should be a red stone there. Don’t ask me why… it just did. Here are some more images…
The red stone, which is yet to play an important role, can be viewed in close-up here. It is an 18 carat solid gold Akaija design with inside a big synthetic Ruby stone. Now we needed a name for the object. In Dutch I was thinking about ‘Geloof’, which means ‘Faith’, because of the crosses. But the Dutch ‘Geloof’ has a religious undertone and I didn’t like that so much. The English ‘faith’ can also mean ‘trusting’, ‘keeping the faith’, believing the world will change for the better, and so on. That’s explanation of ‘faith’ was more like what I could accept.
So ‘Faith’ it was then. The original artwork now is in hands of a friend of ours, Nico IJff, who is a.o. a biophoton therapist, just like Marianne.
All in all, Faith is a merging of some very important symbols in the world: the Holy Grail, the Christian Cross and the Celtic Cross.
and the Akaija :-))
So that’s it, I thought. All finished now. Next project.
Wow… was I wrong!
