Lift Up Your Voice and With Us Sing, Lisa DeLong

Artist: Lisa DeLong

Title: Lift Up Your Voice and With Us Sing

Medium: Handmade watercolor and marbled paper collage on paper

Price: $9,500

Dimensions:  25 x 45 inches

Artist Statement: The principle of complementarity is integral to human experience. All Creation accounts speak of separation and differentiation from a Source and the subsequent emergence of sameness and difference, yin and yang, female and male, self and other. This separation results in light and dark, heaven and earth, good and evil, pleasure and pain.

We now are separated from our divine home, yet we intuit that there is more than the hazy shadows we see in a darkened glass. We see patterns of the heavens above echoed in the earth below; that which is within our hearts influences and shapes that which surrounds us, and vis versa. We are hungry to know, to remember, more.

This painting takes its name from the words of St Francis of Assisi’s poem “All Creatures of Our God and King.” In it, all diverse and multi-faceted nature is called to sing together in unified praise. 

To create in a world defined by separation often feels like an attempt at reunification. As I work, I take raw materials – matter unorganized – and shape them into something that has never been seen before. Subtly-coloured earths, vibrant semi-precious stones, the sap from a tree are purified and blended to create paints. A design is traced on a receptive surface with compass and square, and order begins to emerge. I select numbers and shapes carefully: a 12-pointed star to mirror the zodiac and the march of time; the square of earth reels across space, constantly evolving and changing its orientation; stars dance from the horizon to the heavens. In all this movement, a deeper, more subtle order prevails. Interlocking circles weave all together back again and the rising sun heralds the dawning of a brighter day.

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.