Stand by Me (2022) 绘画 由 Severn (Jie Cheng) Wang

In this piece, I tried to constantly simplify the elements. As much as possible, I tried to keep only the most representative elements of this scene in the picture. For this painting, I chose the blue-striped tallit, the Jewish congregation in traditional Jewish clothing, the piles of white plastic seats in front of the Western Wall, and the Western Wall in the background.

When you think of the Western Wall, you should think of limestone rocks that are not particularly regular in size, huge and stacked together, and plants growing between the cracks of the rocks, etc. Two years ago, I used this method in one of my paintings depicting the Western Wall. But in this painting today, the focus is not on the Western Wall, but on the people in the picture.

The Jewish people in the picture, dressed in strictly prescribed clothing day after day, come to the Western Wall in the morning to recite a portion of the scrolls and pray in order that they may keep fully the Torah as it was promulgated through Moses in the past and further added to, expanded upon, and refined by Jewish scholars in later generations. But I added to this a man who behaved differently, who, although dressed in the same traditional garb, held a book with gold lettering on the cover and left while reading the second half of it. What did he read? My design is that he was reading about a man recorded in the book who not only had not sinned in his life, but had kept the entire law promulgated through Moses completely, and even this man said that the words of the Bible that had been written in the past were referring to himself, and this man even said that he himself fulfilled the law, and that he would complete the law that had been promulgated.

The complete Bible tells us that we have no good works to boast of before God, nor can we rely on our merits, much less on what prescribed clothes we wear, what kinds of food we do not eat, or what rules we obey in exchange for salvation. The only thing we can do is to believe and accept the only begotten Son of God, and through faith we can be justified.

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