Stefan Eicher's Statement on work created in 2003

The theme we picked for this year’s Limner Society Gathering was the ‘Incarnation of Christ.’ My paintings developed different levels of meaning, but at the core they are a means for me to make sense of suffering, by specifically relating suffering to the incarnation.  At the cross, in addition to taking our sins, the fact is that Christ took upon himself our suffering, pain, and disease as well.  So much so that Dr. Dan Fountain, working with HIV/AIDS in Africa and Asia, has said that the blood and water that poured from his side can only be explained by Christ's heart literally having been broken, being torn apart by the sheer stress of suffering in addition to the weight of sin and guilt. Isaiah 53 gives us a dramatic picture of this. The breadth of this suffering is captured in the blue and scarlet of my painting called ‘The blood and the water.’
Having moved to the city of New Delhi recently I was hit again by the reality of suffering.  Urban poverty reaches up to your doorstep and forces you to look at it.  Yet the horror of the suffering seen outside my window is its meaninglessness, not just because there is so much of it and the solutions so few, but because nobody seems to care.
 
As I struggled with feelings of guilt and despair in the face of this suffering I found myself preparing for the Limner Society art show. And it was while reflecting on the incarnation of Christ that I began to see meaning in the suffering.  I was stunned to realize that the very suffering that the street person is experiencing before my eyes and in the present tense is literally an experience of suffering that Jesus is taking upon himself 2000 years in the past. Not only is God 'caring' about this person, he is literally taking his or her suffering into his own body. Suddenly this person's experience takes on infinite value, and the phrase "If you do this to the least of these my brethren you do it unto me" takes on a depth I had never seen before.
I chose thus to depict specific photographs that document historical moments of suffering, which at their very unfolding are taken by Christ upon himself 2000 years earlier.  Using devices from traditional religious art, e.g. halos, arches, and sacred hand positions, I present these individuals as Christ himself, to both get a better understanding of Christ's experience of the incarnation 2000 years ago as well as a better understanding of Christ's connection to the present, his presence in the here-and-now.
Thus the three paintings of the triptych are also moments in the life of Christ:  the first being a nativity scene, the second the crucifixion, and the third the baptism at the start of Christ's recognized ministry.  "The Weight" depicts Christ as a malnourished and dying baby crying out to the Father to take the cup (the weight) away, looking ahead to the cross and what is to come, just as his malnourished state is giving him a foretaste.  The sheep at the back hides its face in horror at the reality of the nativity, which wasn't the cuteness of conventional nativity scenes but rather God being born into the stinking hole of human condition.  The weighing machine is both an allusion to the weight of what he will have to carry as well as a clock foreshadowing the time of reckoning and the time running out.  As the Christ-child pleads with his heavenly father for a way out, the sheep becomes an Abraham-Isaac-type propitiary ram offering the temptation of an alternative.
"The Pain of the World" becomes a crucifix scene complete with three crucified figures and Roman soldiers.  The girl, body burned by napalm, running in agony and terror, utterly vulnerable in her nakedness, and abandoned or separated from her parents gives us a small picture of what Christ experienced on the cross both symbolically and literally.  One aspect of the horror of the cross was Christ’s separation from the Father for the first time in infinity. However even in the correlation with Christ's own experience of terrible aloneness we realize that this girl, in her moment of extreme pain and fear was not alone as she runs down the road, but that Christ himself was taking on her suffering as it happened.
"The Winner" depicts Christ at his baptism, symbolized in the glass of water and the blue colour scheme, where God the Father expresses His pleasure in His son.  The fact that this pleasure was established before Christ had started any official ministry is significant.  Unlike what is told us through popular culture, the winner is a winner not because of his achievement but simply because he is loved and accepted by God the father.  Christ is also in the AIDS patient, carrying his suffering, independent of questions of moral failing.  Even if the AIDS patient denies God and till his last breath rejects the Christian faith, the core of the truth is that God is pleased with him.  In addition to His other characteristics such as holiness and justice, love and loving is God's very nature and the foundation for his relationship to human beings no matter what they do or not do.  This is the often hard-to-swallow truth about Grace.  For me this is a self-portrait as I have struggled with burnout due to not understanding God's acceptance and love for me.  This is Christ who is so pleased with life as well as pleased with me. He is about to die and so weak that as he raises his hand in blessing he lacks the energy to even smile.  All he can do is lift his eyelashes to express his joy.  It is also me, on my sickbed, although I will not achieve anything else I am at peace because I know the unconditional love of the Father for his prodigal son.
I could have called "The Dive" "Grace" instead.  Watching the Iraq War on CNN earlier this year I remember seeing the lines of bombs streaming out of the bellies of B-52 bombers high up in the sky, and imagining that as the bombs came closer they revealed themselves to be a string of divers executing graceful twists and somersaults in all their beauty and vulnerability.  Christ is the diver whose entry into history is like an explosion, changing the world forever. But it is an explosion of life, and the impact of the diver hitting the earth refoliates the dried up trees.  And as all things seem to be in the Kingdom, it is an upside down act, foolish, backwards to the world's understanding of greatness, or of how the race is to be won.