Prayerprint | an art piece

On the 5th Sunday in Lent, Anass Quinten offered a new art piece to the community of saint benedict’s table. What follows is Anass’s reflections on the creative process behind this work, along with a photograph of the piece, courtesy of Kevin Grummet.

Prayerprint

To saint benedict’s table,

I started working on this project in Fall 2020, a few months after the beginning of the pandemic. In the beginning, my intention was to keep the natural grain of the wood and carve a labyrinth using a wood-burning tool. I wanted to keep the burnt wood visible. The process of burning/carving took a dozen tedious hours of smoke inhalation, and after I finished I abandoned the project.

A few weeks later, I started working on it again, but this time with a different mindset. I felt that it was better to mask the burnt carving, so I applied polymer size to the canvas, followed by many layers of gesso. In my work I usually try to follow the tradition of Iconography and mount canvas to the panel before applying gesso. But this time I did not use canvas. Without fabric, the burnt carving was naked even though it was hidden behind the gesso… that was my feeling!

After a lot of sanding, I applied three layers of red clay mixed with special glue. My intention was to gild the surface with copper, burnish it, and then paint interwoven geometric emblems on the surface with blue acrylic paint. But once more, I abandoned the project.

Many months later, in the last two weeks of Lent 2022, I resumed my work, with a radically different mindset once more. I applied the copper leaves to the panel, but I did not burnish it as I had planned. Instead, I weathered it.

Using ingredients from the kitchen, I oxidized the copper which resulted in the natural turquoise colour. I decided that the scattered turquoise texture would replace the painted blue emblems I had first designed. The result was completely different from what I had set out to create a year earlier. But that was not my feeling anymore.

In the Moroccan culture where I grew up, copper is always used as a symbol of misfortune or hardship. Someone who is experiencing recurring bad luck may be told, “You have a face of copper!” Or a farmer who loses his crop may declare it to be “a year of copper.” It wasn’t until I found this same symbolism in the ancient scriptures that I began to pay attention.

You now have copper, but I will bring you gold. - Isaiah 60:17

Well, we held onto copper for too long…

At the end, I applied three layers of satin varnish to finalize the project and to prevent the copper from oxidizing more with time. Time has already influenced the project and the result.

Thank you,

Anass