The Prophet Isaiah
Artwork for a preaching series on Isaiah, at Hope College.
For starters, I don't think I really realized how many biblical references come from this book until re-digging into it for this project. Passages like:
Turn your swords into ploughshares
A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse
The wolf will lie down with the Lamb
A voice calling in the wilderness...Make straight a way for the Lord
The Suffering Servant
It is such a central text - at the heart of so much of what Christians hope and believe about the Messiah!
Because of that, I really wanted to come up with a design that represented a fuller picture of the prophecy - and the prophet himself - rather than just focusing on one image.
The concept for this layout is based on an old book illustration I stumbled across in the MET archive (above).
Seeing the central figure, surrounded by a series of icons helped open up my mind for a way to contain a collection of images from the text. I love numerical symbols as well, so having a set of 12 was an added satisfaction.
The symbols themselves are meant to represent a loosely linear reading of the text.
That is is divinely inspired,
That Isaiah is cleansed for to speak it,
That something will need to be cut down before something new can sprout up,
That peace will come (and we are invited to participate),
At the cost of the affliction, redemption and renewal of the Suffering Servant (the four icons above)