Senior Sustained Investigation

Davis Goodrich: Revelations

The Book of Revelations in the New Testament is the craziest and most mythological the Bible has to offer. Both the Old and New Testaments are straightforward and follow fundamental ideologies. The Book of Revelation has the flair and panache of Greek and Norse myths by introducing mind-boggling creatures and earth-shattering implications at the hand of a Christian God. I am taking what I believe is the only thing from the Bible that modern Christians won't openly reference and bringing it to light. Using my love for absurdism and cartoonish character design, I am interpreting characters from Revelations in my style to show this unseen insanity behind Christianity.

In third grade I saw a version of the Bible called the Brick Bible, which is a visual reconstruction of both the Old and New Testaments using Lego bricks. When I got to the Book of Revelations I was immediately struck by the complete shift in tone. Crazy, nonsensical stories were happening with the same sincerity of the previous chapters of the Bible. Over eight years later, I wanted to take that same whiplash that I felt in third grade and put it into my own interpretations.

I read the Book of Revelations and researched 33 specific characters that showed up at different points in the book. I narrowed it down to the ones that held the most significance when it came to symbolism and their effect on the story. There are 13 characters that I chose. I started to brainstorm how I wanted to visually represent these characters without focusing on visual consistency, but how to communicate the idea of each individual. Keeping it focused on the character attributes added to the absurdity.

Being that this is my senior sustained investigation, it was difficult realizing that I would not get to create as many characters as I wanted. It would have been great to create all 33 before my senior show. I also struggled with color of this project. It is difficult to manage when every detail is so important. Color represents theme and there is too much to choose from.

I have failed to capture the sense of scale that the Book of Revelations recounts with its meticulous description of event and characters. I wanted to evoke the largeness of that. Creating more characters would have been my preferred way to show scale and I just could not design that many in the amount of time given. I also wanted to use this project to represent the failure of Christianity as a religion to keep up with the modern world. It relies on referencing stories that are thousand of years old and in doing so it may have sown its own downfall.

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