Mary at the Tomb

From the artist's trip to Israel in 2003. Based on the biblical story of Mary going to the tomb and seeing it empty. This is the drawing for a similar work in oil.

"Shortly before leaving Israel, I revisited the Garden Tomb. Allenby, the British commander who entered Jerusalem in 1917 and ended the four hundred years of Ottoman rule of the Holy Land, noted a rock formation that looked like a skull. This was Golgotha, the site where Jesus was crucified. The hillside beneath the skull was later excavated and a tomb and a garden were discovered that were dated to be around the time of Christ.

It was important to me to put both the skull-like rock formation and the tomb in the same painting, I was amazed to discover there are two rooms in the tomb, an outer one just inside the entrance door and a side room where a body was laid to rest. In my vision, Mary is about to enter the tomb and the Gardener is standing nearby. It would be just a few minutes later when Mary would come out of the tomb weeping and Gardener would ask, "Why are you weeping?" Then He called her name and she knew it was Jesus."