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The Living Mural

© Richard Kent Matthews

The following account is true.

One evening back in the 1960s, I had the privilege of being a dinner guest in the Los Angeles home of a fairly well-known artist and his wife. I'll call them Michael and Angelique. It was a wonderful event. I was treated to a sumptuous meal and was allowed to preview several of this artist's freshest works. A few of the pieces have since been placed in some of the world's finer museums and galleries.

During the course of the evening, Michael related the following story:

It had been a tumultuous day. Nothing had gone right. I had met for hours with a number of clients with regard to a mural I had been commissioned to paint for a new Catholic church being designed for a wealthy L.A. suburb. I had yet to accept any of the proposed ideas and hadn't come up with any of my own.

By the time I got home that evening, I was a wreck. Angelique and I had a conversationless dinner and I retired early.

I awoke around 3 a.m. with an overwhelming urge to paint. I jumped out of bed and ran to my studio. But I had no blank canvas. I searched the whole house and could find nothing on which to work. I became more and more frustrated. Just as I was about to burst, I found a 2' x 2' piece of window glass in the basement. "This will have to do," I said to myself.

I took the glass back to the studio and began to work, splashing paint all over the transparent surface. Finally, after two hours, I stepped back and realized that all I had done was to create a glassful of mud. And rather ugly mud at that. I felt defeated. . .and exhausted.

I returned to bed and slept fitfully. Around 9 a.m. I heard Angelique's voice.

"Michael, wake up, wake up!"

"What is it?" I asked, groggily.

"Your painting. It's amazing!"

"That piece of mud in the studio?"

"Come see it, Michael. You must have been too sleepy to realize what you were creating."

I got up and stumbled behind her, down to the studio. When we got there, I saw that she had turned the glass over; we were looking through the reverse side. To my utter shock and surprise, there on that glass, looking at me from under what I thought was mud, was the glorious face of Christ, with crown of thorns and streams of blood and a look of the most extreme compassion I had ever seen. And as if that weren't enough, in the middle of Christ's forehead, totally distinct, yet precisely blended, was the figure of Christ on the Cross.

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