I fielded a great question today. Someone asked me why, since I paint a lot of Christian, Buddhist and Eastern religious icons, I don’t also paint Islam. I struggled for awhile – I said I wasn’t that interested, or didn’t know enough about it… but then I finally realized the answer. (Ok, it shouldn’t have taken me that long but I’d never thought about it before and I was tired.) Islam actually keeps the commandment against making images, as do most Jews. For you Christians in the audience – take out your Bibles and read the 10 commandments. It’s the one about not making an image of anything on land, in the sky or under the sea (or something like that.) Christianity, who were completely assimilated into Roman culture, rather than -as commonly claimed – the other way around, followed the commandment for a couple of centuries before deciding to interpret it to mean only that you shouldn’t make any image of God; even though this is clearly, obviously not what it says. Actually the first Christians so adamantly followed the commandment that it because their defining feature. They refused to worship anything made by man – all the statues or icons or art of the Greeks and Romans, which were just ‘wood and stone’. Most of the martyrs died because of this refusal… but only a century or so later, everybody just forgot about it and decided to go ahead and worship the images – which, although renamed to reflect the shift towards Christianity, were made pretty much the same way as they had been previously.

The point, is that Islam (and Judaism) to a large degree have NO tradition of art or painting – at least with regard to their faith. And since I take religious iconography as a basis for many paintings, of course this lack of material is a major deterrent.