Speaking from the heart: Art at BYU museum expresses faith through symbols

For artist Christopher Young, wood has a deep symbolic meaning. It has a lot of similarities to flesh, he says, in its grain, in its ability to show passage of time. It has strength to bear the burdens of life. It can have great beauty.

So, when the officials at Brigham Young University's Museum of Art asked Young to paint something for an exhibit centered around "the visual symbols artists employ to communicate profound truths about the life and mission of Jesus Christ," "I knew it would include wood," he says.

His painting, "Man of Sorrows," shows Christ holding the cross he would be crucified on, but it is different from many such paintings.

On various trips to Europe, Young says, "I've seen thousands of images of this moment in Christ's life. Most of them show him hunched over, in agony. But I wanted to show the triumph, the fact that he was able to bear this burden; that he is bearing the cross but also the burdens of man, and he is able to do it."

So, instead of scarring the man, he scarred the wood. "In our Mormon culture, we sometimes tend to dismiss the cross as a symbol, but in many ways it is a beautiful symbol — not a symbol of torture, but a beautiful instrument of the atonement."

Young's painting is one of 44 works in the museum's exhibition titled "Types and Shadows: Intimations of Divinity." The show contains works from the museum's permanent collection as well as pieces on loan from artists, private collections and other Utah art museums.

It includes works by living artists, including Lee Udall Bennion, Franz Johansen, Brian Kershisnik, Arnold Friberg and others, as well as pieces by classic artists such as Rembrandt, the School of Titian, Albrecht D?rer, Carl Heinrich Bloch and Minerva Teichert.

Conveying religions symbolism and meaning is one of the earliest uses of art. Through paintings, sculpture, stained glass windows and other means, "for thousands of years, the visual arts have taught the stories of salvation to people who could not read or did not have the opportunity to hear the scriptures," Richard N. Holzapfel says in "The Image Speaks," a study guide produced to accompany the exhibition. "The truth is," he writes, "we live in a very symbolic world. This is the beauty and power of symbols.… There is so much more to them than can possibly be written."

The "Types and Shadows" in the exhibition's title refer to specific religious uses of symbols. According to the guide, "a type is an intended similarity between a person, object or event and another person, object or event. A shadow is similar in meaning but refers to something that will follow or come to pass. In the scriptures, types and shadows promise the coming of the Messiah, proclaim His divinity and anticipate His life and supreme sacrifice."