REZAR COM AS MÃOS I | Aliança de Santa Maria

RUBRIC
PRAYING WITH YOUR HANDS

Marta Cruz
Teacher and researcher in the field of design

PRAYING WITH YOUR HANDS I

A strong heart in the fragile body that we are

I don't draw or paint to pray.
Nor the other way around.
And just as I don't pray to understand, I don't draw or paint to represent.
In both cases, what I'm looking for is an encounter. But what encounter? With whom?
I'm looking for an encounter with something that seduces and fascinates me, but doesn't fit me.
I touch it sometimes.
Sometimes in a sensitive way;
others, in the heart.

Drawing, painting and praying are not instrumental paths for me. They are processes of discovery; they are spaces of relationship; they are the search for an encounter.
They are similar processes. Both refer to life, to the material reality of which we are a part, and yet they exceed it. They don't stand apart from it, but allow us to look at it and meet it, but on another level.

“The hand-eye-mind connection in drawing is natural and fluent, as if the pencil were a bridge that mediates between two realities.”

(Juhani Pallasmaa, The Thinking Hand, 2009)

This watercolor materializes my prayer for the day of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
I painted while I prayed - alternately. Like a dance, a conversation, like a crescendo, like two people running towards each other. Sometimes drawing or painting makes room for prayer.
They allow me to enter into God's rhythm. Other times, they come at the end, as a synthesis or fruit of my encounter with the Lord.
In this case, painting and praying were dialogic processes.

Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus highlights the fragility of his human condition and the richness found in that fragility, which Jesus shares with us.
As I prayed, transparency and color - delicate, subtle - gave body to this fragility, intertwining. And from these intersections come new shapes and new colors. Just like in life.
Then the strong and open Heart.
The Sacred Heart of Jesus is open to us, it comes out of the body, although it is also its center. That center that we all have - the heart where Mary kept all things (Lk 2:19) - and which we want to resemble Jesus'.
A collage - a heart that is simultaneously a center, an ‘inside’, but also an ‘outside’. Open, and ready to deliver.

“...Jesus comes to us to ask us:
“Give me what you have.
Open your heart.
Give me what you are”

(José Tolentino de Mendonça, Praise from Headquarters, 2018)

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Marta Cruz is a teacher and researcher in the fields of drawing, domestic space and material culture.
His broad background in Architecture, Fine Arts and Social Sciences has been the basis for a strong interest in themes and practices that cross disciplines and fields of knowledge.
She is currently an adjunct professor at ESAD - Escola Superior de Arte e Design.
In addition to teaching and research, he develops a daily drawing and painting practice, exhibiting and writing about it regularly.

PRAYING WITH YOUR HANDS I

WORD VS SILENCE X | Joseph's Advent

WORD VS SILENCE IX | You said that you were already the One who is coming

WORD VS SILENCE VIII | So that I could dance just for you