You look closer. You see mountains, reflected in a lake in the bottom third of the image. The remainder of the space shows the milky way, a sea of stars and vibrant colour. It’s a perfect photograph. Except, it isn’t. But no one would judge you for thinking so.

I struggle with abstract art. I am often far more moved by the obvious and obviously skilled. But even a hyper-realistic image painted conventionally allows for a small margin of error. Mistakes can be covered and blended. But what of Richard Rowan? A hyper-realistic landscape artist that paints with a method that affords him zero margin for error. He paints on glass, building up the image layer by layer. To do this he begins with the foreground. You see each star, the texture of the mountains, the ridgelines and texture of the melting snow semi-perfectly reflected in the glossy lake below.

When you take the painting down off the wall and turn it around, you can see the back of the image, the artists final remarks. A messy blur; great strokes of black, dark blues, reds and oranges. Months of layering and slow drying oil on glass.

It starts to hit you, all the detail went in first. The skill is unfathomable to me. I hope I own a piece one day.

There’s a story in the Bible, after Jesus’ resurrection where there are a couple of disciples, not really given much mention throughout the story to this point. They are walking together from Jerusalem, where they had just seen Jesus, the one they had come to believe in as their Messiah, be crucified. Both their grief and their disappointment must have been crippling. they had hoped he would make sense of all things. Not to be, just more confusion. They were looking at a mess of paint on the back of a piece of glass. Nothing to see here. Go home.

They were on their way to a town called Emmaus, and Jesus joined them, but they were kept from recognising him. Jesus took the opportunity to talk to them, and what did they talk about? - the Old Testament, the stories they knew of their heritage. He made it plain to them what it all meant and how it pointed to and was fulfilled in Him. He turned the painting around for them. That’s what a ‘revelation’ is, right. Something hidden was made apparent. What was impossible to see, was turned around and made clear, and in so doing it became hyper-real. Like a photograph, but better because it had been painted, a story with zero margin for error.

They would have talked about stories that we still grapple with. What does Genesis tell you about Jesus? What does Exodus tell you about Jesus? What do the Psalms tell you about Jesus? What does the story of Ruth and Boaz tell you about Jesus? What does the story of Hosea tell you about Jesus? We need answers to these questions before we start asking what they tell us about us.

Richard Rowan’s art helped me realise that when I approach the Bible I should try to remember that the foreground comes first, all of this detail that went in right at the start, can now be understood when viewed rightly. It also reminds me that I cannot see or understand things on my own, otherwise I’m no better than a man standing on the wrong side of a pane of glass, complaining that the painting is dreadful. It must be turned, revealed, and shown to be a hyper-real image completed by a master artist with zero margin for error.

I should treat my faith with far greater reverence and commitment than I do. These things are easy to say, I hope they can translate into increased lived experience on my part.