Burning Bush and Ezekiel’s Dream, by Tanja Butler

Massachusetts-based artist and illustrator Tanja Butler has long been respected for the power and depth of her liturgically based works. They employ different “symbolic systems of stylization to describe an internal reality,” she says. Byzantine icons, for example, “use an inverted perspective to portray space as if seen from the viewpoint of eternity.” And a Cubist fragmentation of space can be used to describe “multiple perspectives as a metaphor of the transformation and growth initiated by the Spirit.” Butler combines different artistic genres, theologies, scriptures, and symbols to create what she calls “multilayered metaphors of God’s sojourn with us.”