Heaven

This drawing is part of a tryptic by me (Heaven), James Kasper (Purgatory), and Matthew Ballou (Hell). Mine is a largely abstract work, due to the impossibility of knowing what Heaven might look like.

I was inspired by a button worn by one of my former graphic design students to an art reception. The image was of an “interrobang.” A piece of punctuation that combines a question mark and an exclamation mark, the interrobang:

…indicates a sentence that is both a question and an exclamation, expressing surprise or disbelief. The interrobang gets its name from the punctuation it’s intended to combine — interro is from “interrogation point,” the technical term for question mark, and bang is printers slang for the exclamation mark.¹

In the drawing, the interrobang is large and abstract. The “period” at the base of the mark is the “eye of God.” A period signifies that a sentence stops. This is the end, the omega.

There are angels that look like a cross between sunflowers and a Biblical description of angels. There are crowds of people. There are planets, of course, seeing that Heaven is in the heavens. In the center is a large white shape, which can be read as a heart, a face, or a place of calm. And, in the top right — fish. Ladders tower through the clouds. They might have been used by some to attempt an alternative ascension to Heaven. This takes us back to the ascending “Tower of Babel”.

_{1 https://www.grammarly.com/blog/punctuation-capitalization/say-what-meet-the-interrobang/}