Faith, 2006 Oil on Canvas by Stacy Stewart Smith

Faith begins with two hands that cannot quite reach each other.

At 50" × 34", this oil on canvas is intimate in scale but vast in implication. Against a luminous ground — built up through layers of oil washes, its inner glow kindled by a technique borrowed from Ingres, who primed his canvases in cadmium red — two arms extend toward one another across an impossible distance. One reaches down. One reaches up. They are deliberately mismatched in scale, and that imbalance is the painting’s entire argument.

The background dissolves into the blurred geometry of the Eiffel Tower, glimpsed from a moving elevator — iron and light rendered through daubs of paint and wisp washes, hovering between impressionism and pure abstraction. The figurative arms emerge from this atmosphere like a thought becoming certain: near-realistic, yet drawn rather than merely painted, as if the act of reaching itself is still being decided.

There is something of Michelangelo’s Creation in the composition — that charged space between fingertips — but Smith’s intention is his own. This is not the moment of divine touch. This is the moment before it. The moment when the distance seems absolute, when logic offers nothing, and the only available movement is trust.

Can the small hand lift a large one? Are today’s problems bigger than the power of the Almighty?

Faith is the first completed work of the Resurrection series, painted across the summer of 2006 and finished in November of that year. It is the painting that made everything that followed possible.

Oil on Canvas · 50" × 34" · 2006
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