The Book of Revelation

Is It Really a Story About the End of the World?

For as long as I can remember, biblical stories have fascinated me.

Not simply because of what they say, but because of what might exist beneath the words.

What did those words mean when they were written?

What do they mean now?

And what happens when we stop being frightened by them long enough to really look?

Perhaps that fascination began at school. I attended a convent in Brecon where I studied Religious Studies and the Bible for five years. Even then, I found myself questioning what I was reading.

I was particularly fascinated by the contradiction between belief and behaviour.

How could people read these extraordinary teachings about how we should treat one another and then walk back into the world and behave in ways that seemed completely opposed to them?

Why were people capable of such goodness — and such terrible destruction?

Those questions never really left me.

And eventually they led me to one of the strangest, darkest and most visually extraordinary books in the Bible.

The Book of Revelation.

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The Book That Frightens People

Revelation has a reputation.

Even my great-aunt was a little concerned when I told her I intended to illustrate it.

And I understood why.

The Four Horsemen.

War.

Famine.

Death.

Plague.

The Beast.

The Whore of Babylon.

Armageddon.

Judgement.

The end of the world.

It isn't exactly light bedtime reading.

But I wanted to approach it without deciding beforehand what it meant.

Was this really just an apocalyptic doomsday story?

Or had centuries of interpretation taught us to fear something far more complicated?

So I went back to the words.

And almost immediately, something struck me.

For a book with such a terrifying reputation, it begins by offering a blessing to those who read it, hear its words and take its message to heart.

That didn't feel insignificant.

What if I had entered this story expecting the wrong thing?

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Reading an Ancient Visual Language

I began to think of Revelation almost like reading hieroglyphics.

Its language is ancient.

Its symbolism belonged to another world.

Numbers, creatures, colours, objects and events carried meanings for people living nearly two thousand years ago that we cannot simply assume translate perfectly into our own time.

And then there are the words themselves.

They have travelled through centuries.

Languages.

Translations.

Cultures.

Religious traditions.

Human interpretation.

I couldn't pretend that I was somehow going to uncover the one definitive meaning hidden inside them.

I could only show you what I saw.

And that became incredibly exciting.

Because words and paintings share something I love.

Give the same words to a hundred people and they may imagine a hundred different things.

Stand a hundred people in front of the same painting and they may find a hundred different stories.

We bring ourselves with us.

Our experiences.

Our fears.

Our beliefs.

Our doubts.

Our histories.

So I began reading John's extraordinary vision and asking myself one question:

What do I see?

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This Could Never Be Just a Painting

Very quickly, I realised that a conventional painting wasn't going to be enough.

Revelation moves through worlds.

It shifts between Heaven and Earth, beauty and horror, destruction and salvation.

It is crowded with creatures, symbols, angels, cities, monsters and extraordinary visions.

I wanted the viewer to journey through it.

To move around it.

To discover things.

To encounter darkness and beauty within the same work.

So I began creating something between painting and sculpture — a large narrative artwork in which the story could physically unfold.

I wanted you to feel the words through imagery.

To encounter the pain.

To experience the destruction.

But always with the knowledge that somewhere beyond it there was light.

The work would eventually take me around eighteen months.

And it became one of the hardest things I had ever attempted.

At times, I think Revelation sent me slightly mad.

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Destruction — Or Transformation?

As the work developed, another question began to trouble me.

What if the destruction isn't simply about the destruction of the world?

Revelation repeatedly destroys only a portion — a third of this, a third of that.

And I began wondering whether I could read that symbolically.

What if some of this destruction represents the parts of ourselves that have to be confronted?

The things we carry that aren't particularly good.

Our greed.

Our cruelty.

Our selfishness.

Our capacity to harm one another.

The darker parts of being human.

Perhaps Revelation could be read not only as something happening to the world, but as something happening within us.

That interpretation stayed with me throughout the work.

It also brought Revelation unexpectedly close to another story that fascinates me: Dante's Inferno.

Both can be read as journeys through darkness.

Both force us to confront human behaviour.

And both ask what might exist on the other side.

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Are We the Apocalypse?

There is another reason Revelation continues to feel disturbingly relevant to me.

Mankind is an extraordinarily destructive force.

We wage wars.

We destroy landscapes.

We exploit one another.

We consume.

We divide ourselves.

We create technologies capable of extraordinary good and extraordinary destruction.

Perhaps we don't need supernatural forces to bring about an apocalypse.

We're perfectly capable of creating one ourselves.

That doesn't mean I believe Revelation predicts a particular modern event or that I've somehow decoded its prophecy.

I haven't.

What interests me is something much more human.

Why does a book written so long ago still allow us to recognise ourselves within it?

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From Darkness Into Light

For all its terrifying imagery, I didn't come away from Revelation thinking only about destruction.

I kept thinking about what comes after it.

Light.

Release.

Renewal.

The New Jerusalem.

A beginning emerging from an ending.

And I began wondering whether that is why the book affected me so deeply.

Perhaps it isn't simply a story about the end.

Perhaps it is a story about journeying through darkness in order to reach something beyond it.

Maybe that journey is religious.

Maybe it is spiritual.

Maybe it is psychological.

Maybe it is simply human.

I don't believe everyone looking at my artwork will see what I saw.

I hope they don't.

Because Revelation left me believing more strongly than ever that imagery — whether written or painted — changes according to the person standing before it.

This artwork is therefore not my attempt to tell you what The Book of Revelation means.

It is something much more personal.

It is what happened when I entered John's vision and allowed myself to see what appeared.

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Explore The Book of Revelation

This Collection page introduces the finished artwork and the questions that drove me to create it.

But there is far more hidden inside.

In the Creation Gallery, I'll take you behind the construction of the piece — from interpreting John's extraordinary imagery to physically building a story that could no longer remain contained within a conventional canvas.

And in the Artist Journal, we'll go much deeper into the symbolism, the biblical text, the choices I made and the questions Revelation left me asking long after the work was finished.

First, explore the artwork.

Explore the Gallery

Then come inside the story.

Explore Journal1 Still under construction

Explore Journal 2 Still under construction