The Book of Revelation: Death, Rebirth and the Journey Beyond
Journal Two — The Beast, Babylon and the New Jerusalem
Introduction — Beyond the Destruction
By this point in Revelation, there has been enough blood, fire, death and destruction to last several lifetimes.
And there is plenty more to come.
But I don't want this second journal to become a catalogue of biblical catastrophes. I wasn't interested in painting every plague, every death or every drop of blood simply because it appeared in the text.
Something much more interesting had begun to emerge for me.
In the first journal, John's vision became a journey away from the corporeal self.
He appeared to die.
He was welcomed into a world beyond his own.
He had to conquer his attachment to himself, war with it, starve it and allow it to die. He grieved for the person he had been. His world was destroyed around him, his physical self was attacked, and eventually almost everything familiar was stripped away.
Yet throughout all that destruction, rebirth kept appearing.
A foetal body.
A child.
Spirals.
Rising souls.
Ascension.
A pregnant woman.
A new sun, moon and stars.
Again and again, something died and something else began.
But there is still a problem.
The beast hasn't gone away.
It has followed John through the vision in different forms — emerging from pits, appearing within creatures, threatening new life and continually returning whenever the journey seems to move towards light.
That became increasingly important to me.
Because perhaps the beast isn't simply something out there.
Perhaps Revelation becomes more uncomfortable when we recognise something of ourselves within it.
Human beings are capable of extraordinary beauty, kindness and love.
We are also capable of cruelty, greed, violence, manipulation and destruction.
We create our own monsters.
We hurt one another.
And in doing so, perhaps we ultimately hurt ourselves.
Across religions and philosophies runs a remarkably persistent idea: how we treat others matters because none of us exists entirely alone.
We are individuals.
Yet we are also part of one another.
That contradiction fascinates me.
We are one, and yet we are not.
So as the beasts become more dominant in this part of the artwork, I began to see them less as fantastical monsters and more as manifestations of something human.
The beast within us.
And perhaps that is why it keeps returning.
You cannot become free of something simply by refusing to look at it.
But before we reach freedom, Revelation has more to destroy.
The false prophet rises.
The beast emerges from the water.
People choose whom they will follow.
The winepress fills with blood.
Babylon consumes and is eventually consumed herself.
Armageddon tears through the city.
It is excessive.
It is grotesque.
It is terrifying.
And I wanted it to be.
Because this artwork was never meant to make death and transformation look comfortable.
I wanted it to shine and terrify.
But this time, rather than following every act of destruction individually, I want to look at what lies underneath it.
What are we worshipping?
What are we becoming?
What happens when humanity turns upon itself?
And what must finally be restrained before we can move forward?
Because beyond all the beasts, blood and destruction is something completely different.
The New Jerusalem.
The twelve pearly gates.
The twelve angels.
The foundation stones.
The golden city.
The river of life.
And hidden behind the gates, the Tree of Life.
The artwork has been taking us there all along.
So this second journal isn't really about how the world ends.
It is about what has to be confronted before something new can begin.
Chapter 8: The Tree of Life
Chapter One — The Beast Rises
When the Beast Takes Form
Journal One ended with the beast still present.
Now it steps forward.
John sees a beast rising from the sea — seven heads, ten horns and crowns upon its horns. Its body carries the characteristics of a leopard, and one of its heads bears what appears to be a mortal wound.
I placed the beast within a swirling whirlpool, its form emerging from the water as though being pulled upwards from somewhere beneath the surface.
That water matters to me.
Throughout my work, water represents emotion.
We have already seen the great flood become an outpouring of John's grief and emotion as the woman escapes towards the possibility of rebirth.
Now something very different rises from it.
The beast.
If water represents our emotional self, then perhaps the beast emerging from it suggests that our darkest qualities don't always arrive from somewhere outside us.
Sometimes they rise from within.
The Wounded Head
One of the beast's heads appears dead — visibly wounded — yet the beast survives.
That interested me.
Throughout John's journey, darkness has repeatedly appeared to be defeated only to return in another form.
The beast does the same.
It is wounded.
But it isn't gone.
Perhaps the darker parts of ourselves behave in much the same way.
We can suppress them.
Ignore them.
Pretend we have conquered them.
But that isn't the same as understanding or controlling them.
Something wounded can still survive.
And something hidden can return.
The False Prophet
Then another figure appears.
The false prophet rises from the earth.
I deliberately gave him a face that is almost human, but not human at all.
That distinction was important.
I didn't want him to appear immediately as an obvious monster. There had to be something recognisable in him — something that makes us look at his face and see a distorted reflection of ourselves.
Because deception doesn't always arrive looking frightening.
Quite often, it comes from something — or someone — that appears familiar.
Something that looks enough like us to make us trust it.
Only when we look more closely does the illusion begin to unravel.
His proportions are wrong.
His features are strange.
His tongue is forked.
And from his mouth comes a frog, echoing Revelation's description of unclean spirits like frogs emerging from the mouths of the dragon, the beast and the false prophet.
His mouth betrays him.
What appears almost human on the outside reveals something altogether different from within.
That became particularly important to me because the false prophet's real power isn't brute force.
It is persuasion.
He holds an image of the beast for the people gathered around him to worship. Upon his forehead is the mark of 666, which I rendered in Hebrew.
He doesn't need to physically force everyone to follow the beast.
He convinces them.
And that makes him particularly dangerous.
We are naturally inclined to recognise ourselves in other human beings. Familiarity can make us lower our guard. We listen to people who appear to understand us, resemble us or speak as though they are one of us.
But appearance isn't truth.
The false prophet is my distortion of that idea.
He looks just human enough to deceive you.
Look closer, and everything begins to change.
The forked tongue speaks of deception.
The frog reveals corruption.
The mark declares his allegiance.
And the image he carries reveals what he ultimately wants others to worship.
A beast can frighten you into submission.
A false prophet can make you believe that following the beast was your own choice.
That is much more frightening.
Why I Used Hebrew
The 666 upon the false prophet's forehead is written in Hebrew, as are many of the words appearing throughout this artwork.
That was a deliberate artistic choice, although it isn't the original language of Revelation.
The Bible came into being across three principal languages — Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek — and the Book of Revelation itself was written in Greek.
That distinction is important.
It is also why the Alpha and Omega remain Greek within my artwork. They are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet and belong directly to the language in which Revelation was written.
But elsewhere, I chose Hebrew.
John's vision comes from a Jewish and biblical world deeply rooted in the Hebrew scriptures. Because I was approaching this artwork as John telling his story, Hebrew became my visual connection to that older world.
I wasn't trying to recreate the original manuscript language of Revelation.
I was creating a visual language for John's world.
So Hebrew appears repeatedly across the panels, while Greek remains where it carries particular significance.
It is another meeting of different histories and different layers within the work — an ancient story passing through language, time and finally through my own imagination.
What Do We Choose to Worship?
The people surrounding the false prophet are important.
The beast may be grotesque, but people still choose to gather around it.
That shifts the meaning for me.
The beast isn't acting alone.
It is being enabled.
Followed.
Worshipped.
And we don't need a seven-headed monster before human beings begin worshipping destructive things.
Power.
Money.
Status.
Control.
Our own importance.
We can elevate things until eventually we become servants to the very things we thought would serve us.
That is where Revelation begins to feel uncomfortably familiar.
Perhaps the question isn't simply, What is the beast?
Perhaps it is:
What are we willing to give power to?
The Mark
The mark upon the forehead becomes part of that question.
A forehead is difficult to hide.
It makes an internal allegiance outwardly visible.
And elsewhere on this same panel another group will appear carrying a very different name upon their foreheads — those standing with the Lamb.
That creates a deliberate visual opposition.
But I don't see it as a comfortable division between good people and bad people.
Human beings are more complicated than that.
For me, it asks what we allow to guide us.
What do we follow?
What do we surrender ourselves to?
What happens when we stop questioning what we have been told to worship?
The beast gains power because humanity gives it power.
And that leads back to the uncomfortable idea beginning to emerge throughout this artwork:
perhaps the beast within humanity survives because humanity continues to feed it.
The Beast Is Bound — But Not Yet Gone
Above the beast, an angel begins to bind it with chains.
This moment belongs later in Revelation, but I deliberately allowed different parts of the story to occupy the same visual space.
The artwork doesn't always follow a strict timeline.
I was more interested in allowing one image to speak to another.
So we can see the beast rising while simultaneously glimpsing what will eventually happen to it.
It will be bound.
Around the beast rise great blue crystalline formations.
These were deliberate.
Earlier, the brilliant blue crystal belonged to the sea of glass surrounding the throne. Here, that visual language has been appropriated by the beast.
It has created its own imitation of a throne.
That matters because the beast and the false prophet aren't merely forces of destruction. They have created their own structures of power and, crucially, their own forms of worship.
The false prophet holds up the image of the beast.
People gather before it.
They carry its mark.
And now even its surroundings begin to mimic the visual authority of the divine throne.
I didn't want the beast to appear weak or ridiculous.
It is powerful.
That is precisely what makes it dangerous.
False gods, false prophets and destructive systems don't gain followers because they always appear obviously monstrous. They can surround themselves with the appearance of authority, spectacle and power. They can create their own thrones and persuade people to kneel before them.
So the blue crystal deliberately echoes something we have already seen — but twists its meaning.
One throne represents the divine presence John encountered earlier.
The other is an imitation built around the beast.
Yet across this false throne comes the chain.
The beast rises from the swirling depths.
The angel descends to bind it.
Power meets restraint.
And John's journey begins to move towards another question.
In Journal One, he had to relinquish the corporeal self.
But perhaps letting go of the self isn't enough.
Perhaps there are things within us that cannot simply be abandoned or ignored.
They have to be recognised.
Confronted.
And eventually controlled.
The beast has risen.
John has yet to discover what must finally be done with it.
Chapter Two — Two Marks, Two Choices
The Lamb Appears Again
Against the violence of the beast and the false prophet, another image appears.
The Lamb stands upon Mount Zion, surrounded by those who carry the Father's name upon their foreheads.
The contrast with the scene below is deliberate.
The followers of the beast carry one mark.
Those standing with the Lamb carry another.
But I don't see this as a simple division between good people and bad people. That would make the imagery far too comfortable.
For me, it is about what we choose to follow and what we allow to guide us.
The false prophet has persuaded people to worship an imitation of power. He has his beast, his followers and even his own mimic throne.
Above that darkness stands the Lamb.
Two forms of worship.
Two marks.
Two very different ideas of power.
What We Carry on Our Foreheads
Just as I used Hebrew for the mark of the beast, I used it again for the Father's name upon the foreheads of those standing with the Lamb.
The position of these marks matters.
They make an inward allegiance outwardly visible.
Throughout our lives, we are shaped by what we believe, what we value, what we repeatedly choose and what we give power over us.
Eventually those choices become part of who we are.
Perhaps we all carry marks of one kind or another.
Not literally upon our foreheads, but through what we become.
And here those marks sit opposite one another within the same painting.
One group has followed the beast.
The other stands with the Lamb.
The Lamb and the Book
The Lamb remains in the human, childlike form established earlier at the throne.
That continuity is important.
For me, the child represents the earthly experience of Christ — the part that has known human existence and therefore understands what it means to pass through it.
That is why I wanted the Lamb here again.
He isn't looking upon humanity from somewhere completely detached from it.
He has experienced the corporeal world himself.
In his hands is a book, and within it I placed the Kingdom of Heaven.
The book therefore becomes more than something to be read.
It holds a glimpse of what lies beyond.
After everything John has witnessed, there is still somewhere else to go.
A Crowd Without Judgement
Behind the Lamb stand the people carrying the Father's name.
Their expressions were very important to me.
They look towards the people being consumed by fire below them, but they don't look triumphant.
They don't appear pleased that they chose correctly while somebody else suffers.
They look sad.
There is sympathy there.
I wanted that deliberately.
Because if reaching closer to God means losing compassion for those who haven't, then what exactly have we learnt?
For me, there can be no pleasure in another person's suffering.
Even here.
Perhaps especially here.
The people standing with the Lamb can see what is happening below them, but they don't condemn those people with their expressions.
They recognise their suffering.
We Are One, Yet We Are Not
This connects to something much larger within my interpretation of Revelation.
Across religions and philosophies there is a recurring idea that how we treat others matters — that we should treat another person as we ourselves would wish to be treated.
I think there is something profound in that.
We experience ourselves as individuals.
Separate bodies.
Separate minds.
Separate lives.
Yet what we do doesn't remain contained within ourselves.
Our actions affect other people, whose actions affect others again.
Cruelty travels.
But so does kindness.
We are one, yet we are not.
That contradiction has fascinated me throughout this work.
What we do to another human being ultimately becomes part of the world we ourselves inhabit.
So those standing with the Lamb don't celebrate the destruction beneath them.
They still recognise themselves in those who suffer.
Perhaps that compassion is itself part of what separates them from the beast.
Rising Towards the Kingdom
Around the Lamb, the imagery begins to rise.
Dandelion clocks, leaves and musical notes drift upwards through the clouds towards the Kingdom of Heaven.
But the leaves are particularly important.
They are coming from a dying tree.
As the tree dies, it releases its leaves and they are carried upwards towards Heaven.
For me, this became another reflection of John's own journey.
The tree cannot hold onto its leaves forever. It has reached the end of its cycle and must let them go.
It dies, but what it releases rises.
That is very close to what I was beginning to see within Revelation itself.
John's corporeal body has been left behind. He has been forced to relinquish his attachment to it, grieve for it and accept that it cannot accompany him on the journey ahead.
The dying tree expresses the same idea in a much quieter form.
Alongside its leaves are the dandelion clocks.
A dandelion releases its seeds and allows them to be carried away from the plant that created them. They travel somewhere new, settle and potentially begin life again.
So within this small area of the painting, death and rebirth happen simultaneously.
The tree releases its leaves.
The dandelion releases its seeds.
The music rises.
And all of them travel upwards through the clouds towards the Kingdom.
Something has to let go before something else can continue.
After all the violence surrounding them, these tiny organic details offer a much gentler version of the same transformation John has been experiencing.
Not everything has to be torn away by beasts, fire or blood.
Sometimes letting go can be as natural as a tree releasing its leaves.
And that is what I wanted this upward movement to suggest.
The earthly form dies.
It releases what it can no longer hold.
And what is released begins to rise.
to rise.
Above and Below
This section of the panel is built around contrast.
Below, people carrying the mark of the beast are consumed by flames and drink from the wine of God's wrath.
Above them stands the Lamb.
The people behind him look down with sadness rather than judgement.
Music rises.
Dandelion seeds drift towards Heaven.
And the Kingdom waits within the book.
It is almost as though two possibilities are occupying the same space.
One pulls downwards into destruction.
The other rises.
And between them comes the next extraordinary image.
Through the clouds appears the Son of Man.
A golden crown upon his head.
A sharp sickle in his hand.
Nearby, another figure carries a sickle of his own.
The harvest is about to begin.
And with it comes one of Revelation's most brutal images:
the winepress of wrath.
Chapter Three — The Harvest and the Winepress
The Son of Man Returns
Before the harvest begins, someone returns.
The Son of Man.
This matters to me because we have met him before.
At the very beginning of John's vision, I gave him a much more terrifying appearance. His eyes burned like fire. A double-edged blade emerged from his mouth. He held the seven stars and the key of death, his feet shone like brass and the Alpha and Omega declared something far older and more powerful than John could possibly comprehend.
That was John's first encounter with him.
And John fell as though dead.
Now the Son of Man appears again.
But I deliberately made him gentler.
He is still powerful and still carries the sharp sickle of the harvest, its blade marked with blood, but the terrifying figure John first encountered has softened.
Perhaps it isn't the Son of Man who has fundamentally changed.
Perhaps John has.
John has now travelled far enough into the vision to see him differently.
And there is another important connection.
What might initially appear to be a golden crown upon the Son of Man is actually golden light emanating from his head.
I had already used this idea with the twenty-four elders.
Their crowns are black, but from them emerges a brilliant golden light — the richness and illumination of what exists within rather than an outward display of wealth or status.
Here, that visual language returns.
The Son of Man doesn't need a piece of gold placed upon his head to announce his authority.
The gold comes from within him.
It radiates out.
That light connects him back to the elders and, ultimately, to the larger language of light that has travelled through the whole artwork — the sun at the throne, the illuminated faces, the ascension and the divine presence that doesn't always need a physical form.
John is beginning to recognise it.
At the start of his journey, the Son of Man's power was almost unbearable. His burning eyes suggested something too ancient and immense for John to look into without being overwhelmed.
Now the same presence can approach him more gently.
But this isn't comfort without consequence.
He carries a sickle.
What once arrived with burning eyes and a sword now returns with golden light and a blade for harvesting.
John may be ready to see him differently.
But there is still something that must be cut away.
The Harvest Begins
The Son of Man appears upon a white cloud, golden light radiating from his head and the sharp sickle in his hand.
Nearby, another angel carries a sickle of his own.
The time has come to reap.
By this point, I had stopped seeing John's journey as a simple sequence of punishments. Everything had become part of a much larger process of separation and transformation.
The idea of a harvest therefore feels particularly appropriate.
A harvest is an ending, but it belongs to a cycle.
Something grows.
It reaches maturity.
It is cut down.
Yet within what has grown are the seeds from which life can begin again.
Once more, Revelation places destruction and renewal beside one another.
The Son of Man has returned to cut away what has reached its end.
The Sickle
The sickles are deliberately prominent within the panel.
They curve across the upper part of the composition, their blades carrying blood.
They are instruments for cutting.
Separating.
Reaping.
And within my interpretation, that becomes another stage in John's separation from the corporeal world.
There is a finality to the action of a sickle.
Once something has been cut from its roots, it cannot simply return to the way it was.
That feels important here.
John's old self has already been conquered, fought, starved, grieved for and increasingly stripped away.
Now comes another separation.
The harvest cuts what has grown from the place in which it grew.
Perhaps John is being shown that transformation eventually requires that same severing.
The Winepress of Wrath
Then the imagery becomes far more brutal.
The harvested vine is thrown into the great winepress of the wrath of God.
I made the winepress itself angry.
Faces appear within its sides — distorted, furious expressions embedded into the structure so that wrath isn't simply something happening inside it.
Wrath has become the machine.
Within the press are bodies and souls.
An angel stands amongst them carrying a bloodied sickle, while blood pours from the press.
It is an appalling image.
But by this stage of the artwork, blood is no longer there simply for shock.
Something is being crushed.
Compressed.
Broken down.
Everything hidden within it is being forced out.
And that is where the winepress began to connect with the journey I was seeing beneath Revelation.
What Comes Out Under Pressure?
A winepress works by applying pressure.
The fruit goes in whole.
What is inside comes out.
That interested me.
Because perhaps the same can be said of us.
It is very easy to believe we know who we are when life is comfortable.
Pressure reveals something different.
Fear can reveal us.
Loss can reveal us.
Power can reveal us.
Grief can reveal us.
And sometimes what emerges isn't particularly pleasant.
The winepress therefore became more than an instrument of punishment for me.
It became another form of exposure.
Earlier, the eyes surrounding the throne suggested that the soul can hide nothing.
Here, there is nowhere left for anything to hide.
Everything is squeezed out.
Drinking the Wine
Around the winepress are those carrying the mark of the beast.
They drink from the wine of wrath and are consumed by fire.
That relationship became important to me because the wine isn't disconnected from the world that produced it.
The beast has been worshipped.
Its power has been fed.
Its mark has been accepted.
And now something comes back.
This connects with an idea that will become increasingly important as the artwork progresses:
what we put into the world eventually becomes part of the world we ourselves have to inhabit.
Cruelty doesn't disappear once it has been inflicted.
Violence creates more violence.
Hatred feeds hatred.
The beast grows because it is fed.
Perhaps the winepress is another way of showing the consequence of that cycle.
What has been cultivated is eventually harvested.
What has been harvested is pressed.
And eventually, we have to taste what we helped to create.
The Lamb Does Not Turn Away
And yet the Lamb is still there.
That matters.
Those standing behind him look towards the suffering with sadness rather than satisfaction.
There is no celebration of torment.
No smug division between the saved and the condemned.
They witness it.
And they retain their compassion.
For me, that makes the contrast much more meaningful.
The difference between the Lamb and the beast isn't simply that one side wins and the other loses.
It is in how they respond to suffering.
The beast consumes.
The false prophet deceives.
The winepress crushes.
But those standing with the Lamb can still look upon another person's pain and recognise it.
They haven't lost their ability to care.
What We Sow
That brings the harvest imagery back to something very simple.
What do we sow?
Throughout our lives we plant things constantly, whether we realise it or not.
Through our actions.
Our words.
Our treatment of other people.
Our choices.
Some things grow quietly.
Others spread far beyond us.
The dandelion seeds drifting upwards beside the Lamb offer one possibility — life released into the world with the potential to begin again.
The harvest and winepress offer another.
Both begin with something being sown.
And perhaps that is why I find this section of Revelation so powerful.
It isn't only asking what happens at the end.
It asks us to consider what we are creating while we are here.
The harvest gathers what has grown.
The winepress reveals what it contains.
And on the next panel, that idea expands from the individual into an entire civilisation.
A city built upon power, excess and consumption is about to discover what it has created.
Babylon is waiting.
Chapter Four — Babylon: When Humanity Consumes Itself
The Vision Spills into the City
The second painted gate panel takes us into Babylon.
By this point, Revelation has become relentless. Angels pour out their vials, people are covered in sores, rivers become blood, fire scorches the Earth and destruction seems to come from every direction.
I didn't want to separate every plague into its own neat little scene.
That would have missed the point.
Instead, I allowed them to collide.
The city is overwhelmed by its own destruction. Blood runs through it. Fire consumes it. Demonic creatures appear amongst the people. Horrific scenes play out within its windows while the angels pour their vials from above.
There is no longer any order to the catastrophe.
Everything is happening at once.
Armageddon
Within the city I wrote Armageddon in Hebrew, continuing the visual language running through the artwork.
I didn't imagine Armageddon as one isolated battlefield.
For me, the entire city becomes Armageddon.
A great river of blood pours through it while plague, fire, violence and death spread throughout the buildings.
By now, the repetition of destruction in Revelation had begun to mean something to me.
How many different ways can a world be dismantled before there is simply nothing of the old world left to hold onto?
John's corporeal self has already been stripped away.
Now the structures humanity created within that corporeal world are being stripped away with it.
The Whore of Babylon
At the centre of this collapsing world sits the Whore of Babylon, clothed in purple and scarlet.
But she isn't simply sitting above the city.
She has almost become the city.
Her enormous dress spreads down through the composition and merges with the architecture surrounding her. Buildings crowd into her form, while parts of her clothing become windows containing tiny scenes of suffering, corruption and destruction.
Her chest is formed from screaming souls.
In her hand she holds the golden cup containing the blood-red wine of her corruption, while upon her forehead I placed the biblical reference to Mystery, written in Hebrew.
She is woman and city simultaneously.
But for me, the word whore carries a much deeper meaning here.
She is enslaved to the corruption that sustains her.
She feeds upon it.
She needs it.
Her apparent magnificence depends upon the very system that is destroying everything around her.
I don't see her simply as a woman behaving immorally. That would reduce the image to something far too literal.
She has prostituted herself to corruption.
Power, wealth, excess and the beast have become the things upon which her existence depends. She feeds them because they feed her.
And that relationship has changed what she has become.
She is no longer simply woman.
She has become the Whore of Babylon.
There is something almost parasitic about the whole relationship.
Babylon feeds upon the city.
The city feeds upon its people.
The beast feeds upon Babylon.
And all of them depend upon the corruption continuing.
Why Babylon Has My Face
I gave Babylon my own face.
That was deliberate.
I didn't want to stand safely outside this scene and point towards corruption as though it belonged entirely to somebody else.
If the beast represents something that exists within humanity, then I am part of that humanity too.
I have weaknesses.
I have contradictions.
I am capable of feeding things that aren't necessarily good for me because, at that moment, they appear to give me something in return.
Putting myself into Babylon forces me inside the question.
How easily can any of us become enslaved to the very things we believe are serving us?
That is much more interesting to me than simply dividing humanity into the corrupt and the righteous.
Because none of us exists completely outside the human weaknesses this painting is exploring.
The Beast Is Eating Her
And while Babylon feeds upon corruption, something is happening beneath all her magnificence.
The beast is eating her leg.
She appears enthroned upon it, but she isn't truly in control.
Babylon has built herself around the very force that is now consuming her.
That was important.
We can feed greed, cruelty, power, hatred and excess because initially they appear to give us something.
They can make us feel stronger.
Richer.
More important.
More secure.
But destructive things rarely remain obedient.
Eventually they begin to consume the person or society that allowed them to grow.
What she feeds eventually feeds upon her.
The relationship has come full circle.
Babylon feeds the beast.
The beast feeds Babylon.
And eventually the beast feeds upon Babylon.
The Seven Vials
Throughout the city, the seven angels pour out their vials.
But unlike the commanding sentinel-like angels that dominate the central painting, these angels are deliberately small.
I wanted them to move almost silently through Babylon.
They don't tower over the city.
They don't need to announce their presence.
They simply pass through it, pouring out their vials while destruction unfolds around them.
That difference in scale was deliberate.
Earlier, I used size and physical presence to communicate the immense authority of the angels. Here, I wanted to explore power in a completely different way.
Their power is subtle.
They don't need to appear superior to those around them. They don't need spectacle or grandeur. Their authority exists regardless of their size.
There is something far more unsettling about that.
While Babylon has surrounded herself with displays of wealth, excess and importance, these tiny figures move quietly through the world she has created and begin to dismantle it.
Babylon looks powerful.
The angels simply are.
The biblical descriptions of the vials are brutal — sores, blood, scorching heat, darkness and death — but rather than separating each catastrophe into its own composition, I scattered their consequences throughout Babylon.
Look into the buildings and different horrors are taking place.
People suffer.
Creatures attack.
Blood pours.
Fire spreads.
And amongst it all, the little angels continue quietly with their task.
The details accumulate until the entire city feels infected by its own destruction.
For me, their smallness creates an important contrast with the beast and Babylon.
The beast needs followers.
The false prophet needs worship.
Babylon needs spectacle.
They build monuments to their own importance.
The angels need none of it.
Their power doesn't come from appearing powerful.
And perhaps that is why these tiny figures can move almost unnoticed through Babylon while the enormous structure around them begins to fall.
The Frogs Return
Revelation also brings back an image we have already encountered.
The frogs.
Unclean spirits like frogs emerge from the mouths of the dragon, the beast and the false prophet. That is why I placed the frog in the mouth of the false prophet on the first panel.
Again, corruption emerges through the mouth.
That connects with something I have repeatedly done throughout this artwork.
The Son of Man carries the double-edged blade from his mouth.
The angels sound their trumpets through theirs.
The mighty angel contains lightning within his.
And the beast and false prophet release something altogether different.
The mouth becomes a way of revealing what exists within.
What comes out tells us something about what is inside.
The Merchants Can Only Watch
At the bottom of the panel, brilliant blue water separates Babylon from the merchants in their boats.
They can only watch.
Their route into the city has gone.
Trade has stopped.
The great system upon which their prosperity depended is disappearing in front of them.
I find that detail particularly telling.
Their horror isn't only that Babylon is burning.
Their world no longer works.
Suddenly wealth cannot rescue them.
Commerce cannot rescue them.
Possessions cannot rescue them.
Status cannot rescue them.
All the things the corporeal world taught them to value depend upon that world continuing to exist.
Take the structure away and their value disappears with it.
John has already been forced to relinquish his physical identity.
Here, Revelation seems to perform a similar act upon civilisation itself.
The things we thought mattered suddenly don't.
The Millstone and the Fall
An angel carries the great millstone associated with the fall of Babylon.
The symbolism is brutally simple.
Something enormous, wealthy and apparently permanent can still be thrown down.
Around the city, crows descend from the sky, adding to the sense that this once-powerful place is becoming something dead — almost a carcass waiting to be picked apart.
Babylon appeared untouchable.
Now she is being consumed from within and without.
And there is a terrible logic to it.
The higher humanity attempts to elevate itself through corruption and excess, the further there is to fall.
When Humanity Consumes Itself
For me, that is what this whole panel ultimately becomes.
Not simply a wicked city being destroyed.
Humanity consuming itself.
Babylon feeds upon corruption.
The people feed Babylon.
Babylon feeds the beast.
The beast eats Babylon.
People worship destructive power, only for that power eventually to turn upon them.
A civilisation builds itself around wealth, consumption and control, and when that structure collapses, everyone dependent upon it is affected.
The destruction circles back to its source.
And once again I return to the idea running beneath this entire artwork:
what we do to others, we ultimately do to ourselves.
We are individuals, yet we don't exist independently of one another.
We build our world collectively.
If we fill that world with cruelty, greed and destruction, then that is the world in which all of us must live.
Perhaps that is why I had to put myself at the centre of Babylon.
I am not outside humanity looking in.
None of us are.
The beast isn't always somebody else's beast.
The corruption isn't always somebody else's corruption.
Babylon has created her world.
Now her world is consuming her.
But the painting isn't finished with the beast.
Beyond Babylon, another force is approaching.
White horses.
Figures clothed in white.
And the authority of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
The beast that has followed John throughout his journey is approaching the moment when simply surviving, changing form and rising again will no longer be enough.
It is about to be bound.
Chapter Five — The King of Kings
Out of Babylon
After the destruction of Babylon, another force enters John's vision.
The armies of Heaven appear upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean.
At their head comes the figure carrying the authority of:
King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
After everything we have just witnessed, the contrast is striking.
Babylon surrounded herself with spectacle.
The beast created its own mimic throne.
The false prophet manufactured worship.
All of them needed something from those around them in order to sustain their power.
Here, power arrives differently.
It doesn't need to convince us that it is powerful.
It simply is.
The King of Kings
I placed the King of Kings amongst the white horses, following John's extraordinary description of this returning figure.
Again, I was interested in the difference between appearing powerful and possessing power.
That distinction has travelled through the entire artwork.
The beast creates an imitation of the crystalline throne.
Babylon dresses herself in purple and scarlet and sits above her city.
The false prophet gathers people around an image and persuades them to worship it.
All three construct an appearance of authority.
But throughout John's vision, divine authority has behaved very differently.
Sometimes it has been enormous and terrifying.
Sometimes it has appeared as a child.
Sometimes it has moved almost unnoticed through a city in the form of tiny angels carrying vials.
Power doesn't always have to look powerful.
And perhaps by this point John is beginning to understand the difference.
The Beast We Have Already Seen Bound
This is also where the structure of my painting deliberately departs from the chronology of the text.
According to the progression of Revelation, the binding of the beast belongs here.
But I had already shown it on the first painted panel.
The beast rising from the turbulent water is surrounded by its blue crystalline imitation of the throne, while an angel brings the chains that will eventually restrain it.
So when we reach this point in the story, we are actually being asked to look backwards across the artwork.
That was deliberate.
I didn't want these panels to behave like pages in a conventional illustrated Bible where one event simply follows another.
John's vision doesn't feel like that to me.
Images echo backwards and forwards.
Something we see earlier doesn't necessarily reveal its full meaning until much later.
The chained beast is one of those images.
On the first panel we saw what would happen.
Only now do we fully understand why.
The Beast Within Us
By this point, the beasts of Revelation had become something much more personal to me.
They were no longer simply monsters from an ancient vision.
They had become the beasts within us.
Cruelty.
Greed.
Hatred.
Violence.
Selfishness.
The parts of human nature capable of hurting others and, ultimately, ourselves.
The beast has spent the vision being fed.
It has been worshipped.
Given authority.
Imitated divine power.
And allowed to grow.
Now its power has to end.
But I don't think freedom comes from pretending the beast never existed.
We have to recognise it first.
You cannot chain something you refuse to acknowledge is there.
Chained in Order to Be Free
This is where the chain on the first panel gains its full meaning.
Chains usually represent imprisonment.
Here, strangely, they represent the beginning of freedom.
The beast has to be restrained so that it can no longer control the soul.
That doesn't mean the difficult parts of being human magically disappear.
Anger can exist alongside compassion.
Self-interest can exist alongside generosity.
Jealousy can exist alongside love.
We contain contradictions.
Perhaps transformation isn't about becoming a perfectly purified creature with no darkness left inside us.
Perhaps it is about understanding what exists within ourselves and deciding what we allow to rule us.
The beast doesn't have to disappear for it to lose its throne.
It has to be chained and tamed.
And that brings us back to the false blue crystalline throne on the first panel.
The beast had constructed its own imitation of divine authority.
It looked powerful.
It attracted worship.
It convinced others of its importance.
But eventually it is pulled from that position and restrained.
The beast is chained so that the soul no longer has to be.
What Is Left?
This feels like another major turning point in John's journey.
His attachment to the corporeal world has been torn apart.
He has grieved for himself.
He has witnessed the destruction of the systems humanity created.
Babylon has fallen.
And now the beast within humanity has lost its authority.
So what remains?
That question takes us into the final transformation.
Because Revelation is about to stop showing John what must be destroyed.
It begins to show him what can exist in its place.
A new Heaven.
A new Earth.
And finally, the extraordinary vision that allowed the metalwork surrounding my paintings to become part of the story itself:
the New Jerusalem.
Chapter Six — And I Saw a New Heaven and a New Earth
After All That Darkness
And then something changes.
After the blood, fire, beasts, plagues, grief and destruction, John sees a new Heaven and a new Earth.
For me, this is the great turning point in the artwork.
Until now, so much of John's vision has been about what must be destroyed, surrendered or overcome.
His corporeal world has been dismantled.
The seals have progressively stripped it away.
The trumpets have intensified the destruction.
The beasts have revealed something darker within humanity.
Babylon has consumed and finally been consumed by the corruption that sustained her.
The beast has lost its throne.
But destruction was never where I wanted this artwork to end.
It had to lead somewhere.
And when John's vision finally moves towards the glory of what comes next, I wanted the artwork itself to change with him.
Paint Was No Longer Enough
Most of John's journey exists within the paintings.
Paint allowed me to create the impossible world of his vision — bodies, beasts, angels, fire, blood, cities, clouds and all the chaos of something that seems to exist somewhere between nightmare and revelation.
But I didn't want Heaven simply to become another painting.
After everything John had travelled through, that didn't feel enough.
Something fundamental needed to change.
So the vision begins to leave the canvas.
Paint gives way to metal.
This transition is one of the most important decisions I made in the entire piece.
The painted panels remain connected to the metalwork, allowing the story to move from one into the other, but the material itself has changed.
John has crossed a threshold.
So has the artwork.
I Wanted Heaven to Shine
Metal gave me something paint could only imitate.
Real light.
It catches it.
Reflects it.
Throws it back.
Its appearance changes as the viewer moves and as the light around the sculpture changes.
After spending so much of the artwork painting John's darkness, I didn't want to simply paint the light at the end of it.
I wanted the light itself to enter the artwork.
That became my way of expressing the glory of Heaven.
Not as something soft or sentimental, but something brilliant.
Something physical.
Something that surrounds the darkness of the paintings and transforms the way they are seen.
This piece had always needed to shine and terrify.
The paintings had carried much of the terror.
Now the metal could carry the glory.
The New Jerusalem
John sees the holy city, the New Jerusalem, descending from Heaven.
And suddenly Revelation gives us a completely different visual language.
Gold.
Precious stones.
Crystal.
Pearly gates.
The river of life.
The Tree of Life.
After so much imagery concerned with taking things apart, we are finally being shown something being created.
That distinction became important to me.
The old world has been dismantled.
Now another can appear.
And this is where the metal structure surrounding the paintings reveals why it is there.
The gates aren't simply a decorative frame around my interpretation of Revelation.
They are the next part of Revelation.
The story physically moves out of the paintings and into them.
The Gates Between Two Worlds
This is also why the painted sections within the gates matter.
I didn't want an abrupt division where the painting simply stopped and Heaven suddenly became metal.
The two needed to meet.
The painted panels create that transition.
They connect the world John has travelled through with the physical brilliance of what lies beyond it.
For me, they become almost a threshold between states.
Behind us is the turmoil of the corporeal world.
Ahead is something John has never seen before.
And the gates stand between them.
That makes opening them more than a mechanical feature of the sculpture.
It becomes part of the journey.
A Different Kind of Power
There is something else I wanted to change here.
Throughout Revelation we have encountered power again and again.
The beast displayed it.
The false prophet manufactured it.
Babylon dressed herself in it.
They needed followers, spectacle, wealth and worship to prove their importance.
Heaven doesn't.
Its power is expressed through something entirely different.
Light.
That takes me back to the idea that began at the throne, where the sun became my way of imagining something divine — ancient, life-giving, comforting and immensely powerful.
Here, that idea reaches beyond the painted image.
The light isn't represented by another symbol.
It actually touches the sculpture.
Perhaps that is why metal felt so right.
The Kingdom doesn't have to tell us that it shines.
It does.
The Destruction Was Never the Destination
Looking at the artwork now, I think this is where the relentless destruction of Revelation finally finds its counterweight.
The horror mattered.
The grief mattered.
The beasts mattered.
But none of them were the destination.
They were part of the journey through letting go.
Now John is being shown what all that emptying-out has made room for.
And I wanted the viewer to feel that change before I explained any of its individual symbols.
The darkness remains within the paintings.
It hasn't been erased.
It is still part of John's story.
But around it, something else has appeared.
Light.
John's vision began with him falling as though dead.
He has travelled through the terror of losing everything he understood himself to be.
Now, for the first time, the emphasis is no longer upon what he must leave behind.
It is upon what is waiting for him.
And to discover that, we have to open the gates.
Chapter Seven — Twelve Gates to the New Jerusalem
The Gates Open
John describes the New Jerusalem surrounded by a great wall containing twelve gates.
Three face east.
Three north.
Three south.
Three west.
At the gates stand twelve angels, and upon them are the names of the twelve tribes of Israel.
This gave me the architecture for the final part of the sculpture.
I created twelve individual metal gate panels, arranged around the paintings so that John's description becomes something physical.
These aren't images of gates.
They are gates.
And they open.
Twelve Angels
Each gate carries its own angel.
Throughout this artwork, the angels have changed according to their purpose. Some have appeared as powerful sentinels, while the tiny angels carrying the vials moved almost silently through Babylon.
These angels have another role.
They belong to the New Jerusalem.
On each of the twelve panels, the name of an angel is written onto copper at the top, while the name of one of the twelve tribes of Israel is written onto copper at the bottom.
Their positions are deliberate.
The angel belongs above.
The tribe sits at the foundation.
Between them, I placed each angel within a tree-like structure, sitting upon a trunk whose roots extend downwards towards that foundation.
So each panel has its own vertical order.
Angel above.Life growing through the centre.Tribe at the foundation below.
I wanted something organic running through all that metal.
The city may be glorious, but it isn't sterile.
Life is built into its architecture.
Twelve Foundations
John describes the foundations of the New Jerusalem adorned with twelve precious stones:
Jasper. Sapphire. Chalcedony. Emerald. Sardonyx. Sardius. Chrysolite. Beryl. Topaz. Chrysoprase. Jacinth. Amethyst.
I sourced the actual stones and incorporated them physically into the twelve panels.
The stones, the tribes and the roots all reinforce the idea of foundation.
These are the things upon which the city stands.
That was important to me because I wasn't simply decorating the gates with details taken from Revelation. I wanted the structure of each panel to carry the meaning of John's description.
The angel watches from above.
The tree-like form grows between.
The tribe is named below.
And the precious stone becomes physically embedded within that foundation.
After so much imagination and interpretation within the paintings, there was something satisfying about taking materials specifically named in John's vision and simply placing them into the work.
The foundations John described became part of the actual foundations of my New Jerusalem.
Gold Beneath Their Feet
At the base of the panels are golden bricks, representing the streets of the New Jerusalem.
And there is something about that description that I particularly enjoy.
We have only just left Babylon, a world consumed by wealth, status, appetite and possession.
Then John reaches Heaven and finds gold beneath his feet.
The difference is enormous.
In Babylon, wealth had to be possessed.
Here, nobody needs to own the gold.
They walk on it.
Something humanity has assigned enormous value to has become part of the pavement.
For me, that rather wonderfully reduces our earthly obsession with material wealth.
Perhaps the gold was never the important thing.
Perhaps it was what we believed possessing it said about us.
Here, it says nothing.
It is simply part of the city.
The Pearly Gates
Behind the angels are the pearly gates themselves.
I wanted the twelve panels to carry the splendour John describes without becoming simply decorative.
Everything has a reason for being there.
The angels.
The tribes.
The stones.
The roots.
The golden ground.
The gates.
Together they build John's New Jerusalem piece by piece.
But there is an important difference between this city and Babylon.
Babylon seemed to consume everything around her.
The New Jerusalem doesn't need to consume anything.
It doesn't demand worship of its wealth.
It doesn't need to demonstrate its importance.
It simply stands open.
A City That Opens
That physical ability to open the gates is one of the most important parts of the sculpture.
For so much of Revelation, John has been confronted by things.
He watches.
He witnesses.
He is shown.
Here, the viewer gets to do something different.
You can open the gates yourself.
The artwork changes in front of you.
What appeared to be its outer structure moves aside and reveals another layer hidden within.
That action feels particularly appropriate after everything John has travelled through.
The New Jerusalem isn't simply something distant that he is allowed to glimpse.
There is an invitation to go further.
And behind those gates, I placed one of the most important images in the whole biblical journey.
Not another throne.
Not another angel.
Not another symbol of authority.
A tree.
The Tree of Life.
And after everything Revelation has destroyed, perhaps nothing could be more powerful than that.
Chapter Eight — The Tree of Life
Behind the Gates
Open the front gates of the New Jerusalem and something very different is waiting behind them.
The Tree of Life.
By this point, I wanted the artwork to feel as though it could finally breathe.
The Tree spreads across two metal panels, its trunk divided between them, branches reaching outwards and its roots extending beneath. Leaves and fruit fill the metalwork.
After everything John has witnessed, the imagery has become remarkably simple.
A tree.
Life.
Abundance.
No beast to conquer.
No city collapsing.
No one fighting for control.
The battle has quietened.
Twelve Kinds of Fruit
John describes the Tree of Life as bearing twelve kinds of fruit.
I incorporated that abundance into the metalwork.
There is something beautifully generous about this image after everything that has come before it.
Revelation has shown us famine, starvation, destruction and endless consumption.
Babylon could consume and consume and still never have enough.
The Tree of Life is the opposite.
It doesn't hoard.
It doesn't bargain.
It doesn't demand anything in return.
It gives.
That difference became important to me.
Babylon represented an appetite that could never be satisfied.
Here, abundance no longer means excess.
It means there is enough.
The River of Life
Alongside the tree, John describes the pure river of the water of life, clear as crystal.
Water has always carried an emotional meaning for me.
Earlier in the vision, water became the great flood — an enormous outpouring of emotion that had to be released and washed away.
Here, it has changed.
The water doesn't rage.
It doesn't pursue.
It doesn't overwhelm.
It flows.
Clear and life-giving.
I see something very human in that transformation.
Grief doesn't necessarily leave us without emotion. Perhaps we simply learn to carry it differently.
What once overwhelmed us can eventually become something that moves through us.
The flood has become a river.
The Leaves Are for Healing
John tells us that the leaves of the Tree of Life are for the healing of the nations.
After everything those nations have done to one another throughout Revelation, I find that extraordinary.
The answer at the end isn't another punishment.
It isn't another weapon.
It isn't another display of superiority.
It is healing.
That connects deeply with the way this whole journey has developed for me.
What we do to one another, we ultimately do to ourselves.
We are separate, yet we are connected.
Human beings create extraordinary beauty together, but we are also capable of creating terrible suffering.
If we can collectively wound the world, then surely healing must also be something we can give to one another.
And there is only one Tree of Life.
Its leaves aren't divided according to wealth, power or importance.
They are there for the nations.
After everything that has separated humanity, the final image is one of healing.
Back to Eden
The Tree of Life also takes us back to Eden.
The biblical story begins with a garden, and towards the end of Revelation we find ourselves surrounded once again by the imagery of life, water and the tree.
But I don't see this as simply returning to where we started.
Too much has happened for that.
It is a new beginning.
And thinking about that has recently given me one final idea for the sculpture.
The artwork isn't quite finished.
I now have a mind to create an ornately carved wooden plinth, filled with the beauty and imagery of Eden, for the entire piece eventually to stand upon.
This wasn't part of the original design.
It came afterwards, through living with the finished work and thinking more deeply about the journey I had created.
And the more I think about it, the more important the choice of wood becomes.
Wood is organic.
It grew from the Earth.
It lived.
It belongs to the corporeal world.
If I make the plinth, Eden will quite literally become the earthbound foundation beneath the entire vision.
And suddenly the materials themselves tell the story.
Wood for Eden.Paint for John's human journey.Metal for the glory of Heaven.
Earth beneath.
Human experience within.
Light beyond.
The Organic Becomes Something Else
There is another detail I particularly like about that idea.
The Tree of Life itself isn't made from wood.
It is metal.
Its form remains organic — trunk, roots, branches, leaves and fruit — but its substance has changed.
For me, that says something beautiful about rebirth.
Transformation doesn't necessarily mean erasing what came before.
The tree remains recognisably a tree.
But it exists in another form.
That feels very close to the journey I have imagined for John.
He hasn't travelled through death simply to become what he was before.
He has travelled through it to become something else.
The Artwork Finally Stops Fighting
This is where I wanted the final chapters of Revelation to feel completely different from everything that preceded them.
The darkness has done its work.
The destruction has done its work.
There is nothing left here that needs to scream for our attention.
The Tree grows.
The river flows.
The gates stand open.
The leaves heal.
Nothing needs to dominate.
Nothing needs to consume.
Nothing needs to prove how powerful it is.
The artwork finally stops fighting.
And perhaps that quietness is part of the glory.
Because after everything John has travelled through, we arrive at something remarkably simple.
Life.
Alpha and Omega
And so we return to the words that have followed John from the beginning:
Alpha and Omega.
The beginning and the end.
When I first encountered those words in Revelation, they seemed to describe two opposite points.
Having travelled through this artwork, I see them differently.
The end has brought us back towards the beginning.
Eden becomes the New Jerusalem.
Death leads towards rebirth.
The corporeal gives way to something beyond it.
Perhaps Alpha and Omega aren't simply opposite ends of a line.
Perhaps they touch.
And there is one final physical detail of the sculpture that brings that idea together.
When the gates close, the journey closes with them.
The paintings disappear back inside.
The Tree of Life is hidden.
The Kingdom is enclosed.
And across the finished metalwork I placed the words that bring John's extraordinary vision — and my book — full circle:
I am Alpha and Omega.I am the beginning and the end.
The book can finally close.
Epilogue — What Revelation Left With Me
When I began this artwork, I did not think the Book of Revelation was a metaphor for dying.
I had no theory to prove. I simply began reading, questioning, sketching and trying to give John's extraordinary visions form.
The interpretation found me while I was making it.
The deeper I travelled, the less it felt like the destruction of the world and the more it felt like the destruction of the corporeal self — the terrifying process of letting go of everything we have spent a lifetime believing ourselves to be.
That is only my interpretation. I don't claim to know what John meant.
But it changed me.
When the Artwork Became Too Much
Creating Revelation became brutal at times.
I was consumed by it — death, beasts, destruction, Heaven, Hell — pulling John's visions apart and trying to imagine what experiencing them might actually feel like.
At times, I think I went a little mad.
One night I experienced something I have never forgotten. I couldn't move, and there was a figure sitting on my chest with bright, glowing red eyes.
I don't know what happened. Perhaps my mind had carried the imagery into that strange place between sleeping and waking.
But it felt real.
And it terrified me.
Nothing like it has happened to me since.
Looking back, I sometimes feel that I went to hell and back for this piece.
There remains a strange sense that I peeked behind a veil we perhaps aren't meant to look behind until the hour at which we die.
I don't claim that I actually did.
It is simply how the experience felt.
And Somehow, I Came Back Calmer
The strangest thing is what happened afterwards.
For all the fear Revelation caused me, I came out of it with a remarkably peaceful relationship with death.
Years later, that hasn't changed.
I don't know what happens when we die, and I no longer feel that I need to know.
Perhaps death is an ending.
Perhaps it is a transformation.
Perhaps there is something beyond us.
I am comfortable with the uncertainty.
I spent so long staring directly at death that eventually I stopped needing to look away from it.
What I Found in the Light
Even my idea of God changed while making the work.
I kept returning to the sun — ancient, immensely powerful, capable of nurturing and destroying, yet able to touch us with warmth and light.
It became the closest visual language I could find for something I couldn't otherwise imagine.
Perhaps that is why Revelation eventually had to escape from paint and become metal.
After all that darkness, I didn't simply want to paint light.
I wanted the artwork to receive it.
Years later, I also discovered that I wasn't the first person to wonder whether Revelation might describe an inner journey of transformation, rather than simply the destruction of the world.
What fascinated me was that I hadn't gone looking for that interpretation.
The artwork had taken me there on its own.
Finally, I Understood the Gift
At the beginning, I couldn't understand why such a terrifying book offered a blessing to those who read it.
By the end, I think I understood what that meant to me.
Revelation forced me to confront death — and somehow left me less afraid of it.
I didn't find an answer.
I found peace with the question.
Perhaps that was the gift.
My Revelation
This artwork isn't my explanation of the Book of Revelation.
It is my journey through it.
I entered John's vision expecting beasts, blood, judgement and the end of the world.
Instead, I found myself thinking about the end of the self.
Grief.
Release.
Transformation.
Light.
Rebirth.
It terrified me. It consumed me. It changed me.
I began this artwork trying to understand John's Revelation.
By the end, I had experienced a small revelation of my own.
Explore the Full Book of Revelation Artwork
You have reached the end of my journey through the Book of Revelation, but this journal is only one part of the story.
If you would like to step back and see the artwork as a whole, discover how this enormous mixed-media piece was physically created, or return to the beginning of John's vision, you can explore the other pages below.
See the complete artwork and discover the story behind this extraordinary sculptural book, where painting, metal, glass and light come together to give John's Revelation physical form.
Go behind the finished artwork and follow its creation through my original sketches, early paintings, metalwork, stained glass and construction photographs.
Return to the beginning of my interpretation and enter John's vision through the Seven Churches, the throne, the Lamb, the Seven Seals, the trumpets and the extraordinary imagery that begins his journey.
And if you've travelled through all four pages with me, thank you.
You haven't simply looked at the Book of Revelation.
You've read the artwork.
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