When Seeing is Feeling:
The Art of Walter Rane
By David Pliler
Maybe it was the fact that 9/11 had changed how I was viewing everything in my life, but on this day, not too long after those fateful attacks, I found myself staying overnight in the home of a longtime friend. I had wandered downstairs from my guest room and entered the living room that was separated from the rest of the home by a pair of French doors.
As I closed the doors behind
me and turned around, my eye was immediately drawn to
a painting over the fireplace, an image of a person
in agony. His head lay low on his arm and the tension
in his fingers told me that he was experiencing pain
such as had never been borne by any other person. It
was Christ in
“Not My Will, But Thine” (Luke 22:42)
I had seen many images
depicting the Savior in
The next morning I excitedly
discussed with my friend the painting in his living
room and wanted to know more about this artist who could
represent such feeling in his work. The artist was
Walter Rane and my friend had just returned from visiting
him at his home in
That was the beginning of what has been a remarkable journey with an artist who I now consider my friend.
Within a month of that
first encounter with the work of Walter Rane, I found
myself seated next to him in the back of single engine
plane that was now flying over the jungles of Northern
Guatemala and
We were on a quest together
to place ourselves in physical surroundings similar
to what might have been those of the people whose record
we know as the Book of Mormon. Walter’s assignment
was to paint seventeen original images and I was to
write words and lyrics for a musical stage production
based on the life of Mormon and
There are many memories
from our days together in
We had hiked on this particular day along a mountainous trail into a village where adobe and stone huts overlooked a deep valley below. After spending several hours taking pictures and visiting with villagers, we began our walk back to the road where our driver was scheduled to pick us up.
As we came to a level spot near the edge of cliff we found a young boy about age eight, ripping pages out of an old book and making paper airplanes from them for his five-year old sister. With planes in hand they would walk dangerously close to the cliff edge where they gleefully tossed their planes over the side.
Being a father of six children, I pride myself as an expert paper airplane maker. I reached into my backpack and pulled out a yellow notepad and sat down to make these children one of my winning designs.
I soon handed the children two of the finest paper airplanes my fatherly hands had ever made and with eyes as big as saucers they ran to the cliff edge and flung them over. They circled and floated farther than they could have ever imagined and began screaming with joy and pointing as the planes finally came to rest in the tree tops hundreds of feet below.
The gleeful screams of the two youngsters were signals to every child within earshot that something special was occurring. Soon I was surrounded by at least a dozen young villagers circling me and reaching their hands in the air for the next airplane to emerge from my hands. I could hardly keep up the demand and the more planes I made the more delightful faces with up stretched arms surrounded me.
A half hour passed like a minute and I had come to the last sheet of paper in my pad. As I bid my new little friends goodbye I realized that Walter had been absent from this whole scene. He had perched himself on a rock just outside of view of the children and had been taking pictures the whole time. As we resumed our walk to the road below he whispered, “Well, I guess we’ll have that painting of Christ and the children after all.”
“They Saw the Heavens Open”
Editor’s
Note: In September 2004 the
“He Is Not Here”
