Es · En · De

The Sower and the Woman

When my good and old friend Jose Luis Linares, parish priest of La Natividad, asked me to paint a mural for the church, he only chose the subject: the Parable of the Sower. I had full freedom to develop the work. As support I chose a polyptych with five wooden panels framed in a powerful iron structure of 15m x 3m.

Between 1971 and 1973 I travelled all around the world and I mainly focused my interest on the art of stained glass, so I visited the cathedrals of the different countries I passed through, stopping mainly in Spain, France and Germany, and I also got to know something about the technique of glass and leaded glass. When I remember those far away years and when I review the analysis I did on the motifs appearing in the leaded glass windows of the cathedrals, I realized the little prominence of women in their pictorial representations. It was back then when I developed the painting in my mind. It would be a praise to the sower, to the Verb he was in a beginning and that later inhabited in us.

The main figure is the sower spreading the seed, and the other four panels have each one a woman pointing at the falling seed, addressing the Lord in a praise dance.

With these figures painted on wood simulating a stained glass in an Expressionist key, I wanted to pay tribute to catechist women and to women in general who help, and how they help!, to sustain the Church; strong women from whom today, in the 21st century, their necessary task to disseminate our Christian doctrine is publicly acknowledged.



Jorge Rando, Malaga, September 2009