At Journey's End

Paul Daniel's upcoming art exhibit has been literally a lifetime in the making. It started when his relationship with God ended and came to fruition when he found God -- and the church -- again.

The Eureka Springs artist -- whose full name is Paul Daniel Van Klaveren -- grew up in St. Louis. He struggled with learning disabilities and "barely finished high school," but that wasn't what started his sojourn in what he calls "the shadows." Daniel came out to his parents when he was 13 and was publicly "outed" by a friend when he was 16. He had always been a devout Christian, very active in his church, but "my minister called me in and told me I was no longer welcome," he recalls.

Having struggled with his sexual orientation from the time he was 8, Daniel says he was already "a person on the edge, who immediately became untethered to the God he believed in. I became a family's worst nightmare. I didn't care the consequences of much of anything.

"I went into a 20-year cycle of addiction. Without a moral foundation to live by, nothing mattered to me."

Homeless on the streets in New Orleans, Daniel became an observer of humanity. By the time someone took a chance on his graphic talent, he had a felony on his record and had spent time in jail.

"The universe just laid out a career for me despite myself."

Daniel was beyond functional, designing web sites and graphics for Fortune 100 companies. But "three years ago, my whole world fell apart," he says. "My addiction had come to a head. I had moved here in hopes that would be the cure. But I couldn't even get out of my basement, and what was a nighttime thing became an all-day thing."

One night, Daniel had a full bottle of speed and, for the first time, thought about ending his own life.

"Drunk as a skunk, I fell on my knees, and I prayed," he remembers. "I did have a dark night of the soul."

Two weeks later, he took his last drink. He's been clean and sober for almost three years.

That still left him estranged from God.

"I had tried Hindi and Wiccan and Buddhism, but none of them resonated in my soul," Daniel says. "I had this moment of clarity where I knew the only way I would ever get back to a faith, the only way I would ever heal the wound inside of me, was in the place I was wounded. I had to go back to church -- and not just any church, but a Methodist church.

"To reclaim my relationship with God, and my standing as a man, and a Christian man, and a Christian gay man, I began studying."

In his conversations with himself; with his artistic mentor, Susan Morrison; with his spiritual mentor; with his God, Daniel began to sketch and write, then to paint, and eventually "Gethsemane and On Through to Golgotha" was born. It is, he says, the story of Jesus' final walk. Morrison advised him that to paint in abstraction, he had to "abstract from something," so for each of the seven large-scale pieces, Daniel started with the Scripture, studied the art already in existence, drew a small drawing, painted a small painting, then took it to its full size, first as a drawing, then as a painting, with more study in between every step.

"So while some paintings only took a week in oil to do, I had been working on them for months, so I knew exactly what I was doing with each stroke," Daniel says. He describes some pieces as "almost tortured.

"One piece, called 'The Wounded,' was all painted with a hammer and a nail," he says. "It's the five stigmatas of Christ in life-size in abstract. 'The Mockery' has over 20,000 knife slashes on it. I did a lot of layering of colors, seven or eight layers, then in almost an etching way, I scraped to a different level to get different color tones.

"Each painting will have the Scripture next to it," Daniel adds. "Each piece not only tells the story of Jesus but also tells my story of addiction and coming out and losing faith and reclaiming faith. It's all about having to walk through something that you don't want to walk through."

NAN What's Up on 10/09/2015