Gospel of Mark, by Roberts Rurans

Roberts Rurans is a freelance illustrator from Riga, Latvia, who begins his works solely by hand with paint before later applying a digital postproduction process. Influenced at first by the minimalism of modern art, with its exaggerations of form, Rurans has since delved into the past to find inspiration in the intricacy and meaning of medieval art. His stylized, bright work features clean, clear lines and large swatches of color. Within his spare forms are process lines and color variations, imperfections that signal both his painstaking process and his willingness to give his work a sense of dynamic life, grounded as it is in the physicality of painting.

Rurans’s illustrations can be found in fields as diverse as health care, dining, children’s literature, and religion. This piece, Gospel of Mark, is part of a series of images of each Gospel created for the Latvian Bible Society.  Rurans undertakes new explorations while offering a playful take on a serious topic, all without ever reducing an image to mere trope. His work creates a dynamic that, even with a still image like this one, contains motion, Spirit, and life.