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It can be funny how you stumble across art/artists online. One day as I was on Dribbble I noticed that “Bible” was a common tag for many of my designs on there. I decided to see what else was on Dribbble tagged as “Bible.” And that is how I came across the amazing work of Chris Koelle.
Chris is an illustrator based in South Carolina. Chris has done a ton of cool work, but what caught my eye on Dribbble was the illustrations he did for The History of Redemption. The History of Redemption (HoR) is a book that takes scripture passages from Genesis through Revelation to tell God’s story and Chris did all the illustrations for each scripture passage in the book. The illustrations are absolutely gorgeous. Chris drew on the masterworks of historical artists including Andrei Rublev, Gustav Doré and Klimt among others. Both the book and many of the illustrations are available to purchase (links are at the end of the post).
Chris is also currently working on a fully illustrated graphic novel of the book of Revelation to be released this summer. Not sure about you, but I can’t wait to see that.
Check out a few of Chris’ HoR illustrations below and check the links at the end of the post to find out more about Chris and HoR.
Order the book and prints of Chris’ illustrations on The History of Redemption site
View more of Chris’ work on his portfolio site
Chris and his wife, Annie (also an artist), have an Etsy site to sell their art.
Follow Chris on Twitter
Tags: Bible, Chris Koelle, History of Redemption, illustration
Posted on Tuesday, April 26.
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i’ve been following chris for a long time, but hadn’t seen these HoR illustrations yet.
So wonderful to see that his style is constantly evolving and improving without compromising his own personal fingerprint…
this is definitely some of my favorite work from koelle yet!
Dude. This is great. I love how he uses traditional iconography in a contemporary way like that. Thanks for this post Jim!
Wonderful! And so clever! I also like the echo of old icons.
But I have a theological bone to pick – Jesus did’t leave his bones behind when he got resurrected (and neither will we)! Beautiful art is no excuse for dualist heresy :P
Hi Alison, I completely agree 100% with your statement. However, although this image may be somewhat ambiguous, my thoughts about the resurrection piece were that the skeleton represents not the bones of Jesus, but both physical death as well as “the old man” Paul speaks of, while the lifeless body of Jesus was fully transformed into a new eternal body, free from entropy and decay. So that is why his grave clothes still lay on the slab, collapsed like an empty shell of a cocoon under the weight of itself and the herbs and spices wrapped within the folds, over and above the death and decay that the world has known since the Fall. Again, I can understand how the image could be interpreted different ways, because it appears to read from bottom to top. But I like to think that it reads from top to bottom: the new eternal life of Christ transcends death both physical and spiritual, and his life-giving, death-reversing power permeates even to the grave, to those who were even dead in their sins, and one day, to those dead in Him who will rise first.
In the back of the book there is a section with some of these thoughts written out. Sorry for writing a novel here… :)
Beautiful illustrations. Very haunting yet heart-felt too. Great job, Chris!