STEVE DELANEY: In the western part of Massachusetts, there's a landscape that suggests order and a sense of tranquility. It's the kind of setting that attracts artists and artisans, who cluster here not so much for the inspiration as for the absence of distractions.Mr. HAROLD McGRATH: You're just in time to help me.
Mr. BARRY MOSER: What happened?
Mr. McGRATH: This is ridiculous.
DELANEY: Harold McGrath is such an artisan. He is trying to get a new print out of an old press. But in the manner of mules and machinery, it has gone balky. Barry Moser has a direct interest in helping. It's his work that's stuck in the press.
Mr. McGRATH: Okay, we're getting there. Wait a minute.
DELANEY: Finally, the two old friends apply the mule rule and use a 2 x 4 to move the machine.
Mr. McGRATH: One more. One ...
DELANEY: Barry Moser is illustrating the Bible, an undertaking so daunting that scholars say no one has attempted it from Genesis to Revelations since the artist Gustave Dore did it in 1865, and even he left out most of the books of poetry.Mr. MOSER: Nice coverage in the face. Everything is -- everything is fine, as far as I'm concerned. No, I think this is fine. So let me -- I'll just take this with me.
DELANEY: Barry Moser's studio is airy and bright, but his images, the pieces of a career-capping work in progress, are dark: Job in the depths of his afflictions, Judgment Day. The engravings illustrating the struggle of the spirit sometimes comfort, sometimes disturb, sometimes in unfamiliar ways.Mr. MOSER: I am not doing this for the saved. I am hoping to bring this text to an entirely new audience, that is, an audience that has never read it, an audience who thinks that it's dull and boring and uninteresting. I'm hoping that people, when they open this Bible up, will see themselves.
DELANEY: But how to attract and hold the reader? Must everything biblical be pure? Would a nude figure transmit a more powerful message? Moser's search for answers to these creative questions has led him to craft unorthodox images. His desire is to challenge the viewer's vision of faith.
Mr. MOSER: Usually, my figures are seen in isolation. Samson when he's about to tear down that temple -- I will see him as an individual, alone. And the isolation of the figure is probably the overarching theme, and that theme is that all of us deal with God, deal with our concept of God as individuals.
Mr. MOSER: I was a boy preacher, actually. I got my license in the Methodist Church when I was 19 years old. Today it's a scary thing for me to think about because here I was, a 19-year-old know-it-all, arrogant. I embraced fundamentalism wholeheartedly. And then, through a series of events, I became very disenchanted, not with my idea of God, but I became very disenchanted with the institution within which I was working.
Mr. MOSER: It's the moment that I am dreading, the moment of finishing it. I don't know that I'll ever finish it. I think today that I have begun something that will end only when I die.
