Artandicon's Blog

  • RABBIT! RABBIT!

    Welcome to September 2019 My childhood memories of endless summers overlap with those of my first days at school, while I try to repress my more recent adult memories of an early September Monday when all I wanted to do was drink copious amounts of coffee and deal with the simple problem of a church…

    artandicon

  • LESSONS FROM A MASTER

    “Only when he no longer knows what he is doing, does the painter do good things.” Edgar Degas, the French artist known for his ballerina paintings, is a good teacher from whom to learn. A true artist learns something new every day and isn’t afraid of failure. Failure is just another word for discovering what…

    artandicon

  • The Image of God

    When I was a child, my mother’s friends were sure I was the spitting image of little Martha. Likewise, my daddy’s friends thought I was a chip off the old block of Stew-boy. I suppose I had enough of the parental DNA to be claimed by both sides of the family, as long as I…

    artandicon

  • Work in Progress

    This is a Landscape from Garvan Woodland Gardens, a work in progress, on a recycled woven canvas. I didn’t like the other two paintings I destroyed to make this canvas, and the work I put on the intermediate stage also didn’t satisfy me long term. The great joy about art is we can destroy our…

    artandicon

  • All You Need is Love

    Our annual conference began today here in Arkansas. We United Methodists have a rich tradition from our founder John Wesley, who was a brand plucked from a burning parsonage back in 18th century England. While the Church of England thought him something of a firebrand and an upstart, he only wanted to rekindle the flame…

    artandicon

  • 2,244,80,700—I’m a Billionaire

    Today I’ve been alive for a grand total of 25,976 days. That’s a big number for an old gal. Of course, if I really wanted to feel old, I could count all the minutes I’ve been alive—just think about being 37,406,345 minutes old! I’m a millionaire in minutes. Don’t multiply that number by 60 to…

    artandicon

  • The Inspired Church

    My newest painting is from a photo I took of a church in downtown Hot Springs on one cloudy spring day. It wasn’t much to look at as a photo, but I was called to stop and snap its image at that moment. I learned long ago in ministry to listen to those promptings of…

    artandicon

  • Rabbit! Rabbit!

    Welcome to April! Although we celebrated the vernal equinox on the 20th last month, the church counts March 21 as the equinox date in the ecclesiastical calendar, rather than the actual date, which can vary between March 19-21. This is important because the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE established Easter would be held on…

    artandicon

  • Spring Flowers

    How many colors exist in creation? Many more than we can buy in a tube at the art supply store and even more than the number of paint chips at our local building supply store. Recently I gave my adult art class an assignment to use their primary colors and white only to mix new…

    artandicon

  • Hope and Suffering

    “You totally (should) become his nature, deny his being apart from you; you should be he himself, not Christians, but Christ, otherwise you will be no use to the coming god.” —C. G. Jung, The Red Book, p. 137. “No one can be spared the way of Christ, since this way leads to what is…

    artandicon