Artandicon's Blog

  • Pomegranates and New Life

    Pomegranates are one of those seasonal fruits which show up at my grocery store along with tangerines and other Florida citrus fruits. When I was young, these were rare and extraordinary foods, unlike today, when we have fresh fruits from all corners of the world all year long. The only difference is the cost: if…

    artandicon

  • STARS AND THE WINTER SOLSTICE

    This is a time of year when we look to the night sky for a sign. It’s not for nothing the depths of darkness are the beginnings of hope and our desire for the return of the healing light. People around the world and over the generations of time have celebrations of feasting, family reunions,…

    artandicon

  • A Map of a Changing World View

    When our world is changing “faster than we can say Jack Rabbit,” sometimes life can get overwhelming. My dad often used this quaint phrase when he wanted something in a hot minute, like a bowl of ice cream just before bedtime. Or when he wanted us kids to get a move on and not dilly…

    artandicon

  • Autumn Leaf Prints

    As the days grow shorter, the pile of leaves grows larger. This is Einstein’s equation for autumn. I know “Energy equals Mass times the speed of Light squared” isn’t really congruent with all those bags of leaves accumulating on the edge of the streets of the front yards in your neighborhood. It just seems that…

    artandicon

  • Rabbit! Rabbit! Welcome to December!

    “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” my daddy was fond of saying. We often long for the “way things used to be,” as if the Golden Age of the past was the best of all times. Yet, that past often exists only in our memories, but not in the lived reality…

    artandicon

  • Dreams of Trees and Butterflies

    The saying is true: “If nothing ever changed, there’d be no butterflies.” Yet how hard do we humans hold to the past, even if we need to move on into the future? As an artist, I’ve always been caught between my desire to honor the traditions of the past, but also to move into the…

    artandicon

  • KISS Principle and The Six Degrees of Hydrangeas

    Keeping it simple is a good motto for most all of life. Don’t sweat the small stuff, until you get the big things done.

    artandicon

  • The Autumn Colors

    Robert Frost, in his poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” speaks to the transitory nature of fall colors: Nature’s first green is gold,Her hardest hue to hold.Her early leaf’s a flower;But only so an hour.Then leaf subsides to leaf.So Eden sank to grief,So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. When I was in…

    artandicon

  • Portraits in the Style of the Modern Masters

    “ Good artists copy, great artists steal,” Pablo Picasso once said. If we’re going to learn art, we should learn from the masters, and not from ordinary purveyors of paint. In art school, we often copied the old master paintings and drawings to learn their techniques and develop those traditional styles of execution so we…

    artandicon

  • Creativity Challenge

    I was an art major before I attended seminary at Perkins, where I had the great privilege to take Philosophy from Dr. Billy Abraham. Of course this privilege was extended to me because I failed my one and only philosophy class in undergraduate school. I had taken it pass fail, but hit a terrible depression…

    artandicon