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Cloud Illusions and Creativity
I was watching the Super Bowl on Sunday. Two evenly matched teams kept the score tight until the last quarter, when an interception by Kansas City put the game into the hands of Patrick Mahomes. This young quarterback proceeded to shred the 49ers with 21 unanswered points for a comeback win. If San Francisco came…
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Time and Art March Along
Time and the tide waits for no one, we’re certain of this, for we can no more wrestle the waters of the sea to keep the waves from their constant flowing in and out than we can stop the minutes and seconds from slipping into the past, where they’ll be only a memory for a…
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Homage to Van Gogh’s Sun Flowers
The heat of summer hasn’t yet passed, even though we’re past “seasonal summer” and are almost at “meteorological fall.” Yes, the autumnal Equinox is almost upon us, arriving on September 23, at 2:50 am CDT. Even though the term means “equal night,” the day is longer than 12 hours on an equinox because Earth’s atmosphere…
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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…
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Reflections of God
I carry my phone when I walk, so I always have a camera for the scenes of beauty which catch my eye. Since light is ephemeral and these moments are fleeting, catching them as they occur is important. When I come home, I often photoshop the image on my computer or in Instagram to get…
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Now For Something Completely Different
If we do the same thing over and over again, we’ll get the same results. Most of us will take the same road to our favorite restaurant, choose the same menu items, and call it a night at about the same hour. We are that predictable. A certain structure in our lives is necessary to…
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Perfection in Life and Art
The life of one who pursues Art and Faith has many overlapping points. One of these is the search for perfection. The French artist Marcel Duchamp quit painting to play chess, saying he couldn’t create a greater work. However, he was still working on one last piece in secret in his studio. Artists are driven…
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Apples and Starving Artists
Famous artists throughout the ages have chosen apples for their still life paintings. Apples are known for sitting still, they have a long shelf life, and they work for cheap. Moreover, when the painting is done, they make an excellent pie. We can’t do this with our human models, since this involves non ethical principles…
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Dinosaurs and X-acto Knives
I must be the last dinosaur on the earth who still hand cuts with an X-acto knife and a mat knife. Fair warning—this is an old codger rant of sorts. I still have the knife I used in art school. It’s the same one that took a slice off my left index finger when I…