Artandicon's Blog

  • The Creating God

    In the dead heat of summer, our gardens aren’t putting forth the fruit of our planting. Maybe the animals of our neighborhood have made their too frequent nightly visitations, so our harvest is skimpy. We can forget God is a both a creating god and a recreating god as well. The first words of the…

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  • 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.

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  • Memories and Forgiveness

    Does God, who knows all things, also have a memory, or can God choose to forget? I often wonder about such ideas, for when we ordinary folk experience horrific traumas, we often say, “This is going to be with me for the rest of my life. I’ll never get over it.” In some cases this…

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  • Rabbit! Rabbit! Welcome to April

    I love the springtime, for all the colors of green are in abundance. I live on the lake on a property originally developed to be a high rise hotel and casino, until the city derailed that plan. Then it became vacation condos and retirement homes. Since it’s located on a large plot of timbered land,…

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  • Energies of the Labyrinth

    The word labyrinth comes from the Greek labyrinthos and describes any maze-like structure with a single path through it. It’s different from an actual maze, which may have multiple paths intricately linked. Etymologically the word is linked to the Minoan labrys or ‘double axe’, which is the symbol of the Minoan mother goddess of Crete.…

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  • Rabbit! Rabbit!

    Welcome to September 2020. Not too many days ago I felt the seasons change. This is an imperceptible feeling for most people, but for artists, and perhaps also for those who make their living off the land, this transition from summer to autumn was important. The autumnal equinox won’t be until September 22, at 8:30…

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  • Strawberry Mindfulness

    I read a wonderful journal, Psychiatric Times, which has a free subscription online. I began reading it because it helped me to understand the diseases of the mind, which cause people to be at dis-ease in their lives and to cause dis-ease in whatever community in which they belonged. In today’s modern world, our first…

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  • 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…

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  • 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…

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  • PRAYER: Listening to an Icon Most of us separate our lives into doing and being: we are creatures of comfort at times, and then we expend energy doing chores or work at different times. We live bifurcated lives, even if we’ve heard the admonition to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:16), we work without prayer…

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