Artandicon's Blog

  • 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…

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  • 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…

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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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  • 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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  • ICONS: A Moment of Mystery

    Making Found Object Icons is an art project that evolved out of the Great Macaroni Multimedia Traveling Artandicon Show. In seminary during Art Week our fellow students were horrified we were making sacred images out of edible products, such as macaroni, lentils, peas, and beans. “That’s sacrilegious!” “Jesus is the bread of life, and macaroni…

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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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  • Homage to Van Gogh: Sunflowers

    Flowers please us because of their colors and forms, but also because of their fleeting beauty. While the class was painting, I threw some colors on an old canvas. It is a sketch, since never got to the dark accents of the petals. The paint was wet, so I would have had mud, not two…

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  • Madonna of the Cold Brew

    I’m at my annual conference for my church. I have a display of my art work up. I just sold this found object icon. Icons are not just images of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus, but they represent windows into the holy dimension. They aren’t meant to be realistic renderings of the people…

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  • Crossroads and Callings

    Nine years ago…how time flies when you’re having fun! I was at a crossroads in my life, however, with a preexisting health condition I’d managed to live with successfully through three high stress careers since 1977. Accumulated stress isn’t good for the body, so my seizure disorder began to make itself visible. When my neurologist…

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  • PLANNING TO FAIL MISERABLY

    How to do it as an artist or any other professional. Or lollygagger in the workplace. I personally like #8—Why don’t you ever paint landscapes in normal colors? I get this question all the time. How do we know our greens and blues of today are “normal?” We live in creation after the fall, not…

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