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Pumpkins and Gourds
Sometimes I can work for hours and end up with nothing to show for it. In grammar school, I could use the excuse, “The dog ate my diorama.” Today my primary reason is “The latest iOS upgrade sent my file into the far realms of the cloud and smashed it to smithereens while it was…
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Intuitive Color Wheels
The great and wonderful part of art is exercising imagination and discovering new ways to solve problems. One of my favorite memories in art school was the day our professor came to class with a single red clay brick. Our first thought was this is going to be the most boring drawing class ever, but…
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OAKLAWN FRIDAY ART CLASS
WE’RE BACK!!! The older I get, the faster time flies! When I was a child, summers were long and lazy times. I actually got so bored, by the first of August I’d start to play school. I’d line up my brothers and the neighborhood children and pretend to teach them. It was our way of…
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The Hand Rewrites the Brain
Aristotle once said, “The hand is the tool of tools.” Our hands with their opposable thumbs are an evolutionary miracle. Our opposable thumbs evolved around two million years ago, even before humans began to make tools. Our hands helped us to develop language and procure nourishment, as well as create mysterious images on cave walls…
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Inspired by Autumn Leaves
I returned from a spiritual retreat at Mount Eagle, at which we studied the Enneagram. This is our United Methodist camp site dedicated to holy listening. Of the nine spiritual personality types, I happen to be a Four: The Creative. I’m “The Sensitive, Introspective Type: Expressive, Dramatic, Self-Absorbed, and Temperamental.” Fours are self-aware, sensitive, and…
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Texture Paintings
I don’t do wine painting classes. Since I teach in a United Methodist Church, our Wesleyan temperance tradition holds sway: we serve no alcohol. However, out in the world beyond there are classes where everyone drinks wine and paints the same image. They’re out for fellowship purposes more than for art, but these classes serve…
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Welcome to My World
I’m currently reading Noah Gordon’s The Physician, the story of a Christian masquerading as a Jew so he can study in the ancient medical school in Persia during the Middle Ages. Authors have to describe their characters and the world they inhabit in order for the reader to imagine a realistic place, even if the…
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Mountains and Molehills
I’m one of the world’s worst worriers. I can make a mountain out of a molehill. This doesn’t bode well for living life to the fullest, for none of us know for certain what’s coming up around the corner, much less further down the road. This knowledge paralyses some of us, so that some of…
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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 Morandi
My students in the art class at the church have shown much progress since we began last year. I’m proud of them for sticking in there and taking this journey down a path less traveled by others. Most art education classes begin with the idea of a model and the students should all try to…
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