Artandicon's Blog

  • 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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  • Hope and Suffering

    “You totally (should) become his nature, deny his being apart from you; you should be he himself, not Christians, but Christ, otherwise you will be no use to the coming god.” —C. G. Jung, The Red Book, p. 137. “No one can be spared the way of Christ, since this way leads to what is…

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  • Rabbit! Rabbit!

    Welcome to February! “The most serious charge, which can be brought against New England, is not Puritanism, but February,” said Joseph Wood Krutch, a 20th century American critic and naturalist. If he were alive today, he’d charge this February with felonies! Winter has come with an exceptional vengeance in some parts of the country, causing…

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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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  • 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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  • 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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  • Icon of Christ the Redeemer

    My latest icon of the face of Christ is based on the Napkin of Christ or The Image Not Made by Human Hands. The tradition tells us the Lord washed his face on a cloth and the image of his face transferred directly to it. King Abgar took the image bearing cloth to Edessa and…

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  • Day of the Dead Altars

    Some things I take for granted, since I had the great privilege of knowing my great grandmother in her last years. I knew all but one of my grandparents, since my daddy’s father died when I was only a year old. Even my daughter knew both her Nana and all four of her grandparents. Growing…

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  • Ripples in the Water

    After all is said and done, the taste of victory will not be sweet for the winning side. They will be eating a roast beast cooked to ashes. It will feed them, but it won’t nourish them for the long haul. The agony of this latest defeat for the survivors, who came out of hiding…

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