Month: November 2012
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Forms, Interrupted: How Worship Happens
Liturgies are born as spontaneous formalities. They can be recorded later, but not then re-enacted. Each moment in the presence of God is a formal dance whose rules have been forgotten. Did you actually think that the moment before St. John saw an uncountable crowd around the Throne that some angelic ushers directed all to…
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As Close As The Window On Your Left
“Your best work may be closer than you think. You don’t need to go all the way to Africa or Italy to find subject matter worthy of painting. Your own backyard or neighborhood may be fertile ground for superior paintings. Mary Cassatt spent her career painting friends and family, and almost all of Vermeer’s paintings…
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Mary Whyte, on myths of color
“Artists do not see color differently or better than other people…So, you can’t say that you don’t have any color sense or that you don’t know what colors work together…there are no groups of colors that are better than others…and while we are debunking myths here, let me also add that there is no such…
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Mary Whyte: “I tear up about one in four paintings…”
“In real life, I tear up about one out of every four paintings, because I feel the image is composed poorly or the washes have gotten muddy.” – Mary Whyte, p. 83
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John Singer Sargent, on brushes
“John Singer Sargent said the two most common mistakes he saw his students make were using a brush that was too small and too little paint.” – p. 26, Painting Portraits and Figures in Watercolor, Mary Whyte. Watson-Guptill Pub., NY, 2011. In subsequent posts just “Mary Whyte”.
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Gabriel’s Inhalation
Yoga class this evening. This makes my Christian people nervous. No, I don’t believe that some crazed Hindu god owns the lotus pose, any more than I believe Darwin owns the bones of the brachiosaur. In the end, most Christians in the pew are actually among those who, had they lived in Corinth, would have…
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Political Debate is Inherently Corrupt
Political debate is conducted in mutual bad faith. It isn’t just the malicious intent, the goal of utterly destroying the reputation of the opponent. This is slander, and no honorable person can feel right about it. But beyond this obvious and surface malevolence, there is a deeper structural pattern in political speech that tags it…
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Advent, Vermont, 1982. I find a dead man.
After long hours of night driving it took a second for my eyes to jolt my brain about something wrong. A faint light to the left, down in the ravine, but it was gone behind my moving car as soon as I saw it. Stop the car. I braked gently on the wet blacktop, slick…
