This was found on the back of one of the kids projects. It is a typical kid drawing of a tree. To western eyes it looks strange but it is really after a certain tree in Romania which is cut back each year to the trunk for fire wood. The result is a thick trunk with a little forest of 1-2 year growth on top like a Chia Pet. I enjoy the beauty, simplicity and economy of expression kids can achieve without realizing it. This kid took a marker and a pen and made a beautiful tree in a couple swooping strokes like an old Japanese painter.

I was carrying my little sketchbook and was asked by a few kids if they could draw. I told them to draw me and this is what I got. The middle one was one of our educators. More kids drawings to come.

The Role of the Artist:
Physical Play/Contemplation, Theological Insight, and Integration

The roles of the artist must deal with attentive observation. Apprehension of reality through time and work on physical objects in the physical world. It’s modes range from play and quiet contemplation. Play, the joyful discovery and interaction with the wonders of a miraculous creation, is one end of the same attentive observation, and quiet contemplation is the other. In its quiet contemplative mode it shares at its core, a joyful pilgrimage in the vast wonders of the physical universe. Joy is inherent as one is surprised by the beauty in every corner of the physical universe, one must only look long enough. This is true even in the most God forsaken places on earth. Without play and contemplation and art is always shallow, cliché, or an ugly slave and object of some totalitarian alien domain.

The next role is to be a participant in a similar playful and joyful journey into the universe through living theology, the present experience of the church as it is rooted in the historical and living Church. Written theology often opens doors to more fully experiencing God in the church, but theology in this sense is at its core a continuous journey, which is always renouncing false images of God and of the universe, grasping for the true God who reveals himself, but is always bigger than our comprehension.

The third role of the artist is the integration of the first two ever deepening discoveries (joyful explorations of material world through the senses and the joyful exploration of God through intuition and experience of living theology of the church. As these parts remain separate then the artist has contributed little to his communities, local and world. His power, responsibility to himself, to God, and to the world is to offer a synthesized, integrated image of the universe which seamlessly and organically (experiences the whole) ‘images’ a universe without separations, spiritual and physical, body and soul, idea and concrete reality, word and flesh. In the end the artist has done us a service when he has offered back to us the vision of the new heaven and earth where there is no division, separation, or warring parts. All is unified in the apocalyptic Christ Triumphant.

Without playful discovery of the material world the artists’ universe remains disconnected parts offering little hope of their ultimate reconciliation.

Without joyful pilgrimage into living theology, prayer and experience of God in the church, ones art remains abstract and offers little hope that it can ever touch the physical degradation of the world, the poor, or the earth.

Without integration, our play and contemplation remain undeveloped seedlings unable to provide shade or greater nourishment for the world. Though all artistic play, contemplation, and theological study have worth in itself it is their integration that needs to be developed if our work is to outlive us.

Here are two of four very similar panels. They are somewhere around six feet tall on unstreatched canvas. I am wondering if I shouldn't try working this way on handmade paper.

Sticking paintbrushes in the hands of 15 kids full of energy and too much desk time was the best idea I have had for a while. I took this large card stock page 70x100cm and filled it with blind contours of garden, flowers, plants,etc. Then I chopped it up in 10x10cm pieces, gave each of the kids paints and told them to paint them as they liked. When it was put back together all the kids stuck out their chests and pat ed each other on the back with pride in their colorful garden. It hangs now in the class room where they do their hours of homework a day. Many of them first generation readers, they are my heroes.

the sunflower has grown
old leaves warped
bloated, head cast down
cloves that held up wide

yellow masses now thorns
towards the ground
crowning the massive head
what pride what arrogance

high, bright, bigger than all
flowers plants wide veins
pumping water to the
shower head spraying yellow

your seeds are bird eaten
your petals ground under
with the grand show over
you bow deep with closed eyes

you turned the sun to seed
who shall find you guilty now
of ego pride and greed
you poured out all you could gather

your power not wasted in you
but carries life through winter
into the next year, the next life
another day for extending us into the sun”

-5 September 2006-

Through the summer and into the fall I have been doing blind contours with pen on handmade paper of the sunflower outside the studio window. This one includes a couple birds that were picking away at leftover seeds.