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Category: Bible

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Learning new ways to see

More Work than They Bargained For (Isaac H. Evans), Carol L. Douglas
Yesterday, my friend and erstwhile student took his wife and me out to breakfast. On the way home, I asked them to swing by the North End Shipyard so I could ground myself in my next boat painting. He and I walked around the Jacob Pikeconsidering the angles from which I could paint it. Since it’s in the cradle on a marine railway, those angles are limited to where there’s actual earth on which to stand.  
His wife kept saying, “Over here, guys.” We politely ignored her; after all, she’s not a painter.
He took a call.  I walked back over to where she was standing. “See?” she asked. And I did, and how. Artists are not the only people with eyes.
Packing Oakum (Isaac H. Evans), Carol L. Douglas
I am reading the Bible with a friend who is a newer Christian. We were talking about how the Bible ignores the race questions that seem to consume us today. I referred to that soaring passage that reads, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28)
The distinction between Jew and Greek wasn’t a race thing, it was a culture thing, I said.
“Yeah,” she answered. “One god versus many gods.”
Bam! It wasn’t what I’d meant; it was far more insightful than that. It was exactly how a first-century Jew would have seen the divide.
Ready to Launch (Mercantile), Carol L. Douglas
I get lots of offers for ways to promote myself. I usually just delete them without opening. I spent this past week with Bobbi Heath and listened as she sorted through the same detritus. She pokes her head into every rabbit hole and asks herself what she might be able to do with this new tool. Before Bobbi was an artist, she had a very successful career as a software project manager. There’s a lot to learn from her.
Each time we are challenged by a new idea, we face a choice. We can ignore it, get mad, or consider it. These moments are so common that we often miss them completely. We’re completely wrapped up in our own thoughts.
But each human being is the sum of his or her experiences, education, and character, which makes the potential for new thinking almost limitless. Creativity is about synthesizing existing ideas into new patterns. It’s hard for me to shut up sometimes, but when I choose to listen instead of talk, I learn a great deal.

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Merry Christmas!

Winter Landscape, 1811, Caspar David Friedrich
Our celebration of Christmas is heavily Germanic in origin, marrying the gift-giving and merrymaking of Saturnalia with Yule logs, Christmas trees, greenery, mistletoe and other northern European traditions.
Fir Trees in the Snow, 1828, Caspar David Friedrich
Caspar David Friedrich seems like a fitting painter for today. Born in the last years of the Enlightenment, he was a profound romantic, a German landscape painter who saw allegory and symbolism in everything. He was anti-classical and moody—in short the polar opposite of the Age of Reason. Yet if you look at his superb drafting and paint handling, you see that he was a technician of great skill.
Passage Grave in the Snow, 1808, Caspar David Friedrich
A strict adherence to rationalism shortchanges the human capacity for thought. We have blinding intuition, we have emotional response, and we have gut reactions. To deny any of these processes is crippling. A strictly linear thinker can’t make the leaps of creativity necessary to be inventive. A strictly intuitive thinker hasn’t got enough grounding in reality to be productive. A strictly emotional thinker is, often, just plain crazy.
Christmas itself commemorates something profoundly non-rational: the idea that God would come down to share our suffering, and lift the price of sin from our shoulders.
Early Snow, undated, Caspar David Friedrich
But critics of Christianity make a mistake in thinking that it is anti-rational. From the initial question of whether the universe had a cause, to the faith’s remarkable endurance, to the stunning internal logic within its books, the Bible is a complex and coherent document. I’ve just been reading the Books of Chronicles. On the one hand, they are the historical record of a series of kings. On the other hand, they set the stage for a great restoration that augurs the concept of grace. There are too many examples of this to even list.  If the Bible was the work of obscure sheep-wranglers from a two-bit kingdom in the Middle East, as its critics say, it represents a literary accomplishment with no parallel in history.
Trees in the Snow, 1828, Caspar David Friedrich
 Five people can read the Bible, and one of them will be struck dumb by it, and the other four will think, well, they can cross that off their list. For that one person, the Word becomes the organizing principle of his life, and he admits a relationship to the Living God that will change him forever.
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!