A Large Landscape

I've been working on a large landscape painting for the last week.  Here it is with some of its colleagues at the studio wall.  I'm thinking it's almost done.  36 x 48 inches, oil on canvas.

The Eternal Barn and the Ice Canal

As you can see, I did spend time doing the barn again.  It looks like a house, except it has no glass in the windows, and two broken garage doors on the hidden side.  You can see right through this barn.

Then I moved back to the frozen canal, where the sun was also shining.

I would like to return to Christian Wiman one more time.  In the last paragraph to the article I mentioned earlier he writes: "Art--including our own, perhaps, especially our own--should help us to integrate existence rather than mark it off.  We should learn to see our lives as one time rather than a series of separate times...Our most transfiguring spiritual experiences are merely the experiences we were trying to have all our lives, which is to say that we are not so much transfigured as completed."

Grapefruit, Art and Christianity

I ate this grapefruit today before painting it.  It's not the same one seen previously.  On a heavier note,  I discovered a profound writer on art and Christianity.  The poet Christian Wiman, in an essay entitled "Notes on Poetry and Religion" from Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet, says the following just in the first paragraph:

Art is like Christianity in this way: at its greatest, it can give you access to the deepest suffering you imagine--not necessarily dramatic suffering, not necessarily physical suffering, but the suffering that is in your nature, the suffering of which you must be conscious to fulfill your nature--and at the same time provide a peace that is equal to that suffering.  The peace is not in place of the sorrow; the sorrow does not go away.  But there is a moment of counterbalance between them that is both absolute tension and absolute stillness.  The tension is time.  The stillness is eternity.  With art, this peace is passing and always inadequate.  But there are times when the very splendid insufficiency of art--its "sumptuous Destitution --/ Without a Name," in Dickinson's phrase--can point a person toward the peace that passeth understanding...

Paradox

Betty Edwards writes in From Drawing on the Artist Within:
"...drawing and creativity are both replete with paradox...One always feels that the next drawing will reveal what one searches for, and the next, and the next. Another paradox is that by looking outward and seeing the world around you in the artist's mode of seeing, you gain insight into yourself. Conversely, by looking inward to find the artist within, you gain insight into the world outside yourself."

My dictionary defines the word paradox as "A seemingly contradictory statement that may nonetheless be true". It strikes me that a drawing or painting is a natural paradox.

From my notes written two years ago while reading Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: "The left brain side denies God and sees the contradictions that have no resolution. The right brain side desires God, and sees him as the only possibility acceptable and ignores the contradictions, or even accepts them as necessary!
When we stare at something for a long time, like a sign with the word STOP or some other word, eventually the word becomes strange. We see the letters and their shapes, and the word loses its meaning, and becomes a thing, no longer a sign pointing to something else. That strange phenomenom I can now explain as the R-mode taking over from the L-mode."

Whether the R-mode and L-mode exist or not doesn't matter so much, as being able to accept life with contradictions. Being an artist means living with and creating paradox.