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Yesterday, Orchids was featured in the Painters in Modern Times group at RedBubble. I am grateful for the hosts’ support and encouragement!

I’m reading what is probably the best book I’ll read this year, In the Likeness of God, by Dr. Paul Brand and Philip Yancey (though I haven’t finished the book or the year yet).

I’m beginning to think one of the best gifts God gave us (to learn with, anyway) is analogy. Earlier this year, I read Mind Of The Maker, by Dorothy Sayers and learned a lot about God as Creator by looking at human creators/artists. In The Likeness of God is about the human body and what we can learn about the One who created it and also the Body of Christ, the Church.

I’ve never felt I was particularly talented at finding/creating analogies myself, but perhaps it is something I should pursue. I seem to learn best from them. Jesus’ parables are analogies. I wonder how one goes about learning how to work with analogies?

(Actually, I have a short story I tried to write once that was an analogy, but I never finished it. I have more ideas than I have self discipline, and the light bulb that goes on over my head is sometimes a strobe light.)

In any event, I find myself wanting to quote extensively from this book, but I try not to quote too much from any one book here. Right now, I’m only on page 175 (of 552, though it’s not difficult reading), and I’ve got 3 fantastic passages I’d love to share! Since I really should just pick one, I guess I’ll go with the fun simile (i.e., analogy, if you don’t split hairs):

I can understand the complex process of keratin producing rigid fingernails and horses’ hooves. But no amount of training will lessen my astonishment as I watch a single stalk of keratin push its way out of a follicle, grow erect and proud and shockingly unfurl as a peacock feather. What was chemistry becomes beauty. It is as if a brilliant Appalachian quilt springs from a rock, as if a desert suddenly births a gang of cavorting porpoises.

These two quotations are really one, but I stopped and thought about the first part for a while before I read on to see what followed, so I’m going to break up what is really one paragraph in a book:

“When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting, and so get to the bottom of the subject.”

Flowers in a Green Vase
Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

“But then I shall require a still gayer palette than I get here below. I expect orange and vermilion will be the darkest, dullest colors upon it, and beyond them there will be a whole range of wonderful new colours which will delight the celestial eye.”

– from Painting as a Pastime by Winston S. Churchill

(While I was looking for an appropriate photo of one of his paintings, I came across this story, which I found rather interesting.)

So it is that poetry always seems about to burst into song, to break into dance, but the secret of the poet’s mastery is that he refrains from crossing over–the words stay words, they remain language.

Above all, poetry is intended for the ear. It must be felt to be understood, and before it can be felt it must be heard. Poets listen for their poems, and we, as readers, must listen in turn. If we listen hard enough, who knows?–we too may break into dance, perhaps for grief, perhaps for joy.

Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006)

From Poetspeak, Paul B. Janeczko, ed.

Perhaps this is not the time of year to be writing about this, but the other day, a friend of mine was wistfully wondering if there was such a thing as summer camp for adults. I already knew of a few places and events that might qualify, but I thought it’d be fun to take a look around and see what else I could come up with. Here are a few that captured my interest:

Here in Georgia, how about an overnight trip to the culinary studio at Chateau Elan? Not a summer camp but more seasonally appropriate (and practically in my back yard), make a gingerbread house at the Ritz-Carlton Lodge? There’s plenty of peace and quiet to be found at The Monastery of The Holy Spirit.

As far as activities go, Camp Ocean Pines in California has upcoming workshops about building stone walls, stone carving, and quilting. The 2008 calendar is not available yet, but Idyllwild Arts, also in California, offered a tremendous number of workshops and classes in 2007 regarding painting, sculpture, poetry, and more. In Oakland, there’s the Mosaic Summer Camp for Adults, and I personally can’t think of arts in California without thinking of Mendocino.

Moving on to states I visit less often, for perhaps one of the best outdoor/sports/nature experiences, how about rafting through the Grand Canyon? In Michigan, the Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp has summer programs for adults, including for musicians (various instruments and ability levels). That reminds me of one of the camps I’d already heard about, Camp Bluegrass in Texas.

After spending a few minutes with a search engine, I’m pretty sure that, no matter what your fondest memories of summer camp, the activities, the scenery, sporting activities, etc., there’s a facility or institution that will allow you to re-visit that as an adult.

Donald T. Williams on Three Things Evangelical Authors Can Learn from Flannery O’Connor. (Touchstone Magazine, September, 2007, via Pen and Palette.)

My fellow Evangelicals publish reams upon reams of prose. What we have not tended to write is anything recognized as having literary value by the literary world. What makes this failure remarkable is that our Protestant forebears include a number of people who did: Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, George Herbert, John Milton, and John Bunyan, to mention a few.

Equally remarkable is the host of near contemporary conservative Christians—sometimes quite evangelical and even evangelistic, though not “Evangelicals”—who were also important writers. G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor are all recognized as important literary figures even by people who do not share their Christian commitment.

Where is the contemporary American Evangelical who can make such a claim?

Read the rest here.

The Hello Experiment (3:09)
Hiccup 101 (about 2:00)

Writing can be exhilarating work. While you sit quietly scribbling into your notebook, memories and associations rise like bubbles out of the thick mud of your mind. Interesting words pop up, colorful images. It’s a kind of play, and there’s a lot of happiness in it.

From The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets by Ted Kooser.

A lot of our art making is instinctive. What compels us to create is something inside that needs to get out. That is why the quality of our interior life is so important. If we are living righteously and God’s laws are constantly before us, then the imaginations of our heart will reflect that. If we are constantly learning from Scripture, even our unconscious will is being purified, and our dreams will be different from the dreams of the unregenerate person.

From Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts by Steve Turner.

Artists, even those who are Christian, are fallen people observing a fallen world. Because the world is fallen we have to take notice of its brokenness and acknowledge it in our work. Because we ourselves are fallen we have to monitor our perceptions, because we know that they can be distorted by sin. We should hesitate before calling anything we do Christian art because we don’t know how much of our own pride, selfishness or ignorance has polluted our vision.

From Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts by Steve Turner.

Yet it’s not because we can prove that art has benefits that we feel able to incorporate it into our lives. It should be part of the warp and woof of our existence, a part of our enjoyment of God. It is not something separate from life, but something at the heart of life which celebrates the fact that we are creator children of a creator Father.

From Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts by Steve Turner.