New Paintings (lines and oils)
Against all odds I wanted to give the world an undeniable gift of some kind. Eventually, as you might have guessed, I had the audacity to begin thinking of myself as an artist. And tangled up in this longing to discover my true place of birth was a ragged prayer I still sometimes toss at the sky. God, I pray, by some miracle, make my life a work of art. What does it look like and feel like to live artfully? I think to myself that I could begin the work of answering this question in ways that might actually be of use to someone if I weren’t drunk on the sky. I have a problem with these clouds that loom and sleigh across the the basking blue floor of heaven: I get lost in that white-as-bone, icy fluff. It sometimes feels as if the sky, maybe more than anything else, will ultimately break my heart.
-Linford Detweiler (Over the Rhine)
Like Linford, I’ve worked to develop the audacity needed to call myself an artist. But, I’m still not able to put into words what living artfully means. I know that, for me, it has a lot to do with swallowing whole those unexpected encounters with beauty with the hunger of a five-year-old. The desire to binge on sweets fully intact.
Oh, and I paint. You can check out my website, plus I’ll be featuring a couple favorites here on my blog. This one, yellow/red, is part of my new “oils series” (there’s a story behind this painting, but for another time):
