Too Much Thinking

I can’t think of a single thing that I encounter that isn’t an iceberg.

What my mind already knows about everything in my world is like the iceberg’s visible tip. Let’s say, my bathroom rug, for instance. I see it every day. I know it well. It is green, a rectangle, feels like carpet, and although thin, is able to hold a massive amount of water for weeks on end, so it is always annoyingly sodden. But what I know about this object is limited to my experience with it. I know nothing of its background; like, what materials was it manufactured out of that make it retain water for so long? Where was it even manufactured? How did they make it green? Who came up with this inefficient design for a bath rug? Who even came up with the idea of bath rugs in the first place?
Okay, so maybe this is a silly example. But almost everything in existence has a part to it that we just don’t know about - the gargantuan base of the iceberg that is submerged underwater, invisible to our above-the-surface view. Most of the time, what we see of the iceberg doesn’t even give us an idea of what the thing looks like in its entirety. We often have no idea how much there really is to it.
Think of how this applies to a person. What we know about most people we encounter in life is only the tip of an massive iceberg. We can’t even begin to see the parts that make up who they are unless we dive beneath the surface.
Think of how this applies to everything we know about God. I’m convinced that what i’ve seen of Him is proportionate to about a millimeter of ice sticking out above the water. Underneath is a mass that plunges hundreds of miles down into the depths of the ocean, so deep that we aren’t even humanly capable of reaching the whole thing.


When it comes to making art, I’ve heard it said that illustrators and graphic designers give answers, but painters ask questions. I never thought that this applied to me - I felt like my images presented resolved thoughts. But as I look around the room, thinking of how everything I see is like an iceberg, I realize that I actually do have an inquisitive nature. I question. I will not settle for seeing only the tip of the iceberg. I want to spring from my dry, complacent diving board, and with a flip and a spin, plunge into the depths of the midnight ocean. I want to perceive deeply.

Maybe I am a painter after all.

old, yet applicable

Creation

When I think of God as "Creator of the earth", I think of the God I felt one night while sitting on the surface of a calm ocean.
It's heart-beat pulsed, pushing up rhythmic hills of water that just barely rocked my board, submerged in the gulf beneath me. I stared out at the space around me - I dare not call it sky, because it touched my skin. It was saturated with orange. Yellow was there too, but it wasn't yellow - it was a warm gold light that must have slipped out of heaven on accident. And I, bobbing in the warm saltwater, was the sole witness of God's heaven spilling out onto earth that evening.


My best friend actually took this when I was coming back to shore that night. Can't do justice, but still:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/babygirrrl/747976804/


"Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb,

when I made the clouds its garment
and wrapped it in thick darkness,

when I fixed limits for it
and set its doors and bars in place,

when I said, 'This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt'?

Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
or walked in the recesses of the deep?

Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?
Tell me, if you know all this.

What is the way to the abode of light?
And where does darkness reside?

Can you take them to their places?
Do you know the paths to their dwellings?

-Job 38:8-11, 16, 18 - 20

From a small sketchbook

...I think that as we become comfortable with everything technological, we have less concern for what goes on on earth. I have a strange feeling that, in 70 years, if you ask an adult what a lily looks like, they won’t have the faintest idea.

Does our education system instill a mind-frame in us that says you must have only one path in life? I like a lot of things. I can do a lot of things. I can be an artist throughout all of them.

A good painting or a bad painting may be the same painting, seen by different people. To me, my paintings are good.

“Being a ‘dyed in the wool’ painter happens when the two things that seem seperate - like the color and wool - have actually become one.” -Timothy App

Painting can be whatever you want it to be.

Jennifer Stockholder Lecture (Paraphrased quotes):
-Art is a way of making sense of things
-A big piece of us in unavailable to us through words.
-Sometimes, being expressive is seen as a joke - you have to be intellectual, analytical, intelligent. Expressiveness and the subconscious are often seen as stupid.
-Art is most exciting when it challenges ways of thinking and seeing

Impossible

This past Sunday at the Light we sang a song written for a city in Ireland that was in the middle of a revolution (which I completely forgot all the details about. oops). Here's the chorus:

"Greater things are yet to come
Greater things are still to be done
in this city."

This made me think of "My Impossible Prayer": for God to take away the drug and gang violence in Baltimore. Hey, even the tiniest bit of faith can move a mountain. Sounds impossible, but I believe that God can seriously do anything, and I believe that He can use me and others to do it! (Um, Community Arts anyone?)

This leads me to a very relevant prayer by a guy in the old testament named Habakkuk:

Habakkuk's Complaint

How long, O LORD, must I call for help,
but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, "Violence!"
but you do not save?

Why do you make me look at injustice?
Why do you tolerate wrong?
Destruction and violence are before me;
there is strife, and conflict abounds.

Therefore the law is paralyzed,
and justice never prevails.
The wicked hem in the righteous,
so that justice is perverted.

The Lord 's Answer

"Look at the nations and watch—
and be utterly amazed.
For I am going to do something in your days
that you would not believe,
even if you were told.

Jesus was so not "conservative"

Lyrics to a song Pastor Bill played in church the other week, reminding us who God loves, who we should love, and who we should be reaching out to:

"Politicians, morticians, Philistines, homophobes

Skinheads, Dead heads, tax evaders, street kids

Alcoholics, workaholics, wise guys, dim wits

Blue collars, white collars, war mongers, peace nicks



Breathe deep

Breathe deep the Breath of God

Breathe deep

Breathe deep the Breath of God



Suicidals, rock idols, shut-ins, drop outs

Friendless, homeless, penniless and depressed

Presidents, residents, foreigners and aliens

Dissidents, feminists, xenophobes and chauvinists



Evolutionists, creationists, perverts, slum lords

Dead-beats, athletes, Protestants and Catholics

Housewives, neophytes, pro-choice, pro-life

Misogynists, monogamists, philanthropists, blacks and whites



Police, obese, lawyers, and government

Sex offenders, tax collectors, war vets, rejects

Atheists, Scientists, racists, sadists

Photographers, biographers, artists, pornographers



Gays and lesbians, demagogues and thespians

The disabled, preachers, doctors and teachers

Meat eaters, wife beaters, judges and juries

Long hair, no hair, everybody everywhere!"

I love O'Keffe's words..

“A flower is relatively small. Everyone has many associations with a flower - the idea of flowers. You put out your hand to touch the flower - lean forward to smell it - maybe touch it with your lips without thinking - or give it to someone to please them. Still - in a way - nobody sees a flower - really - it is so small - we haven’t the time - and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small.
“So I said to myself - I’ll paint what I see - what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it - I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.
“Well - I made you take time to look at what I saw and then you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don’t.
“Then when I paint a red hill, because a red hill has no particular association for like the flower has, you say it is too bad that I don’t always paint flowers. A flower touches almost everyone’s heart. A red hill doesn’t touch everyone’s heart as it touches mine and I suppose there is no reason why it should. The red hill is a piece of the badlands where even the grass is gone. Badlands roll away outside my door - hill after hill - red hills of apparently the same sort of earth that you mix with oil to make paint. All the earth colors of the painter’s palette are out there in the many miles of badlands. The light Naples yellow through the ochres - orange and red and purple earth - even the soft earth greens. You have no associations with those hills - our waste land - I think our most beautiful country. You must not have seen it, so you want me always to paint flowers...”

-Georgia O’Keeffe
Exhibition catalogue, An American Place, 1939