Three Reminders
Conformity to a religion and adherence to its dictates neither indicates nor proves an authentic, healthy, loving relationship with God or with other humans (sometimes referred to as “neighbors”). Fear is not love. Sometimes ugly art is absolutely necessary.
Boxer Brains
The Art Therapy Way: A Self-Care Guide by Kendyl Arden is the latest in the string of books on trauma and healing that I’ve acquired. Filled with 50 art therapy exercises, the book begins with a great explanation of why…
Unacknowledged Does Not Equal Nonexistent
Our past is strewn with clues: some are as subtle as a phrase, habitually repeated without thought, while others are as obvious as a dead body. Which symbols, which images do we use over and over, perhaps without understanding why?…
With Intent
Everywhere I turn, I come across messages on the importance of daily practice, and it leads me to a question: can I call it practice if I don’t consciously think in those terms? There is a difference between doing and…
Of Men and Misunderstanding
To Share or Not to Share Two days ago, I began thinking in earnest about the balance between silence and expression. I am coming to understand how essential It is to express oneself and to be free to express oneself,…
What Meets the Eye
Thanks to Camille Paglia, I have mixed (and rather confused) feelings about the Romantic poets. In short, I don’t know what to make of them. If I am to believe Paglia, they were all perverts with strange sexual proclivities that…
Turn Around; It’s not All in Front of You
Andrew Forge’s essays on mostly 20th-century art has me thinking about paintings that tend to elicit the response “I could do that” and wondering why they are important. I think it comes down to a relatively simple distinction: perhaps we…
Competition? Cooperation?
The artist who acts as if he could have conceived his art by himself, sealed off from other artists, is stupid—he merely tries to conform to the idiotic romantic image of the artists as primeval energy, as a demiurge. The continual…
Get In the Boat
I didn’t mean to post my sailboat drawing here at The Ruff Draft. I have another, slightly more clandestine (I like that word) blog called Ruff Edge Design that I think of as the place for my art attempts and…
Daring Despite the Danger
“The known, our current story, protects us from the unknown, from chaos—which is to say, provides our experience with determinate and predictable structure. … When we are in the domain of the known, so to speak, there is no reason…
The Awful Futility of Explaining
In Marcel Billot’s foreword to Sacred Art by M.A. Couturier, he explains that L’Art Sacré was a review run for a time by two Dominican priests, Father Couturier and Father Pie-Raymond Régamey. They managed, apparently, to work together and produce…
Trust Issues
Domenique de Menil writes, in her foreword to Sacred Art, a collection of essays and reflections by M.A. Courturier, O.P. : “For Père Couturier, to be sure, straightforwardness, which begets clarity, was the simple and immediate principle of his personal…
