CHRISTMAS REFLECTIONS

 

Christmas Reflections 

 

   Here I offer you for your contemplation my annual Christmas painting. It’s a very small picture of an immeasurably large truth. And if you read no other words in this year-ending ARTWACH post, I pray that you at least let these words from John 3:16 activate and inspire your Christmas spirit, indeed your life, now and forever forward:

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

   Still reading? Thank you! Let me help you unpack the ultimate Christmas gift with some additional reflections from C.S. Lewis.

 “In the Christian story, God descends to reascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb ancient and pre-human phases of life; down to the very roots and seabed of the Nature.” - from Miracles

“The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.” —  from Mere Christianity

And finally this, also from Mere Christianity:

   “Did you ever think, when you were a child, what fun it would be if your toys could come to life? Well suppose you could really have brought them to life. Imagine turning a tin soldier into a real little man. It would involve turning the tin into flesh. And suppose the tin soldier did not like it. He is not interested in flesh: all he sees is that the tin is being spoilt. He thinks you are killing him. He will do everything he can to prevent you. He will not be made into a man if he can help it.”

“What you would have done about that tin soldier I do not know. But what God did about us was this. The Second Person in God, the Son, became human Himself: was born into the world as an actual man— a real man of a particular height, with hair of a particular colour, speaking a particular language, weighing so many stone. The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a foetus inside a Woman’s body. If you want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a crab.”

“The result of this was that you now had one man who really was what all men were intended to be: one man in whom the created life, derived from His Mother, allowed itself to be completely and perfectly turned into the begotten life. The natural human creature in Him was taken up fully into the divine Son. Thus in one instance humanity had, so to speak, arrived: had passed into the life of Christ. And because the whole difficulty for us is that the natural life has to be, in a sense, ‘killed’, He chose an earthly career which involved the killing of His human desires at every turn—poverty, misunderstanding from His own family, betrayal by one of His intimate friends, being jeered at and manhandled by the Police, and execution by torture. And then, after being thus killed—killed every day in a sense—the human creature in Him, because it was united to the divine Son, came to life again. The Man in Christ rose again: not only the God. That is the whole point. For the first time we saw a real man. One tin soldier—real tin, just like the rest—had come fully and splendidly alive…”

MAY All OF US BE SPLENDIDLY ALIVE AND HAVE A BLESSED CHRISTMAS!

Oh How Her Gardens Grew!

 

Oh How Her Gardens Grew! 

Life Is A Balancing Act

American Grafitti

Everything But The Kitchen Sink

The Last Supper

The French Connection

See How My Garden Grows

By Tom Wachunas

 

“…Also inherent in this soup of paint, collage and accidents, is the subconscious mind lending to my creations the unknown factor. Tapping into the subconscious (which using my untrained hand facilitates) allows me to make work that relies on intuition, a mixture of art-historical and non-art resources in order to create funny, sometimes irreverent yet moving imagery.”

-Patricia Zinsmeister Parker

 

Obituary:    https://www.cantonrep.com/obituaries/pwoo1019397

 

   The news of Patricia Zinsmeister Parker’s recent passing continues to hit me hard. Her art has been a very frequent subject through nearly all the years that ARTWACH has existed. Yet overpowering, if not slowly assuaging my profound sadness at this juncture is my deepest gratitude for our friendship and the profound impact her art has made on our arts community in general.  

   Pat Parker was a flippant deconstructor, articulating the familiar side-by-side with the enigmatic. Her exquisitely refined unrefinement could invade our aesthetic comfort zones and rattle our predispositions for more conventional painting practices. She was a thoroughly compelling artist, and among the most prolific and important artists I have ever had the blessing and privilege to know. Equal parts dream weaver and reality shaper, she always painted in a delightful spirit of palpable muscularity.

   Insightful and inciteful, she made art that wagged a sassy finger in your face and rattled your sense of “finished” aesthetic decorum. She was a painter seriously engaged in mindful play, often not too unlike the proverbial kid who refuses to color inside the lines.

   Look long enough at a painting by Patricia Zinsmeister Parker and you might hear her right hand clapping and slapping while her left hand guffaws and giggles. One complemented and complimented the other.

   Her paintings are specific events in time. Decisions: the point at which she stopped painting the picture. As such, arrivals. Prior to those arrivals there were always stories. History of the artist, indeed even histories of art. There be ghosts in a Parker painting. Some shout. Some whisper. Some sing and dance. Actions. Moods. Remnants. Echoes.

    Underneath what’s immediately apparent in a Parker picture, you might find a person or a place or a thing, a riddle or a rumble, shaky shapes or loose lines lurking inside colliding clouds and clusters of colors both muted and stunningly electric. A brush with memory. A life that’s anything but still. An attitude, an essence. A gripping adventure in unmitigated seeing.

   So look long enough. A Parker painting is often a confluence of the mundane and mysterious. A joining of the very recent and very distant past  to make wholly new, present moments.

   Look long enough. A Parker painting is an activation of her inexhaustible exuberance at mark-making. You might even hear the sound of scrubbing, scribbling, or rubbing. Erasing and emoting. Feeling the push-pull of pure possibility.

   Look long enough. Unencumbered by rendering any laborious illusory minutiae of prosaic details, hers was a larger, deeper reality: the poetry of the painting process. Of creation.

   THANK YOU, Pat, for planting in me an indefatigable longing, and loving, to wonder, to write, and to look… longer. THANK YOU for inspiring me with the constancy of your ever-evolving aesthetic. For your personhood. May you Rest in Peace.