Scriptly Speaking

Scriptly Speaking

By Tom Wachunas


For this, the fifth annual From Script To You New Works Festival presented by the North Canton Playhouse in its intimate McManaway Studio theater, producing artistic director Jeremy Lewis and his team received 246 script submissions (short, one-act plays) from around the country. Six very well crafted entries were selected to make either their Ohio or world premieres. Collectively, the content of this year’s festival is conceptually brighter than in the past. There’s less stormy, existential angst afoot. This is not to say that its many comedic moments aren’t generously balanced with thoughtful, engaging drama.

If there’s a relatively ‘lightweight’ entry in the group, it’s certainly the first play – “Perfect Strangers,” written by Peter Snoad from Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and directed here by Moriah Ophardt. While resting after his mountain climb, Robert meets a chatty woman named Betsy who’s been spying on him. She reveals a grave, cathartic secret about herself which has imbued her life with an urgent mission, and she invites Robert, her “perfect stranger,” to participate in it. Tawny Burkhardt is infectiously charming as the nosy, insistent Betsy, while Chris Sailing, as Robert, is cautious (understandably so, given Betsy’s disarmingly invasive demeanor), yet still a bit too emotionally stiff and pre-occupied. Maybe he’s put off by what he thinks is Betsy’s hubris. But he seems to have a cathartic enough moment of his own in the last seconds of this feel-good thirteen minutes.

“Clown Therapy,” written by Nina Mansfield of Greenwich, Connecticut, and directed by Cassey Martin, starts funny and ends funnier still. Maggie and Frank, married, are in session with a marriage counselor. They’re careful to point out that their last name isn’t Bozo, but something like Boh-show. David Burkhardt, playing Frank, arrives for the session in full clown regalia, belying the fact that, according to sultry Maggie’s weepy complaint, he’s simply not at all the clown she married. Meanwhile, Christina Trompower, playing the therapist, treats this farcical romp with clinical but sincere objectivity. Stacey Essex is hilarious as the passionately ditzy Maggie who’s mortified to find that Frank’s red nose is fake, and Burkhardt is equally memorable – a wounded, defensive Bozo - in his exasperated wishes for her to know the real him.

Jeremy Lewis directed the evening’s longest (35 minutes) and surely most riveting entry – “Museum Piece,” written by William Fowkes from New York City. The three-man-monologue is a gem of clever drama interwoven with biting comedy. Each delivers his take on visiting the Museum of Modern Art with increasing intensity until they literally and heatedly cross words and paths while gazing at a confounding contemporary installation. Zach Blake is utterly convincing as a pathologically panicky, agoraphobic student type, fretting over his every thought and move. So too, the masterful Nate Ross is gripping in his character that seethes with confrontational, brooding indignation, both righteous and misplaced. And Michael Burkhardt (he’s real- life father to previously mentioned cast members David, and husband to Tawny) is unforgettably if not oddly endearing in his frenetic portrait of insecure, effete intellectualism.

Cassey Martin directed the comically twisted “Smoke Screen” by Jamaica, New York playwright Esta Fischer. Stacey Essex returns as Laura, girlfriend to Jeff, played by Paul Weston. In celebrating their six-month anniversary of quitting smoking together, they quickly come to sparring through a tight and laugh-filled scenario of second guessing each other’s motives. Even more absurd, though with its own share of authentic social commentary, is “Breeders,” written by Kevin Aremento from Long Island, New York, and directed by Moriah Ophardt. She also deliciously/viciously nails her role as a puppy on a smoke break in front of a pet store, while confronting Flora, an anti-puppy- mill activist, played with high-energy sincerity by Krystian Bender.

In the final work, Jeremy Lewis directed, and plays the role of Greg, along with co-director Cassey Martin in the role of Hailey, in “Three Hour Difference,” by Mike Poblete from New York City. It’s an intriguing, fast-paced look at a long distance relationship. He’s in New York, she in Los Angeles, each speaking to an unseen ‘other’ as they test the waters of separation while questioning their future. Lewis is sharp in his easy delivery of nervousness posing as witty confidence, in subtle counterpoint to Martin’s tender wrestling with her conflicts.

While the 12-minute story leaves the final status of the couple unresolved, it is nonetheless a poignant close to a marvelously satisfying evening of inventive theatre.


Photo, courtesy Alyssa Pearson and Jeremy Lewis: Jeremy Lewis and Cassey Martin in “Three Hour Difference,” one of six short plays in the From Script To You New Works Festival, at the North Canton Playhouse McManaway Studio theater, 525 7th Street NE (Hoover High School), North Canton. THROUGH MAY 14. Shows at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, also 8 p.m Thursday May 12, and 2:30 matinee on Mothers Day, May 8. Seating limited. Tickets (330) 494 – 1613, General Admission $10, students 2 for 1 with valid ID.

Deja vu, S'il Vous Plait?

Déjà vu, S’il Vous Plait?

By Tom Wachunas


“Competitions are for horses, not artists.” – Bela Bartok –

“Art is the increasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers – and never succeeding.” – Marc Chagall –

“So let’s leave it alone ‘cause we can’t see eye to eye. There ain’t no good guy, there ain’t no bad guy. There’s only you and me and we just disagree.”
- lyrics by Dave Mason, 1977 –


Once upon a time, in 1863, some four thousand artists raised a mighty stink about being rejected by the prestigious Paris Salon. To quell the scandal (one does not raise the ire of that many artists without serious repercussions), French Emperor Napolean III stepped in and spearheaded an alternative show that has since been known as the “Salon des Refuses.” Take that, you snooty intellectual types. Still, I’m sure that many Salon diehards dismissed the exhibit under their haughty breaths as “The Losers Show.” But it did bring to the fore such artists as Edouard Manet, who would consequently come to be regarded as the progenitor of Impressionism.

This is not to say that what we see in juried art shows these days, including the 69th Annual May Show at The Little Art Gallery in North Canton, is determined strictly by pompous or conservative academics, though some certainly are, no matter where they’re mounted. Nor am I suggesting that somewhere in the mix of works not chosen for the May Show are a few artists whose work might someday rock the art world with mind- boggling originality. In fact we’ll never know what we’re missing, unless…Where’s Napolean III when we really need him? (Note to self: find someone to stir up the also-rans?)

Seriously, though, on one level it’s hard to find substantial fault with the overall look of this show, and for that we can once again thank curator Elizabeth Blakemore for making the best out of what the jurors (Gail Rule-Hoffman and Sr. Rosaria Perna, both from Ursuline College) selected. Befitting the sharply polished look of the space, the show is a real stunner, that is if you’re biased toward representational art, be it faithfully naturalistic or with more expressive leanings. In the vein of Old Masters technique, Frank Dale’s “Sarah,” and Kristine Wyler’s “Through the Mist” are both absolutely breathtaking. And Deborah Woloschuk’s still life, “Vintage Iridescence,” is a dazzling feast of luminous textures. There are numerous other representational paintings, collages, and drawings – landscapes, still lifes, portraits - in varying degrees of skill and originality. What they share collectively in this context is a pristine preciousness that gives the show the aura of a haute design boutique. Safe, tried-and-true, and always pretty.

This is all fine and good as far as it goes. But as in too many local juried shows of the past, I miss the stuff I’ve occasionally seen fly just below our provincial radar. To be sure, there are some works in this show that do, very effectively, probe subtler things than visible reality. Just not enough of them. Whether or not this is a matter of jurors’ bias, or lack of depth in total entries for the show is, unless you poll the curator and jurors, an unknowable variable.

Pure abstraction, for example, is woefully under-represented. In that genre, Christopher J. Triner’s oil painting, “Shaken Not Stirred,” with its clustered, energetic impasto daubs atop a ghostly underpainted structure, is certainly among the most compelling works here. Likewise, “Landscape Revisited,” a digital print by Scott Zaher, while structurally derivative of Richard Diebenkorn’s iconic “Ocean Park” abstractions from the 1970s, is intriguing in how it evokes such a large velvety atmosphere on such a small picture plane. Elsewhere, Dr. Fredlee Votaw’s impeccably crafted mixed media “Thinking About the Holocaust” gives new and dramatic meaning to the notion of haunting juxtapositions. Similarly, if there’s such a thing as lyrical minimalism, Robert Gallik’s small sculpture of caged stones on a tray of sand, “River Piece #5,” fills the bill quite beautifully.

The inclusion of Richard M. Huggett’s crisp acrylic “HaveYou Been Eating Tacos?” is curiously jarring in this context. Maybe the jurors saw it as a happy medium between accessible and edgy. As it is, this goofy, Nouveau Kitsch cartoon has a Warholian slickness about it. It’s an irreverent though gentle slap to this show’s prim and proper face, and as such, oddly refreshing.


Photo: Detail of “Thinking About the Holocaust,” mixed media by Dr. Fredlee Votaw. On view in the 69th Annual May Show at The Little Art Gallery, located in the North Canton Public Library, 185 North Main Street, North Canton, through May 31. (330) 499 – 4712, Ext. 312
gallery@northcantonlibrary.org

From Across The Pond, Fury and Finesse

From Across The Pond, Fury and Finesse

By Tom Wachunas



A first time visitor to Umstattd Hall might have thought that this season-closing concert on April 30 by the Canton Symphony Orchestra (CSO) was an intentional addendum to the pomp and circumstance of the Royal Wedding that had transpired in London the day before (even though, of course, the program was determined far in advance of the wedding’s announcement). But more on that a bit later. The theme of the concert was “The Splendor of England,” featuring works, all of them splendid to be sure, by Handel, Elgar, Britten, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Even the first work on the program – Handel’s brief but electrifying coronation anthem, “Zadok the Priest” – was certainly in keeping with all things royal, and thunderously so.

After the orchestra’s lush, quietly measured introduction, the combined choirs of the Canton Symphony Chorus, Kent State University Chorus, and Canton’s delightfully gifted VOCI, exploded with such a sharply pronounced, sonorous entrance that I noticed many wide-eyed audience members appearing to physically bounce upward in their seats. From there, orchestra and choirs embarked on an inspired and unified declaration of sheer jubilance, as if to say, “now that we have your attention.”

A resonant euphoria still seemed present in the air as Maestro Gerhardt Zimmermann addressed the audience before the program’s second work, Edward Elgar’s “Serenade for Strings.” After stating his fond admiration for the beauty of British string music, with impish aplomb he related how some individuals had shared with him their perplexity over the timing of this concert, coming as it did right after the royal nuptials. Leaving the question to dangle unanswered, he abruptly turned his back to the audience to begin conducting. And just before the laughter subsided, he faced us again with a quick afterthought, saying, “It’s because I’m Facebook friends with the Queen.” Then, not losing a beat as it were, it was on to the Elgar.

It’s fair to point out that dedicated followers of the CSO have come to expect, as ‘de rigueur,’ eminently balanced, crisp, and emotionally engaging performances. In short, to deliver great works with great sensitivity. And once again, that is precisely what these remarkable musicians accomplished with Elgar’s iconic work. Interestingly enough, he composed it as a gift for his wife, Alice, on the occasion of their third wedding anniversary. Here, particularly in the achingly soulful Larghetto movement, with its richly tender and delicate textures, the orchestra was the embodiment of intense lyricism.

That lyrical intensity was all the more magnified and visceral in the remaining two works on the program. Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes were combined by the composer as a single work from his 1945 opera, Peter Grimes, the tragic tale of an outcast fisherman searching for redemption. In this astonishing performance, the orchestra wove a virtual tapestry of moods and textures of the sea, beginning with the tranquility of ‘Dawn’ and ‘Sunday Morning’ in the first two movements, followed by the eerie, atmospheric ‘Moonlight,’ and climaxing with the relentlessly startling, furious ‘Storm.’ Throughout, the orchestra’s full array of instruments came into play with powerful imagination and virtuosity.

Finally, as if to answer the emotionality of all that tumultuous orchestral roaring, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Dona Nobis Pacem (Grant Us Peace)” brought another kind of fury and angst to our already stunned attention. This was Williams’ searing plea for peace in the looming shadow of World War II. The combined choirs returned, singing with a gripping fervor and urgency. So too the guest artists, soprano Emily Albrink and baritone Brian Keith Johnson. Their impeccable artistry brought to the fore, with deeply moving clarity, the work’s bittersweet prayerfulness, eventually rising to a thunderous, hopeful song of ‘Glory to God’ at the end, which faded into Albrink’s sweetly plaintive, quiet and lingering “dona nobis pacem.” For all of its quietude, this finale was a resounding Amen to a very memorable CSO season.

Symphony On Canvas

Symphony On Canvas

By Tom Wachunas


Synesthesia is a sensory phenomenon wherein the stimulation of one sense can trigger the awakening of another. I can’t tell you, for example, how many times the odor of a roasting turkey has made me able to clearly see every tiny detail of the Thanksgiving table my mother set during my childhood, right down to the antique floral design of her finest china, the lacy embroidery of linen napkins and table cloth, the finely embossed golden rims of the crystal glasses. Similarly, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced the phenomenon more immediately and acutely than when I first walked through the current exhibit in the Massillon Museum’s main gallery.

Long before I read the wall placard addressing the theme of the show, called “Color in Freedom: Journey Along the Underground Railroad,” the 30 vibrant, luscious acrylic and mixed media paintings by Joseph Holston elicited an instantaneous, astonishing sensation of hearing monumentally symphonic music. So it was particularly gratifying to read that Holston composed this chronicle of slavery from bondage to freedom in the form of four distinct movements, as in a symphony: Unknown World, Living in Bondage – Life on the Plantation, Journey of Escape, and Color in Freedom. To appreciate Holston’s artistic logic and dramatic impact of the paintings’ ordered sequence, on entering the gallery, begin your journey in the nearby right corner.

As a painter, Holston’s strengths are many and formidable, starting with the streamlined fluidity in how he has rendered (as in drawn) his figures. Nothing seems wasted in his expressive brushwork. Whether working in wide, sweeping flourishes, or in smaller clusters of energized strokes, all of it projects an intense, purposeful urgency – progressively more so as the paintings enter the later phases of the third, and then throughout the fourth movement of the sequence. Eschewing any identifying features in his figures’ faces (or, for that matter, other superficial details of dress or anatomy), Holston has focused on their animated postures, their varied and subtle attitudes of movement, and their interlocking forms. Combined with the deliciously liberal, physical presence of the paint itself, and the sheer largeness of picture plane composition, these figures of slaves, even at their most anguished and tortured, inhabit the paintings like heroic spirits, as if they were sculptures carved from the ethereal stuff of pathos, dignity, and ultimately pure exuberance.

It’s Holston as colorist, though, who wields an uncanny ability to conjure palpable musicality. And he does so by employing the effects of the most rudimentary of color dynamics – breathtaking contrasts of cool and hot, and complementary hues in elegant balance. In “Dawn of Despair,” from the Living in Bondage movement, three huddled figures occupy well more than half of the picture, hunched over in a monochromatic mass of deep blues and grays, their black hands like so many dead weights, unable to lift themselves into the amorphous arc of fiery orange above them. In the first two sequences of this symphony of canvases, Holston’s dominant, dark monotones evoke the sounds of eerily foreboding, tumultuous strings and rumbling timpani. But always there’s a smaller, warm glowing, like the soundings of distant brass and winds, signaling a hope, a promise, a destination. In the third movement, those warm accents become more hot, expansive, and insistent, as in the poignant procession under and toward the blazing sun of “After Harriet.” Then, in the triumphant fourth, the once murky, weighted figures are softer and infused with airy, vibrant life. The long, treacherous night has ended. Their earthbound oppression has given way to the explosive ebullience of lighter, brighter colors - indeed songs - of unshackled joy.

This exhibition of works by a single artist surely ranks as the most electrifying to grace the walls of the Massillon Museum in recent memory. Holston’s vision is an unforgettably passionate and reverential one. And in chronicling the human drama of one of history’s most important and compelling passages, he has managed to awaken and inspire all our senses.


Photo, courtesy cantonrep.com: “Dawn of Despair,” by Joseph Holston. On view at the Massillon Museum, 121 Lincoln Way E., downtown Massillon. Viewing hours are Tuesday – Saturday 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and Sunday 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. Information at www.massillonmuseum.org or call (330) 833 – 4061.

Pitching Pitchy Siren Songs

Pitching Pitchy Siren Songs

By Tom Wachunas


I’ve always had a soft spot in this often curmudgeonly heart-o-mine for artists who know full well their ability to push people’s buttons. To stir up the pot of our predispositions about what’s beautiful, inspiring, or empowering. To intentionally walk along precarious esthetic edges while brandishing arguments and attitudes guaranteed to trigger lively if not heated discourse. Whether you call it courage or insouciant self-indulgence on their part, such artists will continue to make works we love to hate, hate to love, or long to like. Somewhere in this mix there’s painter Megan Mars.

Since first encountering her work around five years ago, I’ve watched her, with admittedly marginal interest, solidify her niche in our local arts community to the point of brand-name recognition. All along the way, I’ve wondered how or if she could successfully expand that niche, or maybe even transcend it altogether. And by that I don’t mean increasing the degree of her exposure or viewer base, but rather deepening the ideological and technical content of her paintings per se.

Based on the works currently exhibited in her salon-style show called “She’s a Monster” at Thirteenth Floor Gallery in Massillon, Mars appears to be still safely ensconced in her comfort zone, perhaps content that if it ain’t busted, don’t fix it – at least not overly much. Her signature iconography is for the most part intact (and of its kind, compelling enough) – buxom, often robustly beautiful women presented as alluring or scary embodiments of feminine power and self-assuredness, along with a healthy dose of woundedness and vulnerability. They’re theatrical in the sense that one puts on an elaborately decorated persona and lives it out in a strange fantasy world. Some of these women of Mars, so to speak, look like naughty vixens from planet Bizarro, others like Medusa’s extended family. Still others exude a raw sort of elegance. Most of the pictures don’t come off as portraits of real people who breathe or speak warmly into our lives, but rather as codified symbols of roles, situations, identities, or desires. But even at their most gothic or grotesque, there are some signs, in varying degrees, of genuinely palpable emotions lurking beneath the trappings of kinky eroticism and murky pallor of death common to many of the images.

I think there’s true Romanticism in Mars’ work. But it’s more latent than fully blossomed. This has as much to do with her choices as a painter as with her pictorial content. At this point, she seems to be replicating a tight formula for presenting an ‘everywoman’ sensuality and immediacy, but without the sensuality and immediacy of paint itself. To be fair, she has developed an increasingly refined fluidity in the touch of her brush. Yet I’m fairly certain her sensationalistic imagery could take on all the more visceral impact – and emotional resonance - if she were to loosen up and let paint be paint. Why not employ the tactile physicality of painted surface as metaphorical ‘soul’ of the work? Experimenting with a more daring, varied palette wouldn’t hurt, either.

In viewing Mars’ work these past several years, here’s a cautionary note, offered out of my abiding respect for her clear ability in drawing and her authentic passion for making art. The process of artistic maturing has everything to do with listening intently to what an idea is saying - of letting the idea tell how it wants to be manifest, instead of habitually forcing it into a predetermined schematization. It’s highly plausible, given the sense of implied personal narrative in these works, that the ideas driving them are better suited to be, for example, illustrations in what could be an electrifying graphic novel. In any event, and for any artist, it’s also worth remembering that some ideas simply don’t wear paint all that easily, or well.

In Greek mythology, the Sirens, daughters of a sea god, were beautiful women who, with their seductive singing, lured sailors to fatally veer off course. Here’s hoping that as her artistic journey progresses, Megan Mars doesn’t let the song she’s been hearing thus far lead her, as a painter, any closer to dangerously shallow waters.


Photo, courtesy cantonrep.com: “Octavia” by Megan Mars, on view through May 19 in “She’s a Monster,” at Thirteenth Floor Gallery, 28 Charles Ave. SE, downtown Massillon. Gallery hours are Wednesday – Saturday, 12 noon to 6 p.m.

Thoughtscapes

Thoughtscapes

By Tom Wachunas


The current exhibit at the Kent State University at Stark Main Hall Gallery is not one that will stop you in your tracks as you shuffle by and look through the big glass wall. Eye-popping colors and other visual grandiosities do not beckon from afar. This is not a show that will stand up well to a quick, over-the-shoulder glance, which is too often the typical viewing mode of too many people.

Nevertheless, there’s plenty of inviting visual intrigue in this group show, called “New World: Places + Form,” provided you allow sufficient time to see its unique balance of concept with physical substance. The works by the four guest artists in this show – Kate Budd, Beth Lindenberger, Matthew Kolodzie, and Donna Webb – make for a visually pristine, quietly cerebral atmosphere.

Both Budd and Lindenberger are clearly fascinated with the organic forms suggested by certain animals, vegetables, flower buds, seedpods, or shells. Their pieces – small enough to fit in your hand – are spread out on two long tables covered with white cloth. Like laboratory specimens. Lindenberger’s glazed ceramic works are in large part more naturalistic and tactile – though sometimes playful - homages to the forms that inspired them. Budd, on the other hand, brings a heightened sense of psychological wonder to her forms molded in wax. Several of them are translucent, and embellished with tiny glass beads, protruding pins, or perforated with evenly-spaced holes. Some suggest small vegetables or pods that have been cleanly sliced on one end. They exude a distinctly charming sense of mystery, hinting at human interactions or interventions - like enchanted, sensual forest ingredients carefully prepared for a secret ritual.

Kolodzie’s 22” x 30” gouache wash drawings on paper, titled “Out of Sync” (numbered 1 through 5), are each alternately dense and airy configurations of overlapped, graffiti-like markings in flux. Within these clusters of scribbly dashes, lines, and curves are rhythms in one color that shadow and echo rhythms in another, vibrating in a tentative dance between zones of apparent chaos and fields of more controlled spontaneity. Call them topographies of structured intuition. They’re nervous and even astringent at times, yet strangely confident and seductive. Mesmerizing maps of a sort, they vaguely describe landscapes both urban and rural, simultaneously dispersing and congealing.

And speaking of dispersed landscapes, there’s “The Boogie Man of Howard Street: a place to be blue” by Donna Webb. The central panel in this installation that spans the main wall of the gallery is a mosaic of ceramic tiles, and a study for a public work commemorating Akron’s Howard Street entertainment district. From the right side of the image, a loosely rendered figure in brown, arms stretched as in flight (or reaching to touch land?), floats above intersecting streets. In her accompanying statement, Webb tells us that during the 1940’s and 50s, the district was the night-life hub of the African American community, with clubs offering the music of jazz and blues greats of the day. Declaring the area “blighted” in the 1960s, the city razed it in the name of urban renewal.

To the left of the panel is a round, ridged ceramic ‘platter’ – a shiny blue sun, as it were – surrounded by a variety of smaller ‘orbiting’ discs that also extend to the right of the panel. The work doesn’t so much read as an angry indictment of relentless urban development as it is a sensitive remembrance of a bygone era. On another level, this symbolic microcosm does bring to mind that, for better or worse, modern cultural identity is no longer a fixed, immutable entity. If there is a “new world” identified here, it’s perhaps one of cultural diaspora. And like the rest of this show, the work invites and deserves our gentle contemplation.

Photo: “Out of Sync #3,” gouache, by Matthew Kolodzie, on view through May 6, Main Hall Gallery, on the campus of Kent State University at Stark. Gallery hours are Monday – Friday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m. to noon.

Risen Indeed: An Easter Meditation

Risen Indeed: An Easter Meditation

By Tom Wachunas


“And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.” -Revelation 21:5 –

“He has met, fought, and beaten the King of Death. Everything is different because He has done so. This is the beginning of the New Creation: a new chapter in cosmic history has opened.” - C.S. Lewis, from “The Joyful Christian” –


On this Good Friday I spent an hour or so browsing dozens of pictures of paintings and sculptures depicting the Resurrection of Christ. What follows is simply an invitation to think on what Easter might mean to you.

Archived within these blog posts are several appreciations of art as a spontaneous response to being alive. The act of making art – what we commonly call ‘creating,’ and the process of it ‘creativity’- is itself but a tarnished reflection of our Divine origins, a remnant spark, a flickering remembrance. I have believed this with all my heart for many years. There is a certain sense of desperation that I sense when considering the whole of human creativity through the arts - a sense of the sacred progressively becoming elusive and worse - irrelevant. As I get older, I notice in our world an increasingly fading and corrupted memory of the primordial creative act described in Genesis. God thought it, and so it became. And it was good. Then, it got wrecked, by our own hand.

On this Easter weekend I’m immersed in gratitude for my own capacity to make art, to consider it, to savor it. To savor art that, at the very least, even if indirectly, affirms what is noble or pure or good about being alive. To participate in the memory of “And God said…” How, then, can we use this capacity, this memory, this participation?

What if, as artists and lovers of the arts, we saw our creativity as a way back to thanking, praising, and worshipping the author of our talents, the source of our capacities, the God who made us in His image? What if we saw ourselves as participating in, instead of resisting, His original plan for us? What then would motivate our creativity? What would our art – indeed our life - look like? What would it inspire? Hope? Joy? All things made new?

Unlike Prometheus, we don’t need to steal light from jealous, stingy, unapproachable gods, and suffer the eternally painful consequences. It’s always been ours for the asking. The image that accompanies this missive is the 1510 Isenheim altarpiece by Matthias Grunewald. It’s a beautiful, stunning reminder of the hope and victory first promised us in Genesis. And more, consider it a remembrance, on this Easter and beyond, of not just the greatest story ever told, but the greatest promise ever kept.