Oil on canvas.  14″ x 18″.  Suggested price $200.  Buy art here.

Just as the invocations that I’ve written are a kind of collage, the paintings that I’ve made for this series have some aspect of collage about them as well.  Nothing is cut out or added to this – it’s all oil on canvas.  But the shapes, the forms, the colors, are gathered from the things I’ve seen this spring on my morning walks, from doodles in old sketchbooks, from canvases that I started in life drawing and painting class.  I’ve been pairing old poetry invocations to them, so I suppose that’s part of the collage as well.   Here’s a written invocation to go with the painted one:

I praise you for the strength of trees,
full enough now that the sidewalk
remains dry beneath them,
and for the fast and slow energy of colors,
the faces of flowers, the moderation of green.
For lichen scattered like pigmented dust,
for the gray veins of root systems
in washed away dirt,
for earth.

Invocation #1, digital image.  Suggested Price $50.00.  Buy art here.

I’m part of a group show that will be opening at Saint Philip’s Episcopal Church in Columbus, OH on May 19th.  We drew on William Blake’s poem “Pentecost” for the theme and title of the show, which we’re calling Unless the heart catch fire.

Playing with that theme, I thought about the many morning walks that I take through my neighborhood.  I practice mindfulness as I walk, and often try to form prayers from the things that I see – a kind of spiritual collage.  For awhile I’ve called these prayers invocations, since they’re mostly about naming the ways in which I see God’s activity in the world.  As I prepared for the upcoming show, I thought about how images could be invocations, too.  Here’s the first of them, with more to follow.