Moving...

Tryon Sculpture Arts

While I originally envisioned setting up my arts blog here, using the Blogger platform, I ultimately ended up building my own independent Web site.  The primary reason behind the move is the unfortunate fact that, while Blogger is a great place to easily create and post blogs, there does not appear to be any flexible way to set up and maintain galleries of images... which as a visual artist, is pretty much the driving force behind having an online presence.  Wordpress has its own set of interesting challenges, but it does come with a wide variety of plugins for everything from blogging to galleries to e-commerce.

Since then, I have been actively putting up not only a regular blog, but posting updates of my work, both with sculpture and drawing.

I would like to invite you to wander over to my gallery at Tryon Sculpture Arts and see what has been happening:

• Introduction
• Gallery
• Artwork and Stories
• Blog

Recent posts:

• When Art Hits You Between the Eyes
• Listening
• What’s in a Name?

A bit of what you will see there:

Sheltered

Yesterday, today, tomorrow...

Blessings, and hope to see you there!

Full of Leaves

Full of Leaves

Our pastor, Gary Franklin, has been going through a series called, Jesus- Unpredictable and Untamable, based on the Gospel of Mark.  This past Sunday, he went over the story in Mark 11 of Jesus cleansing the temple the day after the Triumphal Entry.

Almost as a side thought, Mark tells of Jesus going up to a fig tree as he was walking into the city, and finding nothing but leaves, curses the tree, saying, "May no one ever eat fruit from you again."

What Gary explained was that, during that season one would expect to have found the tree full of leaves, but no ripe fruit.  However, in among the leaves, there should have been buds indicating that fruit would be there soon.  In this case apparently, there was nothing but leaves.

The parallel for us, and indeed the warning, is that, from a distance, the tree looked healthy and promising, but on closer examination, the tree was already dead and useless.  The nation of Israel, the priesthood, the temple and everything around Jesus and the disciples looked healthy and vigorous, like the people were carrying on their deep seated traditions, while in fact it was pretty much all a show.  They were more interested in the convenience of the temple courts full of money-changers and people selling temple offerings, but they had no understanding of how to truly worship God.

This is a small sketch I did that morning as my response, sowing what the disciples saw when they looked at the tree, and how Jesus really saw it.

Blessings!