Drawing with Giant It’s Labor Day weekend. The holiday doesn’t remarkably change my work schedule- I’m happily drawing away in my studio. It’s true that this particular weekend says “the END of summer” like nobody’s business. That said, it has allowed some serendipitous activities that happen only when I enjoy a sense of briefly unstructured [...]
Category Archives: Holidays
19th annual Marion Arts Festival!
May 19, 2011, 7:32 am
I confess that I burst into tears when I drove past a billboard in downtown Cedar Rapids heralding the first Marion Arts Festival. Hard won, the product of a Herculean effort on the part of an intrepid core of believers, the festival had become a reality. Since 1993, during this week in May, I have [...]
Angels could do no better
May 5, 2011, 12:27 pm
This has been a great month. Our youngest, Willa, learned that she has been accepted into Yale’s graduate program for midwifery, we’ve had several animated phone conversations with Charlie describing the scope of his travels and research in Munich, and I received a marvelous letter from Maggie and Charlotte. “Dear Mom / Winky, Charlotte suggested [...]
Native son
February 8, 2011, 8:26 am
“…it is the complex, flesh and blood man who has been removed from sight, while his all-too-familiar imagery has remained uncannily resistant to change. If we are to summon Grant Wood from behind that darkened Gothic window, we will see this painting— and all his remarkable work—- deepen before our eyes.” – R. Tripp Evans, [...]
Doing just a little bit more…
December 14, 2010, 6:44 am
Standing back and regarding her handiwork, the woman who has ministered to all the medical needs of our family for the past 20 years, proclaimed, “Well, if you can live with those bunions, the scar that you’re going to have on that knee won’t present ANY problem!” The subject of her statement was my own [...]
Thieves Market … or “Mom! We made thirty-six hundred dollars!”
December 6, 2010, 11:20 pm
In her high-pitched, four-year-old, most excited voice, Maggie Campbell crowed to me through the phone receiver, “Mom! We made thirty-six hundred dollars!” The year was 1984. I was in Omaha, and I had sent Craig and Maggie off to the Thieves Market in Iowa City with a Datsun pickup loaded with my engravings. I was [...]
Happy Thanksgiving!
November 22, 2010, 9:55 pm
Holstein / 7″ x 8″ on Scratchboard / Thomas Agran In the gallery, this is the season when artists make certain to deliver work in a timely fashion. It’s a busy, happy time- a harvest of work done in solitude. Amy Plymat’s painted silk scarves are piled beside Thomas Agran’s beautifully rendered scratchboards of classic, [...]
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”
December 22, 2009, 1:59 pm
I haven’t spent a part of these last two Sundays of the advent season within a church. Rather, I have begun them, as I begin most days, with a run with Buddy. The snows of December, however, have made me amend our routes, so on both Sundays, Buddy and I were jogging past snow-covered hills [...]
Aaron Sinift + Holiday hours
November 19, 2009, 12:05 pm
With my own nose pressed firmly to the glass of a miniscule window on “the holiday retail season”, an old friend reminded me of a larger world spinning beyond the spheres of American consumerism. At the turn of the millennium, Iowa City artist, Aaron Sinift, traveled to India. His work was forever changed by that [...]