LAWRENCE RUSS: Soul, Art, and Society
Archives: Art and Spirit
“We interrupt our regularly-scheduled programming to bring you this important message. . . .”
As I said I would, I’ll write to you soon about the Fire in “The Friend Who May Not Seem a Friend.” But I have to share with you first an exceptional, timely gift that came to me this week.
“The Friend Who May Not Seem a Friend” – The Cat and the Fire, Post 1 of 3
To understand why I show you this carved cat in flames, you need to know that my childhood was plagued by sweat-through-the-night terrors, terrors that could take hold even in daytime. . .
A Christmas Approach to Street Photography: Gifts Given, Gifts Withheld – Post 2 of 2
I miss the pleasures of meeting people in doing my street photography. Various factors have kept me from it almost completely for several years: a major change in the nature of my paying employment, a new office location, a much-needed surgery and long rehabilitation, the pandemic. But I have to say that my experience, mostly on the streets of downtown Hartford, Connecticut, wasn’t all warming and satisfying, though it did call to my mind aspects of the life presented in the Gospels just as much as did the better parts of my portrait-seeking experience.
A Christmas Approach to Street Photography: Peace on Earth, Good Will toward Men – Post 1 of 2
One of the great dangers for each of us is that we let someone define us, even it’s ourselves, and then we let that definition dictate what we do and don’t do, what we believe is possible or right for us. At various times in my life, I’ve felt impelled to challenge some idea of myself, sometimes at the cost of tremendous anxiety and apprehension. I often think of (and have a couple of T-shirts that quote) the remark of one of the child “Candidates” in The Matrix, when Neo asks him how he is bending a spoon only by thinking about: “There is no spoon.” St. Paul has a similar, but farther-reaching saying: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:13.)
Christmas Reports on Weather of the Soul from Charles Dickens (God bless ‘im!) and Me
As some of you knew, we in the Northeast received warnings through all kinds of media in the early part of this week about the likelihood that a powerful Nor’Easter (gee, wonder why they call it that?) might be hitting us sometime on Wednesday, December 16. Naturally, my wife and I, after dinner on that […]
A Pre-Christmas Christmas Card
A few days ago, I wrote an e-mail to one of my best friends, Rich Armstrong, about a new photograph of mine, which you see above, “The Friend Who Dies So His Friends Can Live (Golgotha and the Tomb).” I’ve known Rich for close to twenty years now, and he was one of my early […]
A Quiet Coming-Together: Walt Whitman, America, Keith Carter, This Post
These are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me, If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing or next to nothing, If they do not enclose everything then they are next to nothing, If they are not the riddle and the untying […]
The Cage of the “Surreal” – Part 2 of 2
I recently had three of my photographs chosen for an exhibition called “Strange Times” at the Atlanta Photography Group Gallery . That exhibition was conceived partly with the pandemic in mind. Yet none of my selected images was made since the start of the pandemic, and none was generated by a dream or even a waking fantasy.
The Cage of the “Surreal” – Post 1 of 2
In my last post, I made some remarks about the falsity of calling certain artworks “surrealistic.” I want to pursue that further here. Am I saying that we should never use the words “surreal” or “surrealistic”? No, but. . . .
A New “Marion” and a New Clue
As the title of this post promises, here is the photograph that just last week joined my ongoing, award-winning “Marion under the Moon” series. Its title is “Dream of the Playground Melting into Night.” Several friends of mine, seeing it for the first time, have ha wildly differing emotional reactions to it . . . One male friend said that the image provides “mysteries upon mysteries”. . . .