LAWRENCE RUSS: Soul, Art, and Society
Archives: Art and Spirit
A Welcome to Further and Farther Voyages
If you’ve read my first post on this blog — “Welcome to Artists, Lovers of Art, and Unknown Friends” — you’ll have a good indication of my intentions here. And if you’ve been here before, you may have noticed that I’ve upgraded the template for this site. But that was just a prelude to more significant […]
Art and Mystery
“. . . there is only one thing valuable in art and that is the bit that cannot be explained. To explain away the mystery of a great painting – if such a feat were possible – would be irreparable harm . . . if there is no mystery then there is no ‘poetry,’ the […]
Dear Li Bo, Brother of Clouds and Dragons
Li Bo, how could you keep your heart from loneliness, calling always to the moon?
The Body, Mortal and Immortal, as a Camera
Yes, the word “camera” is italicized in the original text of this passage from “The God of the Living” by George MacDonald. The word opens an entrance into these thoughts as a revelation of what photography, at least great photography, in its essential, not its merely “definitional” nature, is and aims and serves to […]
Suffer the Little Children to Come unto Me
On the front page of The New York Times for Saturday, April 21, 2018, there was an article titled “Over 700 Children Taken from Parents at Border.” It began: On Feb 20, a young woman named Mirian arrived at the Texas border carrying her 18-month old son. They had fled their home in Honduras through […]
Lonely Truth versus the Chill of Ages
There’s a loneliness in being an artist, a feeling that almost no one else understands or values what you’ve intended or made. There’s loneliness in having had any kind of mystical experience, an ache in believing that you’ve gained something of great importance, but that you cannot open it to anyone else. And there’s a […]
Prominence
I’ve titled this image “Prominence.” Every word has an infinite number of meanings that depend, in part, on the context of its usage and the capacities of the one who receives it. “Prominence,” for instance, has a physical, spatial meaning. It has a societal meaning. And it can, more uncommonly, relate to comparative importance or […]
Windows and Doors and Waves and the Well
“[The] notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would […]
WISHING YOU PEACE AND JOY FOR CHRISTMAS
Lo, in the silent night A child to God is born And all is brought again That ere was lost or lorn. Could but thy soul, O man, Become a silent night! God would be born in thee And set all things aright. – 15th Century
A Poem for 2017 and Every Year That Follows
For his wonderful collection of short, imaginative poems from world literature, called The Sea and the Honeycomb, Robert Bly rewrote Frances Desmore’s translation of a Chippewa poem. And I think that it’s crucial to notice, in these days of promoting esteem for a misconceived and egotistical “self,” that the poem’s last line does not read “I am flying”: Sometimes I walk […]