Devotion
2009
Oil on Canvas, 30 x 40 in
(nfs)

A portrait of my friend’s father. He had spent years making a natural mountain stream running though his property considerably more beautiful and if possible, more natural. As he grew older he spent slightly less time hefting rocks and more time just watching the progress of the water and the mosses as they grew. I had intended to put his face in so subtly that you could look at the painting for years before realising a face was there. However, in planning out the face I filled it in with flesh and then couldn’t bear to reduce it to rocks and shadows. Perhaps this reflects poor judgement, I can’t tell at this point. In the end I just had to allow the painting to be what it had become, in spite of my will. It was a lot of work and worked with a lot of love.

Sibling Perspectives
December, 2008
(nfs)

This portrait is of a student and her brother. I used a photograph of them taken by a wonderful photographer to get a basis for this image. I like that each of these individual’s personalities are clearly reflected in their focal points – the one looking outward at the world with a “come hither” (though very sage) grin, the other looking outward at the world from a deep interior resevoir. As far as their likeness to the actual people, I think that she is close, and he is almost alright, but I bet he’s resenting that nose I gave him. I TRIED!! In real life, he’s quite handsome.

D.A. Thompson (Natural)
2008
Oil on Canvas
(nfs)

Well this photo could have been taken much more professionally, but it is depicting a painting I made of my grandfather as he surveyed the ancestral land in Medford, Ontario.

A Bridge Through the Spectrum
September, 2008
Oil on Canvas, 24 x 32 in

An imperfect portrait of two students. I’d like to say that I painted them so that they looked unlike the actual students on purpose, in order to protect their anonymity. In fact, why don’ t I? It was on purpose! totally on purpose, that these guys are not nearly as beautiful as they are in life. Beauty is hard to capture, in any event.

There’s a load of foolishness out there, that I hope has become thoroughly taboo – that suggests that people who are “within the spectrum” are aloof and have no emotional attachments. I have worked with students who have hardly any language, and only a spare cupboard of classic social structures to reluctantly pick from when interacting with others – but to suggest that a lack of standardized social paradigms equals a lack of emotion is pure hogwash. Anyone spending a moment of time with these souls quickly learns there is a fatholmessness to the richness of their every experience and feeling.

I put the quote below because I think that poem is an argument in favor of those who can feel and love without the limitations of social structures and without words. I honor these people and the rich manner in which they can experience life. And, furthermore, these two are a bit of a love story… it just seems to fit.

since feeling is first

“since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
–the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis”

—e.e. cummings

Mother Teresa
2008
Oil on Canvas, 24 x 32 in

I understand that there has been a large debate over whether to make Mother Theresa a Saint, in light of her recently published diaries, which reveal her as a profoundly depressed woman who had utterly lost her faith. Try though she might to regain the feeling of peace and fulfillment that had once been a result of doing “God’s Work,” – and the only comfort she ever sought in life; she could feel nothing but emptiness and pain, no matter how fierce her sacrifice, how tireless her care for others. To my eye, that is precisely the reason she should be made a Saint.

She represents, to me, the ferocious strength of a habit of Goodness. Saint Augustine, in The Confessions, discusses how only choices/actions that are evil are easy; but making a choice to do Good takes will/ effort. That is how sin and corruption can overwhelm the world; they take no effort, and the repetition of them makes them easier still, until they become in fact a necessity. The cracking of that necessity requires more than will or Goodness, it requires Grace.

Mother Theresa belies his claim, that because doing Good takes an active strength of will it can never become habitual. Mother Theresa persisted in caring long after she ceased to be able to feel any motivating thing – love, interest, pleasure in helping others, even will to live. She is also an example to those of us who have ever been perverse enough to fear that wanting to help others is just as vain and selfish a pursuit as anything else; in that it can provide a feeling of satisfaction which can be motivational to doing more… and pleasing one’s self should never, in the cruelest, strictest interpretations of “Christian” thought, be one’s motivation for anything. She lost the “reward” but persisted in her work, like a dog whose spirit has been broken in order to be trained to a greater cause.

I, at least, feel it gives one permission to be grateful for every bit of pleasure one ever has the luxury to feel. I also think that her extreme black and broken loneliness, emptiness and agony; in spite of the adulation of the crowds, is rather an important niche in Saint market. The patron Saint of the Faithless Faithful, the Saint of the souls who persist in love and goodwill long after all hope of it mattering or meaning a damn is lost.

Young St. Mary with her Mother, St. Anne