Happy Mother's Day

Artist Bruce Holwerda



Student artist Dwyer Kilcolllin of Washington University in Saint Louis.



Astro photographer Scott Johnson

For Mother's day today I took Terry and Alex to Laumeier Sculpture park to attend the art fair. Terry's Mother's day present was an Olympus E500 8 megapixel camera. She has been wanting to get a fancy new camera for quite some time so I decided to go ahead and buy one. I get her old camera; our trusty Kodak EasyShare 4 megapixel job which, surprisingly, takes pretty decent pictures.

At the top of this page are photographs of the work of three artists who really impressed me today. The first is a painting by Bruce Holwerda. You can review his complete portfolio at www.bruceholwerda.com For conventional media fine art I was most impressed by his work.

The second piece is a dress by a student artist at Washington University named Dwyer Kilcollin. The dress appears to have been stitched together from cut-up pieces of rubber innertubes. I know my daughter Lauren would just love it!

The final piece I actually purchased. This is an example of astro-photography by Scott Johnson. You can see his online portfolio at www.starfirestudioes.com Scott's work is most surprising to the casual observer. Your first thought it, what's this guy doing selling pictures taken from the Hubble space telescope? Then, you read the note in his booth and find out that he took them himself with his own telescope and a relatively conventional SLR camera.

What the......???

Who knew? Who knew you could go out into your own backyard and see such things in the night sky? Certainly not me. Gazing into the night sky witnessing the majesty of creation, captured so beautifully in these photographs, must be a very inspirational experience. I'm not sure I have the patience to do the same myself, but I definitely wanted to acknowledge and support his effort so I puchased the piece above which is titled "The Horsehead Nebula".

Finally, to wrap up this post with something a bit more philisophical in tone, I would like to quote an excerpt from' The Widow's Son' by Robert Anton Wilson. Did I mention just how much I like this book?! I still haven't finished it, but I am enjoying every paragraph. I can tell right now, that this is a book I will be reading at least a couple of more times in years to come.

I suppose you know there is currently this stupid social debate about creationism? It's really all just a giant semantic mess. In fact, trying to express the idea that the Universe is a creative entity seems to be a great challenge. As soon as you make any attempt to credit the Universe as a great source of creativity, deists rush in and muddy the waters of something that ought to be pretty clear.

I'm pretty sure that Scott Johnson knows all about the creative depths of the Great Architect of the Universe. Here's a man who would find a great affinity were he ever to hear the second degree lecture some day.

Nevertheless, where I fall short RAW picks up. His dissertation on pantheism in 'The Widow's Son' is quite eloquent. So eloquent, in fact, that I am going to manually type it up to share with my friends.

The following is an excerpt taken from 'The Widow's Son' by Robert Anton Wilson, page 192. This is being reproduced without permission of the author, so if Brother Wilson would like me to take it off of my weblog he needs only give me a personal telephone call to chat about life and philosophy and I will gladly remove it. This excerpt is a discussion between the stone cutter Duccio and the main character Sigismundo after sharing several beers together.

Duccio and Sigismundo had breakfast together in the kitchen the next morning. "The only subjects worth discussing are politics, sex and religion." Duccio said. "Which would you prefer?"

"Religion," Sigismundo said. "After being in the Bastille for six months without knowing why, both politics and sex are painful subjects to me."

"Good," Duccio said, opening his third bottle of beer. "I suppose, like most university people, you are a Deist?"

"The God of the churches does seem rather small and petty compared to what we now know of the universe," Sigismundo said.

"You believe in Newton's cosmic clock-maker, then?"

"No. I believe God is bigger than that , too, just as He is bigger than the oriental despot the churches offer us."

"How big is your God, then?"

"He fills all space." Sigismundo said, quoting Bruno.

"Then there is nothing that is not God?"

"Exactly."

"This is most serious. You have entered the heresy of pantheism."

"I fear that I have."

Duccio finished his third beer and opened a fourth. He had unique ideas of what constituted breakfast; he had barely touched the bread. "You are really saying that the Universe is intelligent."

"How else does the cherry stone know how to grow into a tree?"

"The dogs and cats are God, too, then?" Duccio asked, his eyes sparkling with mockery. "And the lice, the bedbugs, the fleas . . . "

"Yes"

"This sounds grand but it is meaningless," Duccio pronounced. "If it is asserted that everything is blue, then nothing is blue. If red is really blue, and yellow is really blue, and white and black and all the other colors are really blue, then we do not need the word 'blue' any more, except perhaps to distinguish hallucinations. If everything is God, then we do not need the word 'God' any more. You are an atheist without knowing it."

"No. The atheist says that all is accident. I say that all things cohere. To explain the coherence I must either use the word 'God' or emply some abstraction which a clever man like you will quickly tell me is just an alias for God."

"That which makes the Universe cohere and is inside all things and you call God: is it in the men who so unjustly clapped you into the Bastille and hired assasins to kill you?"

"Yes."

Duccio opened a fifth bottle. "Do you really believe that, or is it just what you tell yourself to build up some courage to confront this terrible world?"

"I believe it. What do you believe?"

"I believe if I sell enough monuments in a month, I can pay the rent, and if I do not sell enough I will be thrown out on the street like a dog. That is what I believe."