Paint Me Local

"Life is a great big canvas and you should throw all the paint you can on it!" ~ Danny Kaye

I was so excited about beginning to paint that I sketched on each piece of canvas I bought. I bought two 8x10s and a 24x10 piece of canvas. The large canvas has a scene of J-pod with the mountains in the background. As I said before, it’s not going to be super realistic, but hopefully it will be good enough to put up in our living room. The smaller canvases have individual whales on them. One whale is swimming through bull kelp and the other is jumping out of the water. I’m going to use the smaller ones for practice. I’ll probably find paint at the drug store after my mom deposits my check. I thought it was difficult to sketch on the canvas because erase marks show up and don’t fully get rid of the pencil lines. I will just have to paint over what I erased. For example, if you look at the kelp picture you can see the word “orca,” in the top left corner. I was going to paint animals and put their names in the top like in a kid’s room. However, I thought that looked too juvenile and got rid of it. The word is still a bit visible and I can’t wait to paint it away. Hopefully once I paint them they will look better, not worse. I haven’t taken an art class since my sophomore year of high school and I hope this project isn’t a waste of time.

I also have begun reading one of the books I brought. It's called Letters from a Skeptic by Dr. Gregory Boyd. It's a compilation of letters between a father and son in which they debate the ideas of God, Religion, and truth of the Bible. The father, a 70-year-old atheist, debates with his Christian son, Dr. Boyd, by asking the questions we all want to know. The questions I focused on in my last reading were about why Christianity has done so much harm (i.e. the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition) and how come a "loving God" allows so much suffering in the world. I was happy the father asked such good questions because I often find myself wondering the same things. How could a loving God who is "all powerful" allow such terrible things like wars, famine, and rape to occur? I was happy with how Dr. Boyd responded to his father's questions. He said, "If God is going to give free wills to His creatures, He has to allow the possibility of them misusing that freedom, even if it means hurting others. A freedom that is prevented from being exercised whenever it was going to be misused simply wouldn't be freedom." If you give someone five dollars, and stepped in every time they were going to spend the money unwisely, is it really their money? Did you really give them anything? The answer is quite simply, no. The next question is, "Is the risk of freedom worth all the suffering?" Of course to the people suffering, I'm sure it is not. However, with the ability to experience great pain comes the ability to experience great love. "To refuse to create a world where love was possible because the risk was too great seems beneath us. Love is really the only reason worth creating. It's not freedom for the sake of freedom - it's risked for love. " There are many more valid points in the book that I won't go into for the sake of time... I need to be back to work at noon for a tour, but I highly recommend this book so far and think it does a great job to capture the dialog between faith and its skeptics. No matter what you believe, it is an interesting read and worth looking into.

I consider myself becoming more "local" everyday. I'm starting to paint, I read, I'm going to be riding my bike to work, and I love discussing environmental issues. What's gotten into me? hahaha. It must be the whales...