Our house is two blocks from Bisquitville and 10 blocks from East Campus

This summer I've fallen in love with the flatest, muddiest greens. This feeling first occured to me as I walked around the Washington Duke golf course and came across the pond. What a wonderful, scummy green. I'd never felt this way before. It abosrbed light without reflecting it back, refracting light into a jewel-like grayness. This green, I thought, with its drab extravegance, is the color for our century. A century still young, untried in its possibilities. It's in mind of this pond-scum green, that the gray figure I interposed in its matrix, should be seen as an Ophelia. At first I thought a Daphne, but Ophelia, with her more recent entry in the mythic dramatic past suits the sense better.

I could spend a week in the Metropolitan

A reader, Joe, from Decatur, GA, requests that I write some more, not having published anything on this blog for over a month, devoting most of my writing to status updates on Facebook, a social networking site that ostensibly connects people of like interests and shared backgrounds, so that a synergy of creative momentum might be obtained and the world would be so much a more interesting and more fecund place.
By way of excuse, I will say that my computer is busted, a stuck slash key and who knows what else, but that we can't afford to repair it right now. Well, it's low on our spending priorities and fortunately Jami's computer is faster and more nimble anyway. In the ensuing time I've visited great museums in Chicago and New York, spending 5 hours in the Met two weeks ago. I could easily have spent more. When I returned to our hotel later that evening, I painted 11 watercolors. I've been on a watercolor tear since. Note the above image, a levitating picnic I call it.
I will say that the best book I've read this Fall (a great time in history as well as a great season) is Sam Balantine's Torah's Vision of Worship. Balatine details how the torah is all about reimagining the world and establishing worship as an extension of Sabbath, emphasizing the sensual over the verbal. He uses a lot of Brueggeman or perhaps I could say that Brueggeman used him a lot in his old testament theology class. Balatine talks about art as an act of faith. But his primary focus is on how the priestly source engages us in priesthood through prayer and service - just as the priest functions on the boundaries of the holy and common, the common and unclean, so we find ourselves functioning on the boundaries bringing people on the margins of justice and faith into communities of justice and faithfulness.
I've been reading Jungel on justification and Barth as well on this topic from CD 4/1. As Barth cautioned in his Romans commentary, too often Jesus is treated as a means to an end or else one thing among others. Oddly this is so in the religious right, where for all their talk about loving Jesus, so little of the sermon on the mount, for instance, is displayed in their rhetoric. They easily point out that "liberals" use Jesus as a mere symbol, but seem unfazed about how they themselves have a 2-dimensional Jesus.

After reading through Exodus this season how astonishing it is to realize that we have a Baal right on Wall Street: America here is your god. Why is the ancient image of a bull so enduring? Baal, minotaur, Zeus and Europa, Minoan bull dancing frescos at Knossos, on up to bull fights and the running of the bulls. Meanwhile the bare chested minoan snake goddess seems to have disappeared from popular depictions.

This weekend we set up a booth at the Art Walk here in Durham. I have to say that it's difficult selling a painting of a nude toothbrush weilding colossus to people intent on picking up jewelry and other small gifts for Christmas. Looking over a list of paintings and artwork that I've sold over the years, I can see that my audience tends to be well-educated, somewhat liberal, individuals with a deep spirituality, coming from careers in the humanities, pastors or counselors. If you know someone like that, send them my way. Jami has set up a website for me at http://www.fredwise.homestead.com and there's a more comprehensive collection of images there. One difficulty is that I have over 2000 drawings in inventory - easily, and I can paint about two or three paintings a week, with an earth shattering masterpiece every so often, but I'm a novice in business and making connections.

I tend toward hyperbole, but I really could spend a week in the Metropolitan.