The Maker's Space

In his book, Sanctuary of the Soul, Richard Foster, in his chapter entitled "Words Dancing with Beauty," that there are three things that make poetry especially helpful in settling our mind in order to slow our minds to enable them to meditate.  "First, poetry startles us with its economy of words and beauty of language.  Second, many of us do not understand what the poet is saying on the first read.  This forces us to stop and go backhand read the words again.   A poem most often has a double meaning, and it takes us a while to move past the surface subject of the poem to the deeper issue the poet is after.  As we begin to understand the poem, we realize that the racing of our mind has calmed down considerably.  Third, the mind is often captured by the metaphor of a poem.  A metaphor, of course, takes two very different things and shows one way in which they are similar.  For instance, Robert Frost's famous lines..."two roads diverged in a wood...

Spending an evening with Khrystyna Kozyuk was inspiring.  She delightfully demonstrated her current tecnique of layering paint and moving it around with ordinary home improvement tools.  She had the perfect hand that blended the three primary colors of our limited palette, but not too much where they became muddy.  She continued to work on her demonstration painting throughout the evening as we attempted to play with paint as she did.  We watched as our paintings as well as hers continued to change and change and change as the evening progressed.  We could clearly see her mastery of color, as well as her background of the art fundamentals, which gave her a launching pad for abandoning the rules and being free in her design.  It was apparent that in order to be an abstract painter, you helps to have a background in the conventional color rules and design principals on which you can then fly free.  We had a wonderful evening of playing and experimenti...

Shakespeare in the Park August 28  -  August 29 Event Navigation Sensory Garden Playground Free Play Day  » A Midsummer Night’s Dream Presented by Wheaton College Arena Theater and Wheaton Park District. This is a free event;  donations  and community support are welcomed and encouraged. View a  synopsis for this popular play > Performance Schedule: Shows will be held on Friday, August 28 and Saturday, August 29 and start at 7pm on both nights. Rain Date: Sunday, August 30, 2015. Support Shakespeare in the Park through our  GoFundMe.com page > Your support keeps Shakespeare in the Park available and provides student education opportunities with aspiring local artists, allows access to the arts for all income levels, brings high-caliber artists from Broadway to DuPage County for entertainment and teaching purposes, allows for community collaboration and future partnership opportunities that benefit all ages a...

I began the trip to the Denver Botanical Gardens in search of the huge and elusive Corpse flower but stumbled on to the horse art of sculpture Deborah Butterfield.  The artist has spent her career focused on horses and all they represent.  Her horses are at once representational, abstract and metaphorical.  Each is individual, often named for the artist's own horses or places of significance.  With the slightest gestural line, she is able to evoke an enormous presence that strikes a universal cord.  Over time, Butterfield's horse form became more abstracted and she began to incorporate found materials such as sticks, mud, metal and wood into her sculptures.  The ephemeral quality of these natural materials led her to bronze casting.  With one exception, the works you see in Deborah Butterfield's The Nature of Horses are bronze sculptures cast from her original wooden assemblages--an amazing fool-the-eye technique.  The exhibit is on display in t...