Artist Ken Fellows Writes about Watercolor Painting as a Spiritual Practice

 Artist Ken Fellows Writes about Watercolor Painting as a Spiritual Practice

Guest Writer: Ken Fellows

  Watercolor Painting

Ken Fellows

     Before I took up watercolor painting, I was a radiologist who spent decades contemplating black/white images. My grayscale discrimination is pretty good, and perhaps that’s why my paintings feature light and shadow. A doctor colleague observed at one of my shows, “Well, I see you’re still dealing in shadows.”

Interpreting X-ray images also requires subconsciously rejecting what’s unimportant or extraneous and focusing on the unusual, the variant, and the arresting. The same holds true for watercolor art. When I paint, I do the same thing: I try to extract the essential and defining elements of a scene and leave out those that are mundane or distracting. Art teachers stress that what’s left out of a painting is as important as what’s included. Sometimes deciding what to leave out can be difficult; it complicates the start of every painting.

     Dewitt Hardy was my best teacher. He painted locally and was nationally known as a master of watercolor. His early criticism of my work was that my paintings were “too photographic.” Others have observed, not always admiringly, that “your work looks like a photo.” I offer no defense, even if ‘the look’ is unintentional. 

     I often use personal photos as references for painting, but I usually study and sketch the scene on-site before attempting a final rendition. On-site photos help me recall the ambient light and shadows when I return to my studio. Everything else – the objects, shapes, proportions, and colors – is a candidate for change and innovation.

     Whatever viewers think of my work, if it’s in a show, it has already passed my severest critics—my artist/wife Kristin, photographer/daughter Hannah, and young granddaughter Ella (who always recommends, “Grandpa, there’s not enough color”). They have discerning eyes and good judgment. If they disapprove, the painting never goes on display. My paintings have been selected for approximately 65 shows over the past 22 years. I’ve been fortunate to have the support and encouragement of my family and to have found this ‘2nd act’ in life.                                                                             

    In any case, I paint for pleasure, not for critical approval. I see more things I want to paint than I can ever accomplish. I choose what I like and paint what I see. There’s no message in my work – no karmic meaning, no philosophical intent. When a painting pleases me enough to hang on a wall and my in-house jury approves, I dare to exhibit it publicly. I am satisfied if anyone else finds the effort either pleasing or interesting. 

   “I’ve been drawing all my life, just as a hobby, without really having shows or anything. It’s just an agreeable thing to do, and I recommend it to everybody. I always say to people, practice an art, no matter how well or badly, because then you have the experience of becoming, and it makes your soul grow.”—Kurt Vonnegut

Ken Fellows

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Susan Cushman: Praying with Icons

Cushman: Praying with Icons

Guest Writer Susan Cushman

Susan Cushman, Mother of God Directress with Egg Wash

“I have chosen icons because they are created solely to offer access, through the gate of the visible, to the mystery of the invisible. Icons are painted to lead us into the inner room of prayer and to bring us close to the heart of God.”—Henri Nouwen in Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons (Ave Maria Press, 1987).

In the 1980s, Henri Nouwen spent four years at a spiritual retreat in France. Each year, someone placed an icon in the room where he would stay. At the end of these visits, he wrote a book about his experiences with these icons, titled Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons. He gazed at these four icons for hours at a time, and after patient, prayerful stillness, they began to speak to him. As a man who loved the art of Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Marc Chagall, he could have chosen any of these Western treasures for his meditations. But he chose icons.

When I became an Orthodox Christian, I embraced icons as “windows to heaven” and have prayed before them for many years. As an iconographer, I have written many icons—some commissioned, some as gifts, and some that I have kept in our home—and have found the process similar to a prolonged prayer. These images of Christ, the Mother of God, and various saints and angels draw my heart to God in a way nothing else does. In addition to the “set” prayers I pray in the morning and evening, I sometimes pray specific prayers to saints depicted in the icons. Here is one to the Mother of God:

“Forasmuch as thou art a well-spring of tenderness, O Theotokos, make us worthy of compassion; look upon a sinful people; manifest thy power as ever, for hoping on thee we cry aloud unto thee: Hail! As once did Gabriel, Chief Captain of the Bodiless Powers.” —St. John of Damascus, quoted in “Icons Will Save the World” in First Things (12/20/2007) by Susan Cushman.

Susan Cushman, Memphis

An exhibit of icons opens at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church at 5 p.m. tonight.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Catching Rainbows and Searching for Metaphors

Catching Rainbows and Searching for Metaphors

Guest Writer: Isabel Anders

“The heav’ns are not too high,

God’s praise may thither fly;

the earth is not too low,

God’s praises there may grow.”—George Herbert (1593—1633).

We don’t get direct sunlight in our windows every day in the Pacific Northwest. But on days when it streams brilliantly through my den window, my crystal, snowflake-shaped suncatcher turns it into multiple rainbows across my walls. Each one, to me, is a harbinger of hope.

Both sun and rain come to us free of charge—from forces, and perhaps beings—beyond our immediate perception (Matthew 5:45). We, as humans, are not “too low” to receive their bounty (and sometimes their onslaught)—regardless of our deservingness. 

Even though we know there is no “high” or “low” in space as we now perceive it—it is all relational—the ancient images of light and darkness, sun and shadow (and many others) still speak to us on multiple levels. So it troubles me when popular trends co-opt these primordial, long-shared symbols and use them to keep others in or out of favor. We are better off allowing them to reveal to us our inner state of response to Spirit.

In my ongoing informal study of metaphor and religious language (following my graduate school thesis on the subject), I have consistently observed that stumbling upon the right image, analogy, or picture reveals something about how we perceive reality. Perhaps there is also the depth at which a metaphor reaches us.

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that metaphor helps us grasp the “before unapprehended relations of things” and can deepen our understanding of them. But sometimes metaphor, the language of parables, falls on deaf ears, as it did for many in Jesus’ audience. He explained to his disciples, his serious followers: “It has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 13:11)—implying that people would take his relatable illustrations on whatever level they could.

We don’t need to consciously carry our philosophy with us to catch every rainbow, feel the cleansing wash of summer rain, or dance to whatever music fills our ears with delight. Even as we think we “get” the meaning of the forces around us on earth, there may be surprises when light “dawns” in our hearts—or when rainbows reveal to us shades of meaning and response that earth itself endorses as it receives from the generous Sun.

“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a 

huge ball of flaming gas.” 

“Even in your world, my son, that is not 

what a star is, 

but only what it is made of.”

―C. S. Lewis in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Isabel Anders is the author of Becoming Flame, Spinning Straw, Weaving Gold, and Sing a Song of Six Birds (Mother Bilbee Tales). https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D53LDWQ8?psc=1

Isabel Anders

Joanna joannaseibert.com