What does your face look like?

Posted on by debrawtx

What does your face look like?

I glanced at a Facebook post by Jeff Foster at a stoplight this morning. When I saw his question it set me to thinking. He wrote (I’m paraphrasing) Without using memory or looking in a reflective surface, what does your face look like in this moment? He went on to say, you went to memory didn’t you?!

As the light changed and I began to drive, I wondered what DOES my face look like?  What is my face? And I wondered about what the “face of God” would look like. If we are the image and likeness of God, wouldn’t it stand to reason that my face and yours would look like the face of God? In fact, wouldn’t everything around me be the face of God?

And thats what dawned on me. This is exactly what the face of God looks like, it looks like everything I see. And so that is my face too. When I look in the eyes of another, what do I see there? Myself reflected back at me? My thoughts, opinions, love, judgments, fears? And isn’t that true about everything around me as well?

When I see an undeveloped lot in my neighborhood with weeds growing on it, do I see a lack of beauty? Does it bring up displeasure, distraction, and disdain? Or do I see beautiful little flowers peeking through growth, and life abundantly pushing its way to the sky reaching for the sun and drinking in soft rain showers? In other words, beauty.

What about seeing photos of malnourished children living in squalor due to war and drought? Do I see corrupt and greedy governments? Do I see violence and hatred? Or do I see innocence? Not just in the children, but in the whole of society and the world. Do I see people who are innocently behaving in the only way they know how?  People who are fearful and therefore angry?  People who are afraid and therefore weak and oppressed?

Do I see with humility or with arrogance? Love or fear?  And which “seeing” will bless and which will harm?

I don’t know what my face looks like in this moment.  But I love contemplating the question. What about you?  What does your face look like without looking in a mirror or consulting memory?  What do you see?

Arts in Bloom

Posted on by debrawtx

Paintings shown at Arts in Bloom booth in Laura Moore Fine Art Studios tent.

After an amazing day at the McKinney Arts in Bloom festival, I decided it was time to update my site. Hopefully, you met me there and are checking out my page! I was hoping to upload my latest work here quickly, but alas, I seem to be having technical difficulties with that. So instead, if you are on Facebook, you can go to my artist page and LIKE it! I will post all new work there as well as to this website when I get the kinks worked out.

Here’s the web address: https://www.facebook.com/riverdogstudio

It was gorgeous weather today in north Texas and a real pleasure to meet so many people out enjoying it. The last art show I did was almost a year and a half ago and some of you will remember it to be cold and very windy.

After the big push in the studio to paint new work for the show, I will be taking off a week or so to clean my house. Its awful, and my family would be close in line behind me to say so. So buck up, dear ones, clean clothes and clean bathrooms are in your future! Right after I finish those pesky taxes.

Stay tuned for more to come….

Cows

Posted on by debrawtx

Lately, I have been obsessed with cows–mostly photographing them, but now I’m starting to draw them too. I hope to incorporate them into some paintings sometime soon.

Why cows? Well, I do live in Texas and there are a lot of cows here. I live on the edge of a suburban city that meets the countryside with its farmlands and ranches. So basically, I see cows a lot. And I see a lot of cows.

But there is something else too. They seem to express, or maybe embody, a serenity and peacefulness that I don’t see often in the dashing to and fro of life in the suburbs. They stand so still. They move with such an unhurried walk–step, step, lift head and look, take a swing at the flies, shift weight, step, step, step, turn and look again.

And when they look at me with those big beautiful eyes, their gentle nature is usually what greets me.

Occasionally, I have startled a cow or two and they have let me know that they don’t like the idea of my photographing them. Their eyes widen so that I can see the whites all the way around the iris. Or they bray or bugle – not a mellow moo, but a outright call to cease and desist! But they lose interest soon enough and go back to chewing and walking and looking and resting.

Oh, how I love those cows.

A blog of art

Posted on by debrawtx


I’ve been an artist almost my entire life. I painted my first oil painting, a still life of an apple and an orange, when I was 7 years old. My mother was a painter and sold many paintings and portraits on commission during my childhood. She was mostly a self-taught artist in her medium of choice-oil painting.

I received a degree in studio art from Principia College, having attended other reputable art schools along the way: University of North Texas, Massachusetts College of Art, and The Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe. I would say much of what I have learned has been about learning to see as much as anything else. That and practice with the tools that I use: paint, paint brushes, canvas, paper, pastels, clay, camera. It often comes down to finding a process that will get the result that I see in my mind’s eye. Quite often happy accidents are my favorite passages in paintings.

For the past half year I have been posting paintings and photos on facebook for my friends to see what I am doing. Finally, with some encouragement from family and friends (you know who you are!) I have decided to commit to a public website and blog to talk about making art and sell the art I make. I hope you come back often and enjoy what you read and see. Feel free to join the conversation.