Prayer Collage in Progress - this ain’t photo-shop!

Originally uploaded by bbmarie.

I just completed the finished work for a magazine illustration. The article was about developing a life of prayer by including the small and regular things of life. It was funny in a way because Brenda and I had prayed that we would get some more illustration work and later that day an art director we had never heard of before sent us an inquiring email after she had discovered our work online. As it turns out, she had prayed that same morning that God would put her together with the right artist for this particular article. (She shared this with me after I confessed that her getting in touch with us was a direct answer to our recent prayer.) I find that very cool.

As it turned out it was a tough job because it took me quite a while to get it right. I am so used to strictly fine art and doing what ever I please it can be a difficult adjustment to be making art to serve someone elses specific need. It is a good reminder that just because God has created an opprotunity in our life in some obvious way does not mean our experience will be an easy one.

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The Dreamer

Originally uploaded by bbmarie.

This is a painting that has been develoing slowly over many months. It’s not that I am working on it every day but rather from time to time it gets up on the easel. I always have a group of pieces that I am developing and some times a painting can sit around un noticed for a long time. Or perhaps it is not that I am not noticing it but maybe I just don’t know what to do next. Some times I feel like I am a painting that is sitting in a forgotten corner of the studio and nothing is happening to me. I feel like I am languishing. I have felt that way a lot lately. These small portraits are very dense with details, the fruit of a long labor of love. I am putting them up on the web site to share them with you.

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collage card

Originally uploaded by bbmarie.

Brenda and I were making collage cards today with the idea of taking them down to the farmer’s market tomorrow in hopes of selling them there along with some of the other fun stuff we have made. We are a 5 minute walk from the market and have really enjoyed going down there though out the week and taking in the sights and smells as well as enjoying the conversations. So if you are in GR come down tomorrow and say hello.

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art studio

Originally uploaded by bbmarie.

This is a shot of my new art studio in the carriage house behind our new house here in Grand Rapids. It is very rustic. There is no electricity, just a hurricane lamp for when I need to find something at night. The window in the back looks out into the fabulous garden of our neighbor Shirley. The window has no pane of glass, just a board that slip out and gets se to the side in the morning and put back at night. I like how rough it is because it feel like an adventure just being in there. I have a little more privacy then I have had for the last few years when I just worked in the middle of the house were traffic came and went.

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portrait of a girl with red tulip

Originally uploaded by bbmarie.

This is another new painting that I begun while in Brooklyn and finished (I think) yesterday here in Grand Rapids. This was done from some drawings I had done a few years ago of my daughter Pearl. The back ground is mostly taken from an early rennesance painting. I really like the way landscape gives a painting a setting as well as feeling of deepth. The blouse she is wearing was part of the inspiration for this piece. It reminds me of queen annes lace. I really love the details of clothes that have decorative potential.

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man reading

Originally uploaded by bbmarie.

This is a painting I finished just before we moved back to Grand Rapids. The idea is a book as a portal to another place. Perhaps the place is one of insight or maybe it is God. Maybe the book will bring you a much needed encouragment or perhaps help you make a connection you have been looking for.

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Link

Originally uploaded by bbmarie.

This painting is titled Link. Perhaps the title has to do with the way the shapes and lines in this piece seem to be interwoven together and connected as if this were what one was seeing under a high power microscope of some kind of organic tissue structure. I have continued to enjoy looking at this painting for the way the particles appear to float inside the picture plane. The layering and suggestion of depth seem to reflect something of what my life feels like, several pulsing layers coexisting with each other, the different aspects of my life that interlock with one another to create the pulsing web that is my life. Painting is a mysterious thing the way it comunicates to us without sound and in complete stillness and yet if you are quiet before a painting like this one it is as if it begins to dance and hum in a very real way. Jacques Deval has said that “God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved birds and invented cages” and I would say that when I take time to look into Brenda’s paintings the cage door swings open again.

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