Sleeping Princess is an encaustic piece inspired by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh. It was part of the 100 Women Artists in Art History show, organized by the indomitable Alicia Campos. Many women in art history have been overlooked and have not received the attention of their male counterparts. Alicia has gathered 100 contemporary female artists, each of whom interpreted in their own style a historical female artist’s work. 

Margaret Macdonald was a gifted and successful artist in Scotland at the turn of the century. She was born in 1864 in England and moved to Glasgow, Scotland with her family in 1890. She and her sister, Frances Macdonald, enrolled at the Glasgow School of Art.
Margaret was active in the 1890’s and early 1900’s and was a member of “The Glasgow Four”, which included her sister Frances, her future husband Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and her future bother-in-law, Herbert MacNair, both of whom the sisters met at the Glasgow School of Arts.

Margaret used a unique combination of techniques. She piped gesso lines and patterns into the canvas and embedded beads, threads, fabric and other materials in her pieces. She also worked in metalwork, embroidery, and watercolors. Much of her work was collaborative, primarily with her sister and her husband. At the time, Margaret’s process was a well-guarded secret. She made her own gesso and used materials in unusual and creative ways. While her husband’s career often overshadowed hers during their lifetime, Margaret’s innovative and creative style became one of the defining features of the Glasgow Style during the 1890s - 1900s and her work has been increasingly appreciated in recent years.

​New eyes awaken. I send Love's name into the world with wings and songs grow up around me like a jungle. Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes Your Spirit played in Eden. Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise shine on the face of the abyss and I am drunk with the great wilderness of the sixth day of Genesis.

​-Thomas Merton

​New eyes awaken. I send Love's name into the world with wings and songs grow up around me like a jungle. Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes Your Spirit played in Eden. Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise shine on the face of the abyss and I am drunk with the great wilderness of the sixth day of Genesis.

​-Thomas Merton

New eyes awaken. I send Love's name into the world with wings and songs grow up around me like a jungle. Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes Your Spirit played in Eden. Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise shine on the face of the abyss and I am drunk with the great wilderness of the sixth day of Genesis.

​-Thomas Merton

​God experiences pain through His children, works through weakness rather than strength, communicates by dependence rather than independence, and introduces a voice of Christ that flows out of the fumi-e*, an icon of failure and betrayal.

-Makoto Fujimura, Silence & Beauty

   (Broken Beauty, detail)









​*fumi-e: In 1633, after Catholics were expelled from Japan, the Tokugawa government initiated a ceremony using fumi-e (literally "foot-treading picture"). Small bronze and brass plaques were placed on the ground and citizens were forced to walk upon them as a symbol of their rejection of Christianity. If they refused, they were tortured or killed. See Christies for real-life example of a fumi-e. 

​New eyes awaken.
I send Love's name into the world with wings
And songs grow up around me like a jungle.
Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes
Your Spirit played in Eden.
Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise
Shine on the face of the abyss
And I am drunk with the great wilderness
Of the sixth day in Genesis.

​-Thomas Merton

​New eyes awaken.
I send Love's name into the world with wings
And songs grow up around me like a jungle.
Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes
Your Spirit played in Eden.
Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise
Shine on the face of the abyss
And I am drunk with the great wilderness
Of the sixth day in Genesis.

​-Thomas Merton

​New eyes awaken.
I send Love's name into the world with wings
And songs grow up around me like a jungle.
Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes
Your Spirit played in Eden.
Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise
Shine on the face of the abyss
And I am drunk with the great wilderness
Of the sixth day in Genesis.

​-Thomas Merton

New eyes awaken.
I send Love's name into the world with wings
And songs grow up around me like a jungle.
Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes
Your Spirit played in Eden.
Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise
Shine on the face of the abyss
And I am drunk with the great wilderness
Of the sixth day in Genesis.

​-Thomas Merton

​Be still and know that I am God

Psalm 46:10

These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past are good images of what we really desire....For they are not the thing itself, they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. 

- C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

I created this lamp during a Beginning Welding class with Sal St. Germain at the Morean Arts Center in St. Petersburg FL. The base is welded steel and aluminum and the lampshade is encaustic mixed media.

​Life is precious. Not because it is unchangeable, like a diamond, but because it is vulnerable like a little bird.

- Henri Nouwen

In the plan of the Great Dance plans without number interlock, and each movement becomes in its season the breaking into flower of the whole design to which all else has been directed.

​-C.S. Lewis, Perelandra

Joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising of circumstances, even in the midst of suppering, with tears in its eyes.

-Frederick Buechner

"This life of ours is like a street that passes many doors", Ball said, "nor think you all the doors I mean are wood. Every day's a door and every night. When a man throws wide his arms to you in friendship, it's a door he opens same as when a woman opens hers in wantonness. The street forks out, and there's two doors to choose between. The meadow that tempts you to rest your bones and dream a while. The rack-ribbed child that begs for scraps the dogs have left. The sea that calls a man to travel far. They are all doors, some God's and some the Fiend's. So choose with care which ones you take, my son, and one day - who can say - you'll reach the holy door itself."

-Frederick Buechner, Godric

Every moment and every event of everyman's life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men.

-Thomas Merton

This piece is part of the 2018 Exquisite Corpse Games http://exquisitecorpsegames.com, a blind artistic collaboration, in which each artist was randomly assigned the creation of a head, torso, or legs. The assembled pieces were unveiled at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Pete, FL on Nov 1, 2018. 

This encaustic piece, Choices, was inspired by a quote from C.S. Lewis:

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before.

​

I sit in darkness. I sit in human silence.
I begin to hear the eloquent night.
The world of this night resounds from heaven to hell with animal eloquence.
With the savage innocence of a million unknown creatures.
The enormous vitality of their music pounds and rings and throbs and echoes
until it gets into everything, and swamps
the whole world in its neutral madness.

​-Thomas Merton

Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, by prayer & supplication with gratitude, make your requests to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will protect your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.

​-Philippians 4:6