by J. Douglas Thompson | Feb 13, 2023 | General Information
Wondering while Wandering…
…an artist’s limp toward finding ‘Radiance Through the Rain’
‘May the Rain of Suffering Soften Our Hearts,
Seeping Radiance to Our Thirsty Places.’
J. Douglas Thompson© 2022
Todays thought via this poem relates to the strong winds of disconcertion regarding world events that pervade our spaces daily and how the White Pine of the north gives us thoughts of response.
Granite Places*
Inhospitable – hard – windswept – bare
Granite horseshoe wildly flung
Vast and north, strong and free
Canadian Shield.
Emaciated quilt of threadbare soil thinly carpets vast expanse
Quilts – so easily displaced – lay bare this giant’s plate
Revealing slightest pink – textured lines striate – memories from icy wars.
There they rise – emerging
Seeming impossibility
Deriding dust so wafer thin
Titans tall of windswept green – reach to touch and kiss the sky
Swaying stately splendour strong.
Below at base – the fissure waits
Giant’s lonely seed is blown
Tumbling red faced, to the void
Whack!
Naked and exposed it falls
Avian breakfast seeks above? Whew!
Shiver shakes it full awake
Decisions nose right in the face
To hope and dream for future’s sake?
Thoughts – these crazy thoughts
Visions – vast with arms to sweep
Expressions praise and shade to give.
Digging deep – to cut through stone
Really?
Granite?
Imperceptible topsoil
Ridiculous
Kill the dream!
Impossible – growth – that large?
Roll over – take a nap
Give rest a try
Go back, they say – and close your door
Dream your dreams – but far away
Expose your head?
Annihilate?
I hear it speak – that lowly seed
Throbbing choices to endure
Reaching down and reaching up
Pushing back the darkness deep
Gestation’s travel now complete – new life’s about to come
Tiny head peeks skyline’s orb and – groans
Scorching heat of summer’s sun
Blasts of autumn’s freezing rain
Depth of frostbite’s bitter bite
Year to follow lonely year.
Faithful faces tests of time
Mock and ridicule deride
Sneering, laughing, shaking heads
Walking backs again depart
Bother?
Why? Just shrivel up – and die
No one there to see or care
Yet…
Monolith’s monicker, great white pine
Grandeur’s dance from stage afar
Bent with windswept backs they stand
Trademarks of the stalwart north.
Wild framed warriors – scars abound
Contorted mar of deepest scar
Groans of grief – misunderstood
Twisted broken limbs that speak – and so they lean
Quietly, humbly into view.
Artist paints His masterpiece
Single focal point he claims – astounding art – all that remains
Image of decided truth
Gracing palace walls where
Thousands come to stand and gaze
Stay to revel and to praise
Giving up?
Yes, YOU!
Crushed with pressure-crevice living?
Walk away?
To be sure – temptations strong
Softness winks her warm caress
Enticingly says, ‘disengage’
Constant storms too much you say?
Long and lonely vigils wait
Broken through obedience
Surrounded and embraced by few
Raising standards very high
Billowed, bent and sails all full
Driving roots through solid rock
Framed in grace a light to spot
Short-lived lives – to count or not?
So let me say, keep at it, despite the heavy legs and elbows worn thin having done what is right, for, when all is said and done, when the King arrives back, there will be fair reward, if we hang in there, not having slipped out the back door, but rather keeping on keeping on with tenacity Galatians 6:9 JDT paraphrase
* Excerpt from ‘Radiance through the Rain’ Copyright 2020, J. Douglas Thompson
My previous book ‘Radiance through the Rain’ is a self-published, hard-cover limited edition coffee table book showing more than 100 images of my paintings. Alongside of the paintings are sixty-one essays on how the act of painting is a metaphor for doing life and relationships. Much of that thinking will bleed into this blog, but here, this is just you and I quietly pondering our devotional lives. For those of you who purchased ‘Radiance Through the Rain,’ maybe you think some of my wandering thoughts are worth sharing. This blog is the venue!
Carpe Diem, 48″ X 60″ Acrylic on Canvas © J.Douglas Thompson
by J. Douglas Thompson | Feb 1, 2023 | General Information
Wondering while Wandering…
…an artist’s limp toward finding ‘Radiance Through the Rain’
‘May the Rain of Suffering Soften Our Hearts,
Seeping Radiance to Our Thirsty Places.’
J. Douglas Thompson© 2022
Thought’s on Mists
My easel today holds memories, recollections of what was and what I have left to consider to re-describe as I cast my mind over the past seventy-three years. I love taking photographs, but that is a separate love affair from that of painting. I seldom use any of my photos as a reference when painting. Each stands alone.
Today, I paint and while pushing my paint, I’m prone to ponder! The coming ‘letters from my studio,’ will be throwback thoughts across my life as an artist and a photographer with a bit of faith and philosophy thrown in.
What usually occurs when painting, is my hand dips paint with a rag or paper towel and then begins the slashing and whipping of rag against canvas. Sometimes while slapping the paint around an image appears that triggers a memory and if not, oh well, at least I’m left with texture.
Today what is coming to fruition from rag to canvas is an old memory of Alberta, Canada’s Lake Louise veiled in the heart of the Rockies. It shimmers turquoise. The sun slants left, mountainside clearly showing the rock face holding interesting patterns of ice-white water otherwise described as snow.
Up and over the first third of my composition stand a group of rugged pines showing their resolute passion for survival, with backs held ramrod straight. This is somewhat different from their cousins of the east, the Great White Pine. Found on the Canadian Shield, which is made of solid granite, it stretches far north beyond human habitation. There the pines lean way right, having a strong west wind blow them strident since birth.
However, here I am, by means of memory, sitting in my studio chair, my mind next to the lake. This, for the most part will be my way of sharing my journey and stories. A breeze sends a cold signal that maybe things are not as well as maybe they seem. A mist swirls down from the heights, adding a negligee of blue-white light over the rock verticals.
Mists come as the mysterious Spirit comes, first a breeze, a tender touch that kisses my cheek, leaving it slightly wet as the mist envelopes my view.
Sometimes the Spirit enlightens with warmth and sometimes adds a veil. The why and wherefore of the Spirit’s call to humanity is a mystery. I still see some of the hard formation that lays behind, but mostly it is misty grey. Life is seldom a clear-cut course.
More than often, we take slow steps, or well we should, as we navigate life’s journey. Sometimes the mists suddenly lift, and we see that all is well, and warmth surrounds our steps. And then, just as suddenly, a corner turned, and the wall of grey seems to pull us in, and our fears arise. Life is struggle! The flip side of pain is joy! Grey mists, darkness and sunlight. Despite the variables, keep putting your proverbial foot one step ahead of the last and choose to ‘Live!’
The eastern lakes mists steal lower shoals as across the bed of night they wrap all in the comforter of thoughts alone until the sun winks her soft hello. Maybe a fire in a hearth breaks its silent steal where humanity attempts to push away the darkness. It is here I want to dwell for a moment today.
The early sun rises east casting her curling smile on the grey and the mist begins her dance. Together they weave their sensuous sway from the lake and up the mountain as warm interacts with cool.
Later, after coffee is done and bacon crisp has brought us its pleasures, the sun begins to blow its warmth and the mist disappears. About 11 a.m. and she’s gone! The mystery of wonder that refracted light into the wondrous soft silk of mist is now a memory.
So, it is with these, my few short years of life, and yours!
I sat tonight during my walk west, in a field down the way, and reflected on the evening sky and the mists that wanted in. My life is like the mist, and yes will soon cover all as I pass into eternity.
My physical body is the present entity that enfolds the real me: my soul and spirit. This my cocoon will remain behind for the mourners and then disappear, too, but my spirit will remain, having travelled to a different dimension of interim wonder.
For today, I can have hope that as the mist envelops the here and now, there will be light again, and the field that I sat in tonight will re-appear, fully regenerated in its original wonder, perfection ready for a never-ending reality.
Finally, in all my paintings, my desire is to portray the light of hope peeking, even when most seems blue-grey mist. Often, the result is most beautiful when that soft light glazed, seen through the negligee, as she hides the veiled beauty of what can become if the invitation is accepted.
The Spirit of all mists comes suddenly, and then just as suddenly opportunity vanishes.
James 4:14 NIV …‘Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.’
I love it when mists surround the landscape in mystery
by J. Douglas Thompson | Jan 16, 2023 | General Information
I hesitate to share the following story! However being that it has been the underpinning of my reality for more than 6 decades affecting my worldview personally and artistically, I believe it needs to be stated as ground zero for this and future blogs. I again apologize to those I’ve hurt out of that reality. I’m incredibly grateful for the handful of rescuers who listened well, leaned into my reality during the last half of that sixth decade through to today enabling me to find freedom from the strictures of early childhood abuse.
Shut Down to Darkness *
It had begun…
The long rain…
The drowning of a child’s soul – my soul!
My parents made the choice to train for vocational ministry. We arrived at that place when I was three years of age and left just before my fourteenth birthday. From the time of our arrival and for the next eleven years, my parents relinquished their parental responsibilities to a proverbial institutional state. I became for all practical purposes a ward, which turned out to feel like a high-walled enclosure that was authoritarian and controlling. Under the dark cover of legalistic propriety there was a parallel universe of physical, sexual, emotional, and spiritual abuse.
Not everyone who lived there had the same experience, but this is my story.
A dyslexic child with an artistic bent, math was far from my strong suit. Grade 2 erupted volcanic as I attempted to please my teacher and do my best. This was not to be. Every simple arithmetic computation was a massive blur of hieroglyphic confusion. It was innocence that had arrived in Grade 2 bliss. My right brain lobe, however, swept imagination high, passing osmosis-like through lath and plaster walls upwards, where cumulous castles floated far off and wide. Dancing visual beauty consumed me instead of the proposed structured equations. My artistic bent held sway from earliest days!
My left brain, well, in full-out free fall, smashed hard against structured expectations and met the wrath of God himself – or so I was told!
All my mistakes were seen to be purposeful acts of defiance against this teacher personally, the institution, and of course, God, who apparently directed the place. She would insist that I stand up in front of the class and confess my ‘sin of disobedience and defiance’ for not doing the math correctly. She then would insist that every night after school that I be kept back to write on the blackboard 100 times my offences, then leave these until the next morning in an attempt to shame me into compliance.
This went on and on, day after day, month after month.
Finally in exasperation this Grade 2 teacher had enough of my ‘intransigence’ and let me know that the hour of judgement had finally come!
She called for full-fledged intervention!
I was marched out in front of my classmates to the second storey of the other school building next door and upstairs. The room was long and narrow, like a shoebox lying on its side, with twenty-foot ceilings and a small window high at one end. It was dark and menacing.
Nine teachers and a principal, like giant trolls, deep in scowls, snarling, circled tightly around me—this trembling six-year old. Their faces burned deep into my memory. Cult-like, they spewed hate and lies, accusing me of great sin. Cringing in recoil and trembling white, I wept while they mocked. There was no escape. They pressed tighter in tall concentric crush, one by one insisting I confess what I did not understand.
For my child’s ears, their words screamed horror: ‘No, you have pushed this teacher far too far. Extreme demands extreme! Repent to us, each in order, and repent to your creator God. Now! You must repent! You will be punished today by us, yes! But He waits and will punish you down the line to be sure. Just you wait! God doesn’t take kindly to prideful defiance!’
They waited, pushing me from one side to the other, forcing me to confess. Then, while the leering tight circle of female teachers watched, the male principal commanded, ‘Strip down your pants, boy.’ He took a fifteen-inch long black and red leather razor strap and lashed nakedness blue black. When it was over, they insisted I apologize again to each of them in turn, and that I pray again to let heaven and earth know that I understood my serious crime. They then reminded me that my ‘loving heavenly Father’ would be watching carefully to see if my transgressions were to continue.
Continue they did, as math eluded my right-slanted brain. For the next five years I daydreamed my cumulous castles floating far off and wide between ongoing variant abusive discipline—coming, ironically from people who purportedly believed as part of their foundational mandate, God’s love. They insisted the only way to resolve my unsuccessful turn at math—seen as defiance—was to break the will of this young wild heart.
At the end of the five years they succeeded. I cracked and broke! In uncontrolled hysteria, swinging between laughing and crying fits, back and forth, rolling on the floor, my muscles went into spasms of twitching and my head shook and jerked.
At this point, my parents, long preoccupied with their ‘ministry,’ recognized I needed help. They took me to a doctor eighty miles away, who recommended I be put to bed for rest. For the next two years, and unfortunately, alone in upstairs isolation of our home, I shut down completely! Drowning in dark escape, curled in fetal form, I often slept twenty-two of the twenty-four hours of each day.
Deep tendrils grasped my ankles, entwining and entombing me in blackness. I struggled to come to the surface but anchors cemented me into the blue-black waters of coma-edged reality. A distant pinprick light mocked its relief from high above. Disembodied voices came, but mostly went. Gasping for air, I thrashed to find surface’s breath that would give relief. I clawed my way out of the semiconscious depths to take short respites for food and water, and then slip back again into canyons’ deep recesses. I was alone, adrift in and below the high seas of an ongoing death grip and no one was searching for the person overboard.
And so my conundrum and anger began. I felt abandoned by indifferent parents, never sensing what it was to receive a parent’s tender reassurance. I was bewildered by and even embittered with a brand of institutional Christianity modeling a different message than my parents verbalized. Confusion reigned! Eventually a man body emerged, tied up tightly, stored high in the attic’s soul where it remained numbed and frozen, hidden in darkness for decades to come.
I began to identify many things in the broader scope of Christianity that have been done in Jesus’ name, both despicable and devastating. For a long time, I failed to see much that is representative of His character of love and grace and His vast creative nature.
My personal quest however, is to shift the paradigm in this ‘my little tide pool’ by presenting beauty, hope, and truth. I wish to point not to the past, rehearsing harsh rhetoric spoken in his name, but rather redirect my focus to the present where the master of all artists—and my good shepherd who came seeking a very lost sheep far out on a dangerous cliffside—continues to restore me.
*Excerpt from ‘Radiance Through the Rain’
J Douglas sitting contemplatively on Cadillac Mountain, Maine, USA
by J. Douglas Thompson | Jan 4, 2023 | General Information
Just a Feather on the Lane
Earlier this Autumn in walk’s attempt to keep body and soul intact as shadows lengthen and days grow short, I glanced askance and there it lay…this blue black wonder of flight…a feather lost of neighbour jay…
Now, one may see or pass without a second thought but in its immediacy it demanded that I stoop to consider…
I’ve been a designer/artist for five plus decades…I’ve studied well my craft and worked the midnight oil years over…yet in all my attempts where my hand invades canvas, nothing comes close to what demanded my attention this evening upon the lane…
Sure, with great care it may have been possible to replicate a facsimile of sort on canvas stretched, but not one that carried and oozed life in full out dimension…an intricate part of floating, swooping, raucous exuberance itself…it sang out as myriad versions daily sing, that intricate design exudes each centimetre square if only we would stop to smell and see.
It sadly also reminded me of fallen brevity and the curse of death. Life itself was originally conceived to be a sweep of raucous joy and full-out delight, but the fall of a blue, black feather reminds me of my days, and each action to choose well.
Many of you may think my mind facile in giving credence to the possibility of design that transcends human knowledge. To me it is mystery worth pondering deep that a very intelligent designer’s hand and indeed spoken word here, and not just random unguided happen-chance that had passed this way…and with this, at least for me, the palette of life and hope seems much richer again tonight with this fallen work of art.
by J. Douglas Thompson | Dec 12, 2022 | General Information
Wondering while Wandering…
…an artist’s limp toward finding ‘Radiance Through the Rain’
‘May the Rain of Suffering Soften Our Hearts,
Seeping Radiance to Our Thirsty Places.’
J. Douglas Thompson© 2022
On thoughts beyond the plague
And all was well…
Or so it seemed..and then and yet
Another crash has come to set
The act called life
And choices left
Our parts to play
To gain or be bereft…
We went about our daily chore
And thought that there was little more
To do or be
Those ‘musts’ that clang
Like rusty bells
That wore us down
And tried to drown
Our laughter, joy or song.
And in reminders off-tune rant
At days long end, we say, we can’t
Yet, here we are
To once again
Though weary through and through
We push toward
Our single song
In this long year of twenty two
It seems, yes wrong
That just as islands
We’re just fine
But really know
That’s just a line.
And we’ve been told
Without a doubt
To keep ourselves and those about
At distance safe
To not expose
Our inner fate
That broken we
Ourselves indeed
In isolated state
Are deep, so deep in need.
We thought it well
To keep our hearts
Our secret store
Well hidden, locked
Our longings past
Our longings fore
And so, shut down we dwelt
Our inner lives
Alone at core.
It’s in our hearts
That stoic we
Placed walls against the hurt of past
And statements make
Just to ourselves
To place our stake
That islands we
Shall still remain
Above the fray
Stiff upper lipped
And yet we lay
And yes, we pray
And dark at night
Alone we stay.
From morn till night
With just a nod, a smile or slight
A hand in clasp, or distant sneer
The other wish to disappear
And yet beneath our dermal skin
Our heart lay cold
With stated stand
Of not in want or need
At least it seemed
To us
As on we went in daily rounds
To fortify
That we flew high
Above it all
And needed none,
Not even one
To come by close
And so afford us
Love.
And so and now
The tide has turned
And want, yes we
From others free
A touch
And so to see
If given chance
On future date
It might be wise
In promise pure
To act upon
And give our hearts to others sure
Not just in heads
Or passing nods
But heart to heart
With depths that throb
With deepening care
The other for
Including self, which we have wore
So sawdust thin
That just before
We didn’t love ourselves at core
And so it came
The neighbour less and less, than more.
So finally,
This act has past
The play called plague
Its shadow cast
And yet it clings
The danger rings
Across the shore
And so we stand
With grateful hearts
For life still giv’n
Another day
To laugh, to cry to stay
To yes imbibe
The wonders way
And yet there lies
Good bye
Forestalled
And so to stop
T’would be with wise
One further thought
As yes distractions rise
To cast our minds
A moment fore
An open door
For what’s beyond
A crack of light
Despite our night
That offers hope
With laughter, joy and pure delight
A place called Evermore.
Wondering while Wandering…
