With Gratitude in my Heart...

I haven't posted on this blog for over a year.  The reason is that I have been posting my painting updates on Instagram as rob_larson_artist.  I've enjoyed connecting with people all around the world.  I've enjoyed connecting with other artists in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and as far away as France and Singapore.

The downside of Instagram is that it's not a platform for writing about art.  I'm planning on using this blog to write about the creative life and how it impacts community life.  I'm excited to be writing about how the creative process is a universal human activity that has the potential to bring healing, wholeness, integrity and joy to our communities in which we live and work. 

I'm excited about the 2018 year ahead to develop a body of work that I hope you will find encouraging, challenging, inspiring and life giving.  I found this poem this week after listening to Billy Collins on National Public Radio.  I enjoy his conversational style and hope that my future writing on art will be as accessible and revelatory as a Collins poem.  I find the ending of the poem to reveal our tendency to be 'violent' with our culture, ourselves and others.  The poem names this tendency, and points us toward another way, a way of discovery, playfulness and wonder.

With gratitude in my heart.
Happy Thanksgiving,
Rob  


Introduction to Poetry

By Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.