The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 8,200 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 14 years to get that many views.
Back in March of 2012, my pastor came to me with this “crazy” idea. He wanted to do something “monumental,” something that no one in our church had seen before, tags a kick off to the year-long sermon series we were starting using the book “The Story,” which basically takes the Bible and arranges it chronologically rather than in the traditional arrangements of the books.
L (my pastor) and I decided to attempt some live worship art, where I would be painting during his sermon on the Creation, and in the middle of the sermon, he would come “ruin” the painting by throwing black paint all over it (to represent sin). Then I would work during the rest of the sermon to “fix” the painting, as God works to fix us and our sin. We added an extra bonus at the end. All the “fixing” I was doing on the canvas was really turning the mountain and sunset scene that I was painting into a portrait of Jesus.
God was with us that day, because we never practiced the painting before we gave that that sermon, and boy, did it turn out awesome!!! Enjoy the pictures 🙂
Here we go! Starting the sunset, thinking “Be like Bob Ross!”
L, of course, managed to paint over my favorite part of the painting! I was really happy with how the sunburst effect was looking… And then…. Poof! Gone.
Thinking, “It’s okay! I can fix this!”
See? Fixed! 🙂
Last Friday I had the good fortune to be “kidnapped” by my good friend C. Our destination? An over 400-miles total road trip from where we are to the Toledo Museum of Art to view the traveling exhibit of collected works of Edouard Manet.
The details on this exhibit can be found here, and it was WONDERFUL!
While photography was not permitted in the exhibit, I can tell you that I saw 40 works by Manet which are normally housed in museums around the world, such as France, Germany and Denmark! We saw Manet’s portrait of Berthe Morisot in black lace (which I literally started crying when I saw it!) as well as a few of Victorine, his famed model for Olympia and Luncheon on the Grass, not to mention a family portrait of Claude Monet and his family in their garden. Sigh… Artistic bliss!
C and I spent well over 5 hours trolling the exhibits at the museum, and had such a great time just laughing, talking art, and indulging in so many great masterpieces of the art world. You never know what you’ll find at the museum! I encourage everyone to go explore your own local museums with a friend. It makes for a great day of wonderful memories and art, and who doesn’t want more of that? 🙂
Here is Painter Smurf, our unofficial mascot, waiting in line at the museum!
Showing his TMA Manet pride with his twin! (C has a Painter Smurf as well, and we usually bring them when we do artsy things so that we can take photos of where the Painter Smurfs have “travelled.” I think it will make for some fun discussions in my future art classroom!)
C LOVES Monet. So of course she wanted to stop and say hi to his Water Lilies. This one is a study for the twenty that eventually became Monet’s circular room paintings.
I was delighted to find an El Greco. I love his paintings.
Then there were some random other sculptures we found in the ancient galleries.
Hope you enjoyed this “visit” to the museum!
Candice McMath 