art

May 8, 2025 - The textiles and wallpaper created by Newton Paisley of Whitstable, England, can be appreciated and enjoyed on a purely aesthetic level, but knowing the story (or more accurately, the stories) behind the designs, makes the art even more compelling. By Louise Conner

November 21, 2024 - Among the official and unofficial art exhibits at COP29 was a piece that combined realistic art with a type of playacting that taught about reality by use of what wasn't real. By Louise Conner

November 14, 2024 - An installation that spans places, times, and mediums aims to bring to the forefront "what is missing" and how humankind can avert further losses on our plant. By Louise Conner

October 24, 2024 - Shapes, colors, patterns textures are what go into the making of Charley Harper's art—not a particular number of feathers. By Louise Conner

October 3, 2024 - Since 1993, the UN has published a series of stamps that highlights endangered plant and animal species across the world. This puts international cooperation on these issues in the spotlight. By Louise Conner

September 19, 2024 - Artist Kay Sekimachi transforms the fragility of leaves into bowls of beauty. By Louise Conner

August 29, 2024 - Artists Daniel McCormick and Mary O'Brien create sculptures that are aesthetic remedies to ways in which a particular landscape has been degraded. By Louise Conner

July 18, 2024 - When I wrote a piece about Thomas Dambo and his work three years ago, Dambo’s trolls delighted me, but I didn’t know that I would have the opportunity of seeing one first-hand. By Louise Conner

July 11, 2024 - What comes to the notice of Belgium-born artist Adele Renault is the ordinary—ordinary people, pigeons, plants. But her depiction of these very easily overlooked subjects is anything but ordinary. By Louise Conner

July 4, 2024 - A pathway of 55 stepping stones at a rest area in Norway invites travelers to not just stop for minute on their way to somewhere else, but to take some time to really look and be in this particular place. By Louise Conner

June 13, 2024 - Artisan Richard Haining turns old, discarded pieces of wood into new, treasured pieces of art in his "STACKED' collection. By Louise Conner

May 30, 2024 - In 1982, Joseph Beuys heaped 7,000 stone markers in the middle of a German city to prompt the planting of that same number of trees around the city. Over 40 years later, the effects of that project continue. By Louise Conner

May 16, 2024 - Guest writer Rev. Elaine Breckenridge shares a recent experience with an art exhibit that helped her see trash on the beach in entirely new ways. By Rev. Elaine Breckenridge

April 11, 2024 - Toronto, Canada-based artist Ava Roth works with tens of thousands of worker bees living within beehives which she places the creative work she has begun, expecting and hoping that they will complete the work. By Louise Conner

April 4, 2024 - This second article on the work of Makoto Fujimura looks at how putting objects back together again can result in something more beautiful than the original object. By Louise Conner

March 28, 2024 -As an advocate and practitioner of “slow art,” Makoto Fujimura believes that art should be made slowly and deliberately and viewed with this same respect, not just as a background but as a focal point we can immerse ourselves into. By Louise Conner

March 7, 2024 - Some artists use broad strokes to portray the vision they want to communicate. Others, like Olga Prinku, lean into the small. By Louise Conner

February 29, 2024 - You can find photographs of this well-known artist's work in art galleries, but viewing the original pieces which the photographs capture would often require some tramping and some very lucky timing to see in person. By Louise Conner

January 4, 2024 - To thoroughly experience the work of Fanni Sandor, you need to look closely—very closely. In fact, a magnifying glass can be a very useful tool. By Louise Conner

December 20, 2023 - A painting by Irenaeus Yurchuk and a song from The Porter's Gate point to the great gift of light that we remember during Advent. By Louise Conner

October 26, 2023 - When artist Angela Manno combines Byzantine iconography with the subject of species extinction, her goal is nothing less than a reformation of the human view of the earth and its non-human inhabitants. By Louise Conner

September 16, 2023 - Guest writer Colleen shares ways she makes her art practice more earth-friendly. By Colleen Megerle.

September 14, 2023 - Today we welcome back Circlewood friend, Jeff Reed as a guest writer for The Ecological Disciple. Today he takes an insightful look at landscape art. By Jeff Reed

August 31, 2023 - Nicknamed “The Bead King," Gateja is a mixed-media artist and jewelry designer, known for his use of recycled and sustainable materials—in particular, his paper beads. His large-scale, intricate works are often colorful and tend to a hopeful view of the world. By Louise Conner

August 17, 2023 - Today, Circlewood friend and guest writer Elaine Breckenridge shares the work of Camano Island artist and neighbor Susan Cohen Thompson. Along with the art itself, Elaine shares how it has influenced her own understanding of the world around her. By Elaine Breckenridge

July 27, 2023 - Young artist Eden Overland shares some of the art she has created from natural materials she has found growing or fallen onto the ground around her. By Louise Conner

June 28, 2023 - Tanabe Chikuunsai IV's most well-known works catch one's attention, but his sculptures are not stand-alone tributes to one person's creativity and skill. They are rooted deeply in tradition, community, and the earth itself. By Louise Conner

June 22, 2023 - The night sky has guided humans and animals in their travels, created healthy rhythms of rest and work, and has invited humans (including artists)to reflect on their place in a vast universe. By Louise Conner

June 15, 2023 —Jennifer McCurdy draws on the forms and shapes of nature—translating spirals and fractals, seaweed and flowers into vessels that evoke their source in such a way that the viewer sees into the heart of something beautiful and living. By Louise Conner

May 4, 2023 - Through his work as a birch bark canoe maker, Wayne Valliere ties past, present, and future together, water and land, new generations and old traditions. By Louise Conner

April 20, 2023 - Pippa Dyrlaga is a Yorkshire, England-based artist who, with a piece of paper, a drawing instrument, and a precision knife as her only raw materials, creates an imaginative world of creatures and places that evokes awe toward the natural world. By Louise Conner

March 9, 2023 - On the side of many concrete buildings throughout the world, massive weeds have been appearing, causing people to turn their heads and crane their necks in spite of the fact that most people see weeds as undesirable and worthy only of being eradicated. By Louise Conner

February 2, 2023 - The Rosary Chapel, created by Henri Matisse, though very controversial at the time of its creation due to the artist's particular style and history, is, to me, a portrayal of how the Church and Creation collaboratively infuse beauty into each other. By Louise Conner

December 29, 2022 - With her feet and the snowshoes, artist Sonja Hinrichsen tracks out works of art that cross and curve, sometimes over massive expanses of snowy landscape. By Louise Conner

December 22, 2022 - The list goes on and on of who and what we would exclude from God's love, but God's love expands far, far beyond the borders we would make for it. By Louise Conner

December 1, 2022 - I wonder if this Advent, those of us in more comfortable places who have much within our grasp: relative affluence, security and power, might think less about our own need for hope and more about being agents of hope to others. By Louise Conner

November 3, 2022 - Originally a painter and photographer, British artist Hannah Bullen-Ryner has, since 2019, been creating Land Art, using materials found in nature to form intricate works of art that nestle upon the ground as if they live there. By Louise Conner

October 27, 2022 -In today's post, I share four well-loved paintings of autumn along with reflections of how these images can help us welcome the current season. By Louise Conner

September 29, 2022 - 27 artists from around the United States started with identical wooden boxes and made them their own so that they could give them away! On October 1st, the online bidding to benefit A Rocha USA begins! By Louise Conner

September 8, 2022 - Some art seems universal and could be made anywhere, but some art is rooted so specifically in a particular place that it does not seem that it could have come from anywhere else. By Louise Conner

August 26, 2022 - Creating art is an opportunity to listen well and be drawn into a bigger story than our own personal one. By Louise Conner

July 14, 2022 - The art installation, Salmon School, places the plight of salmon and steelhead right before people's eyes through a "school" of blown glass fish hanging from the ceiling, absorbing the viewer imaginatively into their life and movements within a river. By Louise Conner

June 15, 2022 - The techniques of the Dutch Old Masters and the accuracy of scientific observation come together skillfully in the work of Isabella Kirkland. By Louise Conner

May 19, 2022 - We can see the effects of climate change through melting ice and changing sea levels; we can watch the struggles of animals whose habitat becomes uninhabitable to them through climate change, but there are some voices that are harder to hear. By Louise Conner

May 5, 2022 - If all beings are related, there is a responsibility to consider the way we walk and live in this world. By Louise Conner

March 3, 2022 - One of the losses in recent days from the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a museum that held, among other work, a large number of paintings by Maria Prymachenko, probably the most well-know Ukrainian artist. By Louise Conner

February 3, 2022 - The art of Michael Leunig may appear simple—even childlike—it gives us images of ecosystems and connection that deeply remind us of the beauty and joy within both the individual person and the wider community of creation. By Louise Conner

December 30, 2021 - When you lie down a field of flowers, the sights, sounds, and smell surround you—you are immersed in the experience. How do you replicate that for people within a gallery space? By Louise Conner

November 18, 2021 - English stained glass artist Thomas Denny has completed about 60 commissions primarily, though not exclusively, in English churches; each one of those is rooted in the particular commission, community, and place of their inception. By Louise Conner

October 7, 2021 - Soaking in a Georgia O’Keeffe painting can be as refreshing as a spell of idleness can be for people with overly-busy schedules. By Louise Conner

September 16, 2021 - Sometimes the only way anyone will see his works is through the pictures he takes of them before they change, melt, collapse, or are brought down by a passing wind. By Louise Conner

July 29, 2021 - This artist's work lights up the texts, combining the tradition of illumination with meticulous accuracy, creating pages that are vibrant, intricate works of art. By Louise Conner

July 15, 2021 Can we live with other creatures in a such way that not only we thrive, buy they thrive as well? By Louise Conner

June 24, 2021 - Do you remember that feeling when you opened a new, unused box of crayons? That's the feeling that this recycle artist has when he finds ways to use what has been discarded as trash. By Louise Conner

June 10, 2021 - Sometimes a work of artistic redemption must go beyond the borders of our original vision to reach a point of greater completion. By Louise Conner

May 27, 2021 - True goodness and rightness isn't dull; it shimmers and sings with possibility and joy. By Louise Conner

May 13, 2021 - When you love something, you want to protect it. That is one reason why these artists want you to love the places they love. By Louise Conner

April 29, 2021 - We are all old enough to know that we aren't the center of the universe....right? By Louise Conner

April 22, 2021 - On this path in San Francisco, you can walk from the ocean to the sky in just 163 steps. By Louise Conner