I decided to try my hand at musical composition. This is my first piece. I call it "We Spin Together".

(This is just the melody)

And here's how it sounds:

Just another painting. I did this one earlier this year.

This is my 2nd painting (painted 2014-01-10). I like how it came out, but almost gave up while painting it because I was comparing it to the sky God painted:

I took this photo of a beautiful "vanilla sky" outside of our home in Milwaukee, WI. It served as my model for the painting (along with other memories of looking at sunsets from beneath the spruce tree).

This year (2014) has been, for me, a year of art exploration. And to end it, I'd just like to share what I believe to be the greatest prelude ever written: the Prelude to The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde:

"The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They ...

I recently finished reading Phantastes by George MacDonald for the 2nd time. The first time I read it, I really liked it. This second time, it became one of my all-time favorites. I've never experience any other work of art which feels so much like being in a dream.

To give you an idea of what it's about, here is the end of the Prelude:

"In a genuine fairy-story, everything must be miraculous, mysterious, and interrelated; everything must be alive, each in its own way. The whole of Nature must be wondrously blended with the whole world of the Spirit. In fairy-story the time of anarchy, lawlessness, freedom, the natural state of Nature makes itself felt in the world... The wolrd of the fairy-story is that ...

Yesterday (12/13/2014), my wife and I went to a painting studio to try our hands at painting. I loved the experience! Here is what I came out with:

This was my first time painting since I was a kid doing watercolors in school. Definitely plan to try it again!

Too much detail in art is profanity - a vulgar attempt to sum up that which is beyond finite expression.

The best art is more like a laser beam than a flood light - it doesn't hit everyone, but those it hits, it burns.