More on: Essays

POSSIBLY THE EARLIEST visual representation of Jesus of Nazareth is a crude drawing scratched on the wall of a Roman house, dubbed by scholars the “Alexamenos graffito.” It shows a man in profile gesturing toward a donkey-headed figure on a cross. Beneath it, the anonymous artist has written, “Alexamenos worships his god.” Around 200 AD…

JONATHAN ANDERSON THINKS ABOUT his paintings in construction terms: to him, they are buildings. They regularly depict architectural structures—façades, doorways, hallways, stairways, chapels, homes, and so on—structures in which people live, move, and interact. But his paintings are not only images of built structures; they also are themselves built structures, material constructions that create space…

IN ONE OF HIS MONOLOGUES about the fictional Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon on the Prairie Home Companion radio show, Garrison Keillor relates: It’s a good time, winter, for all of us. It’s a time when all the things that we’ve been postponing for months can now be put off for a good while longer.…

ONE RADIANT FALL MORNING about eight years ago, I needed to revise some poems before I sent them to editors. I approached my desk armed with questions I ask my students: Is the language alive? Check out the metaphor. Does the poem make an argument or take the reader on a journey? I am a…

The following is adapted from the plenary address given at Image’s Glen Workshop in Santa Fe in August, 2018, on the conference theme of “Telling Truths: Art, Honesty, and Community.” I HAVE WRITTEN THIS TALK as a partial alphabet: it starts with A (for art) and goes through T (for telling truths). For alphabetic languages,…

IN FALL OF 2016 I RETURNED TO THE CLASSROOM, filling in for a friend who was on sabbatical. The course was a seminar for art students, one that I had taught many times before I retired. My friend had used Chaim Potok’s My Name Is Asher Lev as one of the texts, just as I…

IMAGE HAS ALWAYS embraced the idea that art often speaks better than argument, and that seems especially true in times of grief. For this issue, we’ve chosen to print a poem rather than a traditional editorial. As the Image board and staff search for a new editor, we and our community are in a state…

YOU WERE HOLDING THE BEEF DIP you had brought to the vegetarian potluck when I met you. The potluck was the lunch hour of the day-long birthing class at our midwife’s cabin. Through the large window behind the kitchen sink I saw the snow falling heavy and wet on the woods behind her home. I…