Othling Pastels

Welcome to my web site! (Which is terminally under construction!) You may view original pastel paintings in the gallery, and even shop for giclée prints and note cards. I am no longer represented by any galleries so I can keep my original paintings affordable for you! Contact me at terri@othlingpastels.com for pricing information on original paintings.

The visual world is actually colorless unless light is reflecting on it, which provides a trope for the notion that we are essentially colorless unless we reflect the light of God.
- Karen Mulder, It Was Good, Making Art to the Glory of God

December 10, 2009….We will miss your sweet, gentle spirit…

(the following prayer courtesy of Libbie+)

Holy, holy, holy, perfect Lord of Hosts,

heaven and earth are full of the holiness of your glory.

You have created all creatures with your word.

You carry them all without being weary,

and feed them all without ceasing.

You think about them all without forgetting any.

You give to all without being diminished.

You water all the earth without running dry.

You watch over all without sleeping.

You hear us all without neglecting any.

While your presence fills every place,

they have told us about you in a way we can receive.

–An Ethiopian prayer;

From Richard Marsh,

Black Angels: the Art and Spirituality of Ethiopia

What is the crying at Jordan? Who hears, O God, the prophecy? Dark is the season, dark our hearts and shut to mystery. Lord, give us the grace to awake us, to see the branch that begins to bloom; in great humility is hid all heaven in a little room.

– verses one and three of the hymn, What is the Crying at Jordan? Words: Carol Christopher Drake (b.1933)

Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.
Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.
It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest,
eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep.

(Psalm 127:1-2, ESV)

Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise.
You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy!
For your dew is a dew of light,
and the earth will give birth to the dead.

(Isaiah 26:19, ESV, courtesy of Libbie+)

For the early church, Lent was just the opposite of a dreary season of restriction and self-torture. It was understood as an opportunity to return to normal life – the life of natural communion with God that was lost to us in the Fall. This perspective is clearly expressed in Eastern Orthodox liturgy and theology: “In the Orthodox teaching… the world was given to [Adam and Eve] by God as ‘food’ – as a means of life… In food itself God… was the principle of life. Thus to eat, to be alive, to know God and be in communion with Him were the one and same thing. The unfathomable tragedy of Adam is that … he ate ‘apart’ from God in order to be independent of Him… because he believed that food had life in itself and that he, by partaking of that food, could be like God, i.e., have life in himself.” (Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy)

…Lent is derived from a Saxon word meaning “spring.” In the early church, Lent was viewed as a spiritual spring, a time of light and joy in the renewal of the soul’s life. It represented a return to the “fast” that Adam and Eve broke: a life in which God was once more center and source, and the material world was again received as a means of communion with God. This return to authentic human life was made possible by the Incarnation.

-excerpts taken from Marjorie Thompson’s book, Soul Feast

Every year Christmas comes around again and forces us to deal with God in the context of demanding and inconvenient children; gatherings of family members, many of whom we spend the rest of the year avoiding; all the crasser forms of greed and commercialized materiality; garish lights and decorations. Or maybe the other way around: Christmas forces us to deal with all the mess of our humanity in the context of God who has already entered that mess in the glorious birth of Jesus.

-Eugene Peterson, from the intro of God With Us, Rediscovering the Meaning of Christmas

I have so loved all sense of Him, sweet might

Of color and sound,-

His tangible loveliness and living light

That robes me round.

- John Hall Wheelock, Exile from God

“When you painted on earth…it was because you caught glimpses of Heaven in the earthly landscape. The success of your painting was that it enabled others to see the glimpses too.”

- C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

“If we have nothing above us

we soon succumb to what is around us.”

- English theologian P.T. Forsythe

It is finished! This is proof that color can make the most mundane of rooms seem divinely special!

Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways. [even in a bathroom!] -Oscar Wilde

“St. Anthony’s Church” in Cordova, NM

Available soon in 18×24 and 8×10 image sizes on the SHOP page.

There is not one blade of grass,
there is no color in this world

that is not intended

to make us rejoice.

- John Calvin

(Photos taken in San Luis Valley, Colorado September 17, 2008)

Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things -

For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon the trout that swim;

Fresh firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscapes plotted and pieced-fold, fallow, and plough;

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise Him.

“Observing the arid and unattractive character of most dogmatic theology of his time, [German theologian Urs von Balthasar] claims that unless we have a deep sense of beauty, not only will dogmatic theology remain bone dry and unconvincing, but we will also lose a proper sense of the good in the world…As fallen creatures living in a broken world, we cannot ignore, deny, or escape its flawed condition. But as renewed and redeemed creatures, living in the expectation of a new heaven and a new earth, we are also capable of seeing traces of the world’s original goodness and of tasting the Lord’s presence in the midst of it all. To recognize true beauty requires mature, sensitive and spiritually attuned discernment.“

-Adrienne Chaplin, Beauty Transfigured, an essay from It was Good, Making Art to the Glory of God

Giclée Prints and Note cards are now available to purchase through PayPal on the “Shop” page! Check it out!

For those wanting to know a little history of the Giclée printing process…

Giclée (pronounced “zhee-clay” ), is an invented name for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word “giclée” is derived from the French language word “le gicleur” meaning “nozzle”, or more specifically “gicler” meaning “to squirt, spurt, or spray”. It was coined by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial “Iris proofs” from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints. (Wikipedia.org)

Patrick Carr of Carr Imaging in Albuquerque digitally captures and accurately reproduces the vibrant colors of my original pastel paintings, which is not an easy task!