why art for a burning world?
The world feels overwhelming with change and uncertainty. To hold both knowing and unknowing in a delicate, dynamic, and highly creative tension is one of the primary skills we need if we want to live with courage and wisdom in an unstable climate. Art for a Burning World is about finding wonder and nurturing creativity within us. It can help us express ourselves, connect and tend to one another in community, and offer resilience in our uncertain and sometimes terrifying world. We can’t let any current despair strangle our imaginations nor do we want to join a caravan of despair.
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Presentation + Conversations
Our paintings are nearly always non-representational. We create together on the same canvas forging ideas together that we could not create alone. Working in acrylic and mixed media, we use hand stretched canvas on wooden bars or paint directly on wood. Before we begin an original painting, we inscribe the un-gessoed canvas with a blessing, poem, or intention for the earth and our more than human world. You will receive a copy of that meditation, along with our journal notes on the painting, in a stitched fabric pocket. Our paintings are always signed on the back along with our studio seal.
Contact the studio for more information and pricing.
Art Exhibition
Our fine art prints originating from our paintings are made using our high-quality inkjet printer, museum-quality media, and pigment inks. We use an acid-free, 100% cotton rag paper with a bright white, smooth surface. This paper also has a high color gamut and black density. This combination gives you a high-quality fine art print that are created in limited numbered editions, signed by Chuck + Peg and embossed with our studio seal.
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Art Workshops
Ephemera is transitory, collectible memorabilia typically written, printed or relics that inspire deeper memories. Here you will find journals for your own thoughts, cards printed from our paintings and blank on the inside for your reflections, Celtic Earth Crosses made from earths clay and fired, and small framed prints from our original painting sketches.
Contact the studio for more information, sizing and pricing.
Community Gatherings
If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else, we must see our neighbors with our imagination as well as our eyes. That is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.
– FREDERICK BUECHNER
Love and Hope is the story of uncertainty, of coming to terms with the risk involved in not knowing what comes next, which is more demanding than despair and, in a way more frightening, and immeasurably more rewarding. By living out hope and resistance in public together with strangers of all kinds, we can overcome together the catechism of fear. Through the language of art and the conversations that come from creating together, we can begin to trust in one another and the community it forms. Our informal gathering takes place at our studio in the St. Croix River Valley, Wisconsin every other month or as desired by the group.
Contact the studio for information about joining our gathering.
Books
There are many invitations to listen, to engage, to be open, to love and remind ourselves that we don’t own the answers. We offer our own writings as well as the writings from our community as a way to provide sustenance and growth for your journey,
Gary Marx & Daniel Overturf
Illinois Trails & Traces: Portraits and Stories along the State’s Historic Routes
Exploring Illinois history through the paths we travel
Illinois Trails & Traces partners the deft writing of Gary Marx with vivid photography by Daniel Overturf to illuminate ever evolving patterns of travel and settlement. Taking the reader on a journey down early buffalo traces and Native American trails, this book shows how these paths evolved into wagon roads and paved highways. Marx and Overturf explore historic routes ranging from Route 66 to the Underground Railroad, all the way back to post-Ice Age animal migration trails followed by Paleo-Indian people. The authors also examine how rivers, canals, and railroads spurred the rapid rise of Illinois as a modern state.
Marx and Overturf bring history into the present by including over forty photographic portraits and written profiles of individuals who live along these routes today. Many of the people you will meet on these pages work to preserve and honor the history of these passages. Others profiled here embody the spirit of the old roads and provide a vivid link between past and present. Through this journey, we discover that we’ve all been traveling the same road all along.
Gary Marx & Daniel Overturf
A River Through Illinois
A River Through Illinois, an innovative collaboration by journalist Gary Marx and award-winning photographer Daniel Overturf, carries readers down the 330-mile Illinois Waterway, from the urban landscape of Chicago to the state’s most rural areas. Combining literary impressions, history, and personal narrative with stunning color photographs, this remarkable book transports readers to places most have never been: three hundred feet below the city of Chicago in a TARP pump station, above the Illinois River in a lift-bridge operator’s hut, in the wheelhouse of a towboat pushing twenty thousand tons.
The story of the river is told by the people who live along the waterway’s banks and work its course, who rely on it for their livelihoods, their recreation, and their spiritual sustenance. More than one hundred original color photographs and dozens of conversations with waterway residents, workers, and visitors capture the essence of the waterway, exposing its course and uncovering its past.
From Mud Creek to Peoria Lakes, a biologist, an ecologist, and a hydrologist consider the edge of the watershed Meredosia, Chandlerville, Henry, the Kankakee River and its tributaries and discuss the changing nature of the river, including new threats such as sedimentation, and the loss of habitat. Hunters, commercial fishermen, and bridge tenders share their stories that demonstrate resiliency in the face of great change.