Two Houseplants (2023)

Michael Banning’s Two Houseplants (2023) is, at first glance, a modest still life: two potted plants resting on a table, angled sunlight spilling across their leaves, a patterned curtain softening the backdrop. Yet the longer I stay with it, the more the painting feels like a mirror. I don’t just see plants. I see myself and my oldest friend Nate—two lives that sprouted together, grew side by side, bent in different directions, and yet, through resilience and return, continue to share light.

We were nearly inseparable as boys. To be baptized on the same day is to be joined in a peculiar intimacy, rising from the same waters as if planted in the same soil. From there, our roots intertwined—youth group meetings, church camps, late-night talks about life, and eventually, standing together at the front of the sanctuary to lead worship. I remember the many times we played Audio Adrenaline’s The Houseplant Song. Its playful satire—about hiding from the world with nothing but “my houseplants and me”—made us laugh so hard we could barely keep ourselves in rhythm. (clang. sorry) The absurdity became ours. Two teenagers, half-serious in faith and half-aware of its comic contradictions, grinning at each other as the others at Brown Bag chuckled along.

When I look at Banning’s painting, I see how one plant grows tall and straight, leaves striped with complexity, while the other spreads outward, round-leafed, exuberant. That, too, was us. Through high school, graduation, and even a stretch of college together, we seemed aligned, two stems reaching for the same light. But as Erik Erikson reminds us, young adulthood is often a time of divergence—what he called the tension between intimacy and isolation. We began to bend toward different suns. For me, the questions of faith grew larger than the certainties I had been given; for him, there was a steadier rootedness. Plants of the same species, grown in different corners of a room, will turn in different directions depending on the windows they face. Friendship is no different.

For years, our pots stood apart. Yet psychology tells us that attachment bonds, once formed, rarely vanish. John Bowlby suggested that our earliest and deepest attachments create “internal working models,” templates of trust and love that linger beneath the surface. Old friends occupy this deep layer of the psyche. Even in absence, the bond continues to shape us. And so, when Nate and I reconnected years later, the soil was ready. Not in the pews or classrooms of our youth, but in the unlikely medium of online gaming. Sailing together in Sea of Thieves, shouting across digital oceans, we found ourselves laughing again, just as we had with guitars in hand. The medium was new, but the friendship was the same: resilient, re-rooted, and alive.

Banning’s still life offers a philosophy of friendship in visual form. The plants differ in size, shape, and angle, yet they share the same shaft of sunlight. Their coexistence does not require sameness, only proximity to the same sustaining light. Aristotle described friendship, or philia, as the recognition of goodness in another—a relationship where one’s flourishing is tied to the flourishing of the other. Centuries later, Montaigne, reflecting on the death of his closest companion, wrote: “If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed, except by replying: Because it was he, because it was I.” Such is the mystery of enduring friendship: it cannot be fully explained, only lived.

And perhaps there is something playful in this recognition, too. The faint echo of The Houseplant Song lingers in my memory. What began as parody—a lyric about locking oneself away with ferns and avoiding the world—has become, in hindsight, an emblem of resilience. Friendship sometimes does look like that: two figures in a room, surviving the seasons together, even when the wider world changes. There is a strange holiness in that kind of companionship, not in withdrawal from the world, but in remaining rooted through it.

Friendship, like a plant, needs tending—water, light, attention. Yet it also surprises us with its endurance. You can neglect a plant, leave it in a corner, and years later discover it leaning still toward the sun, waiting for care. That is the truth Banning’s painting whispers: growth is slow, but bonds endure.

So when I look at Two Houseplants, I see more than greenery. I see the long arc of friendship—rooted in childhood, bent by circumstance, stretched by distance, and renewed in unexpected soil. And faintly, from the corner of memory, I hear two teenagers laughing through a worship service, strumming along as they sing about houseplants, still turning toward the light, still being put to the test, still talking about all the things that matter most like life and love and happiness and then the Holy Ghost. 

SURE.JELL Elderberry Jelly

Ingredients

3 cups prepared juice

1/4 cup fresh lemon juice

1 box SURE-JELL Original Premium Fruit Pectin

1/2 tsp butter or margarine

4-1/2 cups sugar, measured into separate bowl

Instructions

Step 1

Bring boiling-water canner, half full with water, to simmer. Wash jars and screw bands in hot soapy water; rinse with warm water. Pour boiling water over flat lids in saucepan off the heat. Let stand in hot water until ready to use. Drain well before filling.

Step 2

Remove and discard large stems from elderberries. Crush fruit thoroughly; place in saucepan. Cook on medium heat until juice starts to flow, stirring occasionally. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer 15 min., stirring occasionally. Place 3 layers of damp cheesecloth or jelly bag in large bowl. Pour prepared fruit into cheesecloth. Tie cheesecloth closed; hang and let drip into bowl until dripping stops. Press gently. Measure exactly 3 cups prepared juice into 6- or 8-qt. saucepot. (If necessary, add up to 1/2 cup water for exact measure.) Stir in lemon juice.

Step 3

Stir pectin into juice in saucepot. Add butter to reduce foaming. Bring mixture to full rolling boil (a boil that doesn't stop bubbling when stirred) on high heat, stirring constantly. Stir in sugar. Return to full rolling boil and boil exactly 1 min., stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Skim off any foam with metal spoon.

Step 4

Ladle immediately into prepared jars, filling to within 1/4 inch of tops. Wipe jar rims and threads. Cover with two-piece lids. Screw bands tightly. Place jars on elevated rack in canner. Lower rack into canner. (Water must cover jars by 1 to 2 inches. Add boiling water, if necessary.) Cover; bring water to gentle boil. Process 5 min. Remove jars and place upright on towel to cool completely. After jars cool, check seals by pressing middles of lids with finger. (If lids spring back, lids are not sealed and refrigeration is necessary.)

HTeaO - Webb City

Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen

Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend

Essay 11: The Hill That Wasn’t There

Introduction: People of the Book

Growing up Southern Baptist, I was always told we were People of the Book. That phrase carried a sense of pride. Catholics had their popes, Lutherans their catechisms, but we had the Bible alone — pure, inspired, without error. I can still hear the refrain: “The Bible said it. I believe it. That settles it.”

But the older I got, the more cracks appeared in that certainty. Friends in other churches, even those who also called themselves “Bible-believing,” seemed to carry around a version of the Bible that contained whole scenes and details I couldn’t find on the page. I would listen, puzzled, as they confidently declared things that sounded familiar — but when I went back to the text, the words weren’t there.

What they were relying on was not the Bible itself, but tradition built up around it. They were repeating interpretations that had been layered on long after the fact, interpretations so old and so familiar that they had become indistinguishable from scripture. For the Bible tells me so, I realized, often really meant for my pastor told me so.

That realization was unsettling. It made me feel like the ground was moving beneath me, that the very authority I was taught to trust was far less secure than advertised. At first it felt like betrayal. Later, I would come to see it differently — as a natural process of communities shaping meaning through time. But as a young man, the discovery that so much of my faith was built not on text but on tradition was one of the first cracks that would eventually open into de-conversion.

The Hill That Wasn’t There

When I close my eyes and picture the crucifixion, the image comes easily: three crosses rising against a dark sky, perched high on a hill above Jerusalem, the city walls fading in the distance. It is the image I absorbed in Sunday school posters, in Easter pageants, in hymns like “On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross.” It is the image that most Christians know by heart.

And yet, the Gospels never call Golgotha a hill. Matthew writes only that, “They came to a place called Golgotha (which means Place of the Skull)” (Matt. 27:33). Mark repeats the phrase (Mark 15:22), as does John (John 19:17). Luke is even briefer: “When they came to the place called the Skull, they crucified him there” (Luke 23:33). No hill, no mount, no height — just a place of execution outside the city walls.

So where did the hill come from? By the early fourth century, Christian pilgrims were already describing Golgotha as elevated ground. The anonymous pilgrim from Bordeaux, writing around 333 CE in the Itinerarium Burdigalense, speaks of visiting “the little hill of Golgotha where the Lord was crucified.” A decade later, Cyril of Jerusalem instructed his catechumens: “Golgotha, the holy hill standing above us here, bears witness to our sight” (Catechetical Lectures, 13.4). By then, the site of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre had been identified by Constantine’s mother Helena, and Christians were already venerating Golgotha as a sacred hill.

Once the hill entered the imagination, it never left. Medieval art cemented it: illuminated manuscripts, altarpieces, and frescoes all depicted the crucifixion high above the city, Jesus raised where all the world could see. Hymnody carried the image forward: Isaac Watts’s eighteenth-century line, “On a hill far away,” still echoes through Protestant churches today.

The reasons are not hard to grasp. A hill offers visibility: the execution becomes not a hidden shame but a cosmic drama. It ties the crucifixion to Israel’s sacred geography — to Sinai, Zion, and Moriah, mountains where God meets humanity. And it gives artists what they need most: composition. A rise of ground allows for figures at the base, thieves to the side, and Christ in the center, elevated above them all.

But the fact remains: the hill is not in the text. It is a product of retrospective interpretation — a creative elaboration that entered tradition centuries after the event and hardened into assumed fact. For me, that “hill that wasn’t there” stands as a symbol of how easily imagination and art blend into certainty. What began as a way of seeing became, over time, a way of believing. And most of us never thought to ask where the hill came from, because by the time we inherited the story, it had already become indistinguishable from scripture.

For the Bible Tells Me So

The hill of Golgotha is only one example. Once I started noticing details like that, I began to see them everywhere. What I had been taught as “biblical truth” often turned out to be later elaborations. And yet, in my church, these elaborations were spoken with as much certainty as if they had been written in red letters on the page.

That’s why I sometimes joke that “for the Bible tells me so” really means “for my pastor told me so.” In Southern Baptist circles, Bible study was less about the Bible and more about confirming what we already believed. Questions were allowed only if they had approved answers. We underlined verses, filled in blanks in workbooks, and left each week with the same conclusions we had walked in with.

This was a far cry from the wrestling I would later discover in the early church fathers. Origen, writing in the third century, claimed that scripture often contained “stumbling blocks” deliberately placed there so that readers would have to struggle, to move beyond the surface (On First Principles, 4.2.9). Augustine confessed that he was often bewildered by the text: “I confess to Your love, O Lord, that I am perplexed by the obscurities of Your Scripture” (Confessions, 12.18). For them, the Bible was not a manual of certainty but a field of questions, demanding patience, humility, and imagination.

But in the church of my youth, certainty was the point. So instead of study, we rehearsed tradition. We repeated the details that centuries of Christians had supplied, filling silences in the text with stories until they became indistinguishable from scripture itself. Mary Magdalene as a prostitute — a detail first asserted by Pope Gregory the Great in 591, not by Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. The apostles martyred one by one for their faith — a claim found in later church tradition but absent from the New Testament itself. Even the number of wise men at the nativity: Matthew never says three, only that magi brought gifts.

It makes me sad now, because the Bible itself has so much to offer when approached honestly. As an ancient text, it opens a window onto the world of first-century Palestine and the reach of the Roman Empire. Paul’s letters reveal fragile little communities trying to survive under Caesar’s shadow. The Gospels capture the tension of an occupied people, some expecting revolution, others longing for the end of the age. Seen alongside other ancient texts — Tacitus, Josephus, the Dead Sea Scrolls — the Bible is extraordinary, a human document of hope, struggle, and resistance.

But most of us never read it that way. Instead, we inherited a version already draped in centuries of retrospective interpretation. We were told it was the Bible speaking, when in truth it was our pastors — themselves repeating what had been told to them. And in that endless cycle of hand-me-down certainties, the text itself was often left unopened.

Betrayal and De-conversion

As a young man, discovering these layers of tradition felt less like illumination and more like betrayal. I had been told that we were People of the Book, but when I went looking for the Book itself, what I found was silence where I expected certainty. The hill wasn’t there. The three wise men weren’t three. Mary Magdalene wasn’t a prostitute. The apostles’ martyrdoms, so often cited as “proof” of Christianity’s truth, weren’t recorded anywhere in the New Testament.

I remember reading Acts with this in mind. Stephen is described as the first martyr, stoned outside Jerusalem (Acts 7). James, the brother of John, is executed by Herod Agrippa (Acts 12:2). And after that? Silence. Peter is imprisoned, then released. Paul is left alive at the end of Luke’s account, preaching in Rome “with all boldness and without hindrance” (Acts 28:31). Yet every sermon I heard assumed the apostles all went to their deaths for their testimony. Tradition supplied the details, but the text itself did not.

As I pressed into this gap, the answers I received were rarely satisfying. “Church history tells us so,” I was told, as if the traditions of the second or third century carried the same authority as the words of the Gospels themselves. Or worse, I was warned not to ask so many questions, because doubt was a sign of weak faith. The dissonance was unbearable. If we truly believed in scripture alone, then why did we fill its silences with legends? Why did we demand belief in things that were never actually written?

That gap — between the Bible I was told about and the Bible I read for myself — became one of the deepest cracks in my faith. What had been presented to me as the unshakable Word of God now looked like a patchwork of text and tradition, history and myth-making, literature and art. And once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

The sense of betrayal was sharpened by the rhetoric of certainty that surrounded me. “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it” was more than a slogan — it was a shield against questioning. But as I discovered, what “the Bible says” was often what the preacher said the Bible must mean. In effect, I had been taught to place my faith not in the text itself, but in the unbroken confidence of those who interpreted it. When that confidence cracked, my faith did too.

Looking back, I can see that I was not alone. Many who leave evangelicalism tell similar stories. Scholars of de-conversion note that such narratives often mirror conversion testimonies in reverse: once I was blind, now I see — retold as once I was certain, now I doubt. For me, it was less sudden revelation than slow erosion. Each inconsistency, each silence in the text, each unconvincing answer wore down the foundation until finally there was nothing left to stand on.

At the time, it felt like loss. But in hindsight, it was also a release.

Religion as Art, Not Physics

For years, I carried the weight of that betrayal. If the Bible was supposed to be God’s perfect Word, how could it contain so many silences, so many inconsistencies, so many out-right falsehoods? If Christianity was built on certainty, how could so much of its foundation rest on legend? But over time, my perspective shifted. What once felt like deception, I now see as art.

Religion, I’ve come to believe, is not physics. It does not give us formulas that explain the universe, laws that never change, proofs that settle arguments once and for all. Religion is closer to poetry, or painting, or music. It is a human work of meaning, fragile and interpretive, woven out of memory and imagination.

The hill of Golgotha is a perfect example. As a historical detail, it is absent from the Gospels. But as a piece of religious art, it is brilliant. It transforms an ordinary place of Roman execution into a stage where the cosmic drama of suffering and redemption can be seen. It draws on Israel’s sacred geography — Sinai, Zion, Moriah — to frame the cross as the new mountain of God. And in art, from medieval frescoes to Protestant hymnody, the hill provides the composition, the symmetry, the drama that sears the image into memory. It is not factual, but it is meaningful.

The same could be said for the traditions of the apostles’ martyrdoms. Historically, the record is at best thin. But the stories endured because they answered a deep need: the conviction that those who had walked with Jesus were faithful unto death. Their courage became a mirror for later Christians facing persecution. Whether every detail happened or not, the legends served a purpose. They transformed silence into inspiration.

This, I think, is how retrospective interpretation works. It fills the gaps of history with imagination. Sometimes it distorts. Sometimes it consoles. At its best, it creates beauty out of suffering, meaning out of absence. The crucifixion itself is the clearest case: a brutal Roman execution, lifted by centuries of art and devotion into one of the most enduring symbols of human endurance and hope.

As a younger man, I saw these additions as failures of honesty. Now, I see them as fragile achievements of art. They are not “true” in the way that a scientific equation is true. They are true in the way that a painting can be true, or a poem can be true — not because they describe facts, but because they reveal what it feels like to be human.

For me, the shift was freeing. I no longer needed to force belief in things that the text did not say. I could honor the art of religion without demanding that it be history or science. The hill of Golgotha may never have been there, but the image has endured, not because it is factual, but because it is beautiful.

The Bible as Ancient Text

If I no longer read the Bible as inerrant, I have not stopped reading it altogether. In fact, once I set aside the demand that it function as flawless physics, the text became more compelling. What had once been a fortress of certainty opened up into a gallery of human voices.

Seen alongside other ancient writings — Josephus, Tacitus, Plutarch, the Dead Sea Scrolls — the Bible is one of our richest windows into the world of the first century. Paul’s letters reveal not abstract theology but urgent correspondence with fragile communities trying to survive under Roman rule. The Gospels, with their apocalyptic overtones, show a people caught between longing for God’s kingdom and enduring Caesar’s empire. Revelation, for all its strangeness, becomes a coded protest against imperial violence, a cry for justice in a world bent on oppression.

Even its contradictions become part of the fascination. Mark’s Gospel ends abruptly with women fleeing the tomb in fear, while John spins out resurrection stories of intimacy and recognition. Matthew situates Jesus on a mountain giving a new law, echoing Moses on Sinai, while Luke places him in a Nazareth synagogue announcing good news to the poor. Each is not a photographic record but an interpretive portrait. Taken together, they remind us that early Christianity was never a monolith; it was a conversation, already filled with retrospective interpretation from its first generation onward.

What saddens me is how often this richness is lost. In many churches, Bible study becomes an exercise in confirmation rather than discovery. Instead of marveling at its poetry, its fractures, its flashes of honesty, readers are given prepackaged answers that flatten its complexity. The Bible deserves better than that. As Augustine once said, “Scripture is shallow enough for a child to wade, but deep enough for an elephant to swim.” The tragedy is how often we never leave the shallows.

For me, to read the Bible now is not to extract rules or defend dogma, but to encounter the voices of a world both strange and familiar. It is to stand in the streets of first-century Jerusalem, to hear the arguments of Pharisees, to watch Roman governors wield power, to glimpse the hopes of people on the margins. It is to hear poetry, lament, and fragile faith echo across two millennia.

The Bible may not be the error-free code I was once told it was. But as an ancient text, it remains extraordinary. Its silences and embellishments, its remembered histories and invented legends, all reveal the human work of meaning. And in that sense, it still speaks. Not because it “tells me so,” but because it shows me us — our long struggle to understand suffering, to endure, and to make beauty out of loss.

In Closing

When I was young, I thought being a Person of the Book meant having answers. The Bible said it, I believed it, and that settled it. But the more I looked, the more unsettled I became. The hill wasn’t there. The three kings weren’t three. The martyrs weren’t there. So much of what I was told the Bible said turned out to be tradition speaking through the text, not the text itself. At the time, that discovery felt like betrayal.

Now, I see it differently. What once looked like deception I now recognize as art. Retrospective interpretation is not a flaw in religion but one of its most human achievements. It is the way communities fill silence with meaning, transform loss into legend, and lift ordinary suffering into beauty. The crucifixion may not have happened on a hill, but the hill made the story endurable, visible, unforgettable.

And the Bible itself, stripped of the weight of inerrancy, remains worth reading. Not as as textbook, not as law, but as literature and story — a chorus of voices from an occupied land, carrying forward their hopes, their doubts, their faith. To read it honestly is to enter a conversation across centuries, one that still reveals more about us than about any god.

So I no longer call myself a Person of the Book. I call myself religious, not spiritual. I treat the Bible as I treat mosaics, or cathedrals, or hymns: not as perfect, but as deeply human and beautiful. The truth it offers is not the certainty of settled answers but the witness of a people who kept telling stories, kept making meaning, kept filing in the gaps when the text itself was silent.

References

Augustine. (1998). Confessions (H. Chadwick, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published ca. 397 CE)

Cyril of Jerusalem. (2008). Catechetical lectures (E. H. Gifford, Trans.). In P. Schaff & H. Wace (Eds.), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Series 2, Vol. 7). Hendrickson Publishers. (Original work delivered ca. 348 CE)

Dahan, G. (1998). The reception of the Bible in the Middle Ages (J. Taylor, Trans.). CUA Press.

Docherty, S. E. (2015). The Jewish pseudepigrapha: An introduction to the literature of the Second Temple period. Augsburg Fortress.

Itinerarium Burdigalense. (1887). The pilgrim of Bordeaux: Itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem (A. Stewart, Trans.). Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society. (Original work written ca. 333 CE)

Luz, U. (2005). Matthew in history: Interpretation, influence, and effects. Fortress Press.

McDonald, L. M., & Sanders, J. A. (Eds.). (2002). The canon debate. Hendrickson Publishers.

Origen. (1936). On first principles (G. W. Butterworth, Trans.). Harper & Row. (Original work published ca. 220 CE)

Ricoeur, P. (1984). Time and narrative, Volume 1 (K. McLaughlin & D. Pellauer, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.

The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version. (1989). Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.

Watts, I. (1915). Hymns and spiritual songs (Vol. 1). George E. Burrough. (Original work published 1707)

Young, F. M. (1989). Biblical exegesis and the formation of Christian culture. Cambridge University Press.

Zahn, T. (1909). Introduction to the New Testament (Vol. 3). T. & T. Clark.

An Evening with Matthew McConaughey

Fixins Soul Kitchen

Self-Portrait (1894–95)

Some works of art do not merely present an image; they open a conversation with us across time. Ellen Thesleff’s Self-Portrait (1894–95), drawn in pencil and sepia ink, is such a work. What captivates me is not only her likeness but the way her face emerges—a luminous presence rising out of a storm of restless lines. This is what I admire most: the tension between dissolution and definition, between chaos and stillness, where the gaze holds firm while the world around it dissolves. It is precisely this effect I strive for in my own practice with pencil and charcoal.

At first glance, the portrait seems simple. A head, softly modeled, surrounded by dark hatching. Yet the more one lingers, the more one sees how deliberate the balance is. The lines around her are turbulent, layered, almost chaotic, and yet they intensify the quiet solidity of her face. She does not conceal the process; she allows hesitation, scribbles, and shadow to remain visible. This willingness to leave the drawing unresolved gives it vitality, as if we are watching her identity form before our eyes.

This sense of emergence was central to Thesleff’s wider style. Born in Helsinki in 1869, she began her career during the height of European Symbolism, when artists sought to capture inner life rather than outward appearances. Thesleff absorbed this influence, but she also resisted categories. Her work moved restlessly between Symbolism, Expressionism, and Modernism, always retaining a fiercely independent voice. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she often turned the gaze inward. Her self-portraits are not self-celebrations but meditations — attempts to grasp the instability of selfhood in a world where identities were shifting, especially for women in the arts.

The medium here is as telling as the image itself. Thesleff’s decision to work in sepia ink situates her portrait within a much older tradition. Sepia, derived historically from the cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis), has been prized since antiquity as a natural ink. Renaissance artists used it for warm-toned wash drawings, and it continued to carry connotations of memory and time. Unlike the starkness of black ink, sepia introduces softness, an undertone of warmth, as though the image is already tinged with the patina of age.

To render herself in sepia was to embrace that history of memory. We often associate sepia with the faded photographs of the past, with images softened by time’s hand. In Thesleff’s portrait, the sepia tone deepens the sense that we are seeing her both as present and as a figure suspended in history. Her face emerges not only from shadow but from the sediment of memory, as if drawn out of the sea’s depths or the archive of the past.

There is also a symbolic charge to the medium. The cuttlefish produces ink as a defense mechanism, creating a cloud to obscure itself from predators. How fitting that Thesleff should choose this substance to render her own image — a self both revealed and veiled. The sepia becomes a metaphor for identity: we are always partly visible, partly hidden, our presence revealed through the very medium of concealment. In this way, the material itself participates in the meaning of the portrait.

For me, as a fellow maker, this is instructive. Working with pencil and charcoal, I know the play of shadow and light, the intensity of black against white. But sepia suggests another register: warmth, mortality, the organic. It reminds me that materials carry their own histories, and that choosing one medium over another is never neutral. Thesleff’s sepia face does not simply depict her — it anchors her within a lineage of art history, memory, and nature itself.

Placed within her oeuvre, this Self-Portrait stands as one of her most intimate achievements. Later, she would move toward color and abstraction, creating bold, expressive landscapes. But here, stripped of ornament and hue, she presents herself in elemental form. The portrait is not polished or complete; it is suspended in the act of becoming. That is precisely why it resonates.

Optimus Prime

With some help, Optimus Prime is ready to transform and roll out! 

Pancakes, Raspberries and Blackberries (2025)

Heidi von Faber’s paintings are a feast of light and shadow, an ongoing meditation on the dignity of the ordinary. Her oeuvre is built around food—bread rolls, cheeses, bowls of berries, pastries, and, in one of her most striking works, a simple stack of pancakes. Yet these are never casual images of sustenance. Under her brush, such subjects become monumental, staged against impenetrable darkness, illuminated with an intensity that recalls the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio.

Still life has always walked the line between indulgence and morality. In the Dutch Golden Age, painters like Pieter Claesz and Willem Claesz Heda delighted in oysters, goblets, and lemons, rendering them with gleaming surfaces that celebrated abundance while hinting at its fragility. In Spain, painters such as Juan Sánchez Cotán pursued an even starker path, suspending fruits and vegetables in shadowy voids that seemed to whisper of mortality. Caravaggio himself blurred the sacred and the profane, granting divine gravity to both saints and tavern boys through the force of light.

Von Faber inherits all these traditions, but she does not merely imitate them. Instead, she gathers their visual languages and translates them into our time. She replaces oysters and goblets with pancakes and berries, pheasants and lobsters with bread and cheese. In doing so, she democratizes the still life. Her subjects are not luxuries of wealth or exotic imports, but the simple, everyday foods that shape our rituals of living. Yet the treatment is the same: shadows envelop her canvases, light isolates the object, and suddenly the ordinary carries weight equal to that of saints or monarchs.

It is in Pancakes, Raspberries and Blackberries (2025) that her vision crystallizes most fully. The painting depicts a stack of pancakes, syrup cascading like liquid amber, crowned with raspberries and blackberries rendered in near-hyperreal detail. Against the darkness, the plate glows like an altar, the fruit luminous as though lit from within. What in life is a fleeting, unceremonious breakfast becomes here an image of permanence, contemplation, even reverence.

The influences converge seamlessly. The gleam of syrup and the lush surface of the berries recall the Dutch masters, who saw in food both sensual pleasure and allegory. The starkness of the composition echoes the Spanish bodegón, where simplicity heightens the sacredness of the everyday. The chiaroscuro is pure Caravaggio: light revealing not only form but meaning, bathing an ordinary meal in revelation. At the same time, von Faber embraces the precision of modern realism, painting details so sharply that the berries seem almost to tremble with ripeness. And beneath all this lies the subtle presence of contemporary food culture, in which meals are endlessly photographed and shared. Where social media images vanish into the scroll, von Faber’s oil paints insist on permanence.

Philosophers remind us of what is at stake here. Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, insisted that the smallest details of daily life—a drawer, a loaf of bread—could hold entire worlds of memory and imagination. Roland Barthes, in Mythologies, argued that food is never neutral; it always signifies, always carries cultural meaning beyond itself. Von Faber’s pancakes embody both ideas. They are not just breakfast, but ritual and comfort, fragility and abundance. They point to the fleeting sweetness of life, caught for a moment in light before it passes.

Seen within the arc of her oeuvre, this painting becomes a kind of crescendo. The breads, cheeses, fruits, and pastries that populate her gallery all build toward this moment, where the humble pancake takes on the weight of an icon. It is not that von Faber abandons tradition; rather, she expands it, reminding us that the language of still life belongs as much to the twenty-first century as it did to the seventeenth.

For me, this work is not just beautiful—it is instructive. It asks me to slow down, to see the sacred in the rituals of daily life, to recognize that meaning is not elsewhere but here, at the breakfast table, in the sweetness of fruit, in the warmth of bread. Von Faber’s vision is clear: the extraordinary is always hidden in the ordinary, waiting for light to reveal it.

See von Faber's Still Life here.

Gwendy's Final Task

The Hidden Fire: Creativity in Silence

Introduction

John C. Pederson’s story captivated me the moment I read it. Here was a man from Hillsboro, North Dakota, who lived almost a century, worked as a rural mail carrier, raised a family, and painted—painted endlessly. More than 250 works filled his home, yet he rarely, if ever, showed them to the outside world. His children encouraged him to exhibit, but he resisted. He even spent time with Norman Rockwell, watching one of America’s most celebrated illustrators work, and still he kept his own paintings tucked away.

It’s easy to romanticize a story like this, to imagine the humble artist quietly laboring in solitude. But Pederson’s choice to withhold his art also raises harder questions: Why do we create if not to share? What holds us back when we do? His life opens up a conversation about creativity, shame, imposter syndrome, and the strange, beautiful tension between making and keeping.

This essay isn’t just about Pederson, though. It’s about all the hidden artists across history whose work came to light only after they were gone. It’s about the psychology of creativity—the drive to create, the fear of exposure, the way recognition transforms art. And it’s about what happens when the unseen finally becomes visible.

The Drive to Create

What struck me first about John C. Pederson’s story was how much he painted. More than 250 works. Think about that: the hours, the patience, the persistence. Here was a man who lived almost a century in small-town North Dakota—working as a mail carrier, raising a family—and yet behind closed doors he was quietly filling canvases. Portraits of Lincoln, vintage airplanes, Laurel & Hardy, dreamlike science fiction visions. He painted as if he couldn’t help himself.

That’s what makes me think about what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called flow—those moments when you’re so immersed in what you’re doing that the act itself becomes the reward. Pederson clearly knew that state. He didn’t need exhibitions or newspaper reviews to keep going. The joy was in the work itself.

And the range of subjects fascinates me. History, humor, flight, fantasy—it feels like he painted whatever tugged at him in the moment. In that way, his art reminds me of Freud’s idea that art is a way of channeling our inner lives, or Jung’s belief that art carries symbols from the collective unconscious. Maybe Pederson was reaching for something larger than himself even if he never said so.

What amazes me is that he kept creating without recognition. Most of us need at least a little encouragement to keep going, but Pederson didn’t stop. His art feels like evidence that creativity doesn’t always depend on an audience. Sometimes the canvas itself is enough company.

And that’s the heart of it, isn’t it? The drive to create. To put something down, to give shape to an impulse inside. Even if no one ever sees it. Pederson’s story is a reminder that the creative fire doesn’t wait for applause—it just burns.

The Need to Keep

If Pederson’s art showed how strong the creative drive can be, his decision to keep it private revealed something just as powerful—the pull to hold back. His family urged him to share his work, but he resisted. Even after spending time with Norman Rockwell, watching one of the most famous American illustrators paint, Pederson came home and kept his own paintings tucked away. That choice feels telling. It wasn’t just modesty. It was a need.

I can’t help but think of imposter syndrome here—that nagging voice that whispers, Who do you think you are? It’s the feeling that your work isn’t good enough, even when you pour yourself into it. I know that feeling well, and I suspect Pederson did too. Imposter syndrome feeds on comparison, and who could measure up after spending a week with Norman Rockwell?

Underneath imposter syndrome often lies shame. Brené Brown describes shame as the voice that says you’re not worthy of belonging. For an artist, that voice can be paralyzing. To show your work is to risk rejection, and rejection feels like confirmation of all those secret doubts. Maybe Pederson chose silence not because he didn’t believe in his art, but because he couldn’t bear the chance that others might not.

But there’s another way of seeing it. Maybe keeping his paintings private was also a kind of protection—not just against criticism, but for the work itself. Donald Winnicott, the psychoanalyst, once wrote about creativity as a kind of play that happens in a safe, transitional space. For some people, that space doesn’t need to be public. Maybe Pederson’s studio, his home, his inner life—that was enough of an audience. The paintings lived where they were safest.

Still, I wonder about the tension in that choice. The drive to create pulled him toward the canvas, but the fear of being seen pulled him back. And yet, he never stopped painting. That persistence is haunting and beautiful: a reminder of how often artists live in the push and pull between expression and concealment, between wanting to share and needing to keep.

A Gallery of the Unseen

Pederson’s story isn’t an isolated one. Once you start looking, you see how many artists worked in silence, their creations hidden until long after they were gone. It’s almost like there’s a secret gallery somewhere, filled with works that waited for time itself to unlock them.

Henry Darger is one of the most famous examples. He was a janitor in Chicago who, when he died, left behind a 15,000-page manuscript filled with watercolor illustrations of his imaginary Vivian Girls. No one knew what he had been working on all those years. Emily Dickinson is another. She published only a handful of poems during her life, but after her death, her family found nearly 1,800 poems tucked away. She once wrote, “This is my letter to the world / That never wrote to me,” and that line feels like it could hang above this whole hidden gallery.

Then there’s Vivian Maier, the nanny who quietly took over 150,000 photographs of everyday life in Chicago and New York. No exhibitions, no recognition—just rolls of film, left in boxes, discovered decades later. Franz Kafka told his friend Max Brod to burn all his unpublished manuscripts. Brod ignored him, and that’s the only reason we know The Trial and The Castle today. And John Kennedy Toole—his novel A Confederacy of Dunces was rejected over and over, and he never saw it in print. It was only because his mother persisted after his death that the book was published and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Even Vincent van Gogh, who feels like the very definition of an artist today, sold only a handful of paintings while he was alive. He died convinced of his failure, never knowing how the world would one day see him.

So Pederson is in good company. His work now hangs beside these other hidden voices in that invisible gallery—the gallery of the unseen. Their stories remind me that recognition isn’t the measure of creativity. Sometimes art waits in silence until the world is ready, and sometimes it never comes out at all. But the making still mattered. The fire still burned.

The Psychology of Hidden Creativity

Whenever I think about hidden creativity, I wonder—why do some people keep their work private? Why do others push it into the world, even when they’re terrified of rejection? Pederson’s story doesn’t give us all the answers, but it opens the door to some fascinating possibilities.

Sigmund Freud once said that art is a way of channeling what’s inside us—our desires, fears, frustrations—into something we can live with. For some artists, that process isn’t complete until the work is shared. For others, like Pederson, maybe the private act was enough. The painting itself did the work it needed to do, even if no one else ever saw it.

Carl Jung offered another way of looking at it. He believed that creativity often comes from deep inside, from archetypes and symbols that belong to both the personal and the collective imagination. When I think about Pederson’s paintings—the portraits, the landscapes, the airplanes, the comedians—I imagine him weaving together fragments of history and fantasy, connecting his own life to something larger. Whether anyone else ever witnessed those connections didn’t change their meaning for him.

Modern psychology adds another layer. Researchers talk about intrinsic motivation—the drive to do something simply because you love it. That seems to fit Pederson perfectly. He didn’t paint for applause or for money. He painted because painting mattered to him. And that, in many ways, is the purest kind of creativity.

But there’s always a shadow side. Shame and self-doubt can keep artists from stepping into the light, even when their work has something to offer the world. Maybe that’s what held Pederson back. Or maybe he just didn’t need anyone else’s eyes on his canvases. Either way, his story reminds me of the delicate balance between making art for oneself and sharing it with others. Creativity is deeply personal, but it’s also profoundly vulnerable. Sometimes the safest place for it to live is in silence.

Toward Recognition

When Pederson’s family finally chose to share his paintings after his death, something shifted. For decades, his art had lived quietly within the walls of his home. Suddenly, it was on display, hung in a gallery, offered to the public. What had been private became communal. What had been silent began to speak.

That transition fascinates me because it shows how art changes when it’s seen. For Pederson, painting may have been about personal expression, self-understanding, or simply the joy of creating. But once his family opened the doors, the paintings took on a second life. They became part of a conversation, part of a larger cultural story. They no longer belonged only to him—they belonged to everyone who stood before them.

Recognition has a way of rewriting stories. Pederson might have doubted himself, might have felt his paintings weren’t worthy. But now, with people admiring them, bidding on them, celebrating them, those doubts stand in stark contrast to the reality of his talent. Brené Brown talks about vulnerability as the gateway to connection. Pederson never took that leap himself, but his family did it for him, and in doing so, they gave him a kind of belonging he never claimed in life.

History is full of artists whose work only reached the public because someone else decided it mattered—Kafka’s manuscripts preserved by a friend, van Gogh’s canvases championed by his family, John Kennedy Toole’s novel published because his mother refused to give up. Pederson’s story fits this pattern. It reminds me that legacy isn’t just about the artist; it’s about the community that carries their work forward.

And so, Pederson’s paintings live on—not just as evidence of his creativity, but as a testament to what happens when hidden art finally sees the light. They invite us to consider how many other unseen works wait in attics, basements, and storage boxes, created in silence by people who never thought the world would care. His legacy suggests that maybe the world always cares, if only we’re given the chance to see.

In Closing

Pederson’s paintings now hang in public view, and with them comes a fuller story. For decades, his canvases were private companions. Now they’re part of a larger conversation, connecting him with others who also created in silence—Darger, Dickinson, Maier, Kafka, Toole, van Gogh. Together they form a hidden gallery, a reminder of how much human creativity has bloomed unseen, waiting for someone else to open the door.

His story reminds me that creativity doesn’t always depend on recognition. Sometimes the act of making is enough. But it also shows how powerful it can be when hidden art finally meets an audience. Recognition doesn’t erase the solitude in which the work was made, but it extends its meaning, allowing others to be changed by it.

In the end, Pederson’s art testifies to the endurance of the creative spirit. Even in silence, it burned steadily, filling his home with color and form. Now, out in the world, it burns more brightly still—illuminating not just his vision, but the countless unseen fires that flicker in quiet lives everywhere.

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