I met Shaine Claiborne the other day, I wouldn't usually mention it but he had an interesting quote.

Speaker-"wait, wait, so you actually let children draw on your walls?"

Shaine-"well of course! Thats what walls are for"

After which it was quiet with only a few people chuckling quietly to themselves and one young man in the audience shouting "Yes! Amen!" loud enough to be herd across the small stadium filled with about 5000 men. That was fun.

The other day I received a phone call from a church that asked me to paint a couple of masonite boards for their youth group. One for their senior high (momentum) and junior high (vertical)respectively (below). Huge church, nice people and they support the arts which is nice within modern churches. A long time ago the church and people of faith were major benefactors of art and played a major role in the arts especially the visual arts of sculpture, architecture, and painting (especially murals). But now the modern church doesn't really invest in the visual arts and we've seen a big divide between the quality of secular art versus religious art with generally speaking religious art coming up way short. As a side note I should also say lack of visual arts is certainly not the most important thing the modern church is missing but, it's nice to see a church who recognizes the value of art, they have murals in a lot of the different rooms and it makes the church look like less of a warehouse it's really quite amazing. The murals were done by Mural FX, I met the woman (above) as she was painting and we had a good talk and was eager to answer some of my many questions.

A long time ago in a post called motivations I talked about a gay bar I was going to paint, I didn't say anything but 2 weeks after I finished they closed down the gay bar. A few weeks ago I had a post that I was painting a satanic metal bar after I had finished painting it they started tearing the whole building down. I honestly don't know what this is about but something strange is happening.

A few weeks ago before the coke thing, I went looking for a Halloween costume for my wife at the local magic trick and costume store. As I was walking in I noticed that the outside sign had faded over the years from the weather, I looked around and since I had the supplies in my car and it would only take a matter of minutes to repair I offered to fix their sign in exchange for a costume. I've done things like this before where for free or for in exchange for food I've fixed a sign that looks rundown and ugly. I don't believe advertising or decoration is necessarily wrong I do however make a distinction between a barter exchange for the sign of Mom and Pop independently owned costume store that i actually go to and buy magic tricks from and a big fat paycheck for just another out of place billboard advertisement for a corporation that I don't like that advertises so much it has become an eyesore. Just so everyone is clear. I also make no judgments on people in advertising unless they use their talents to advertise something evil (like consumerism, greed, lust, dissatisfaction, unthankfulness, alcohol, degradation of women or anything else that makes up 90% of advertising).
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