Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 4:57PM "Training is needed in order to love properly; and to be able to give happiness and joy, you must practice DEEP LOOKING directed toward the other person you love. Because if you do not understand this person, you cannot love properly. Understanding is the essence of love. If you cannot understand, you cannot love. That is the message of the Buddha."
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 7:27PM 
From the Holy Resurrection Russian Orthodox Cathedral. It was still on canvas in the studio when I took this photo. It was an interesting problem, or play, to choose the colors for all twelve, their robes and feathers. And their fluttering ribbons. The ribbons perpetually flutter to symbolize the constant murmur of God in their ears. Again, about 9 feet tall, 14 foot wingspan. I made the wing tips separately; it was easier to position them that way.
I’ve been remembering, finding more photos and adding a few, little by little, to the Liturgical Art gallery -- see thumbnails over yonder on the left side (had to think about that a second -- left -- right... never very clear in my mind. Lucky the angels were in a circle.)
Monday, June 21, 2010 at 9:45PM "It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony."
~ Benjamin Britten
Friday, June 18, 2010 at 1:48PM "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."
~ Albert Einstein
Saturday, June 12, 2010 at 12:38PM 
While doing dental work on the 1 mm teeth of my tiny dinosaur -- he has 60+ and they vary in size -- I find myself missing the work my mother Lou and I did on the murals she designed for the Holy Resurrection Russian Orthodox Cathedral, Wilkes-Barre, PA. It was as much in the Eastern style as we poor westerners could muster. We both found it a deeply congenial language, though we were surely interlopers: women and heathen, and who could say which was worse in the eyes of the Old Believers. Indeed, we were declared Anathema (or was it Abomination -- I forget). That seemed to me to be rather an honor, altogether.
A ring of twelve angels were my job, and each had a 14 foot wingspan. We were about 60 feet up on scaffold (constructed by persons who liked to have a mighty good time in the evening; there was an element of suspense). The church bell would strike the hours, which, somehow, gave a timeless rather than a timely sense. Self and Angel, so long ago:
I was able to draw each angel on heavy mural canvas, mostly paint it, cut it out like an enormous paper-doll, adhere it to the ceiling and finish the painting there.
When Mr. Dinosaur and several other belated Entities (bless your patience, Friends) are complete, I may have to pause and do something Large.
Friday, June 11, 2010 at 10:48AM So long neglected it's almost antique, but I want to get back to it soon. Actually about life-sized and full figure, on canvas:
Marion Richmond Gardner Rogers, my paternal grandmother and one to whom one could confide anything without hesitation.
Friday, June 4, 2010 at 7:56PM I cannot say anything about the oil bleeding and vomiting into the Gulf of Mexico, because I cannot say enough.
How much unwitnessed suffering of bird and animal and fish, oil in the small eye, oil on the ruined wing, wild nests gone and gone. How much loss for the people on the shore, how long we shall reap this harvest.
Detail, "Raising Morning" by Lou Rogers, my mother.
Monday, May 31, 2010 at 4:15PM Thinking of those far from home and under duress. And those left behind.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
~ Wilfred Owen, from "Anthem for Doomed Youth"
Monday, May 31, 2010 at 6:56AM 
"Shaman," by Lou Rogers, my mother.
Memorial Day was the day my father was found in the river by a fisherman.
Those pins of fate around which lives turn -- his disappearance two weeks before was the first one in my life, though I was unaware, being a baby. My mother was 27, and how she managed I do not know. Though I believe she already dwelt largely in an internal world of tales and visions, and that she fled there.
I woke at 4 this morning with yet more clear a sense of the echoes down the many years of that first event in our tale. Things of most bitter regret, yet perhaps necessary. I hope necessary: otherwise unbearable.
What do we do with these things, for our own healing and perhaps the helping of others?
I remember seeing great barges turned by tugs on the rivers of Pittsburgh, slow, slow and with so wide a wake. Turning a life seems as gradual, though with moments of sudden, forward clarity if one is fortunate and receptive. One thinks one is there, and one is not, yet. And the rocking of the waves stirred in the process, what currents and cross currents do they send out that wash through the lives of others in ways we cannot know.
Were I not convinced that this life is a dash in a continuum, I might have folded and conceded long ago. But I believe there are no throwaway beings, nary a flea, and so I think we have no choice but to pour all our misadventures into an alembic and strive to transmute them.
Will we never be who we might have been, or are we who we were meant to be, precisely because of our blunders and the patterns of mischance?
By Lou Rogers, my mother. Oil on canvas. I do not know the title.
Saturday, May 29, 2010 at 1:05PM Still on the year's Carnegie Dinosaur toy prototypes. Alas, I cannot show them to you yet. Safari, the company producing them, very much wants the subjects to remain a surprise until they are released for public consumption. But thereafter, I’ll post some in progress images, and further develop the Carnegie Museum Dino page. Meantime, here’s the Little Mermaid. You likely saw her before, but... I aim to do more with Hans C. Andersen tales over the next while.
Friday, May 14, 2010 at 9:23PM ...out of this year's dinosaur marathon. But meantime:
"Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---"
~ Emily Dickinson
One of the great uses of art, I think. And also sometimes of humor.
Sunday, May 9, 2010 at 6:55PM ... to stop and catch my own thoughts, here's another borrowed one:
"Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."
~ Dr. Seuss
Monday, April 5, 2010 at 7:00PM 
I was honored to do an interview with Prehistoric Times, a quarterly publication for dinosaur enthusiasts and collectors. It appears in the current issue (no. 92) and was instigated by Dan Liebman of Dan's Dinosaurs, who asked excellent questions.
Saturday, March 27, 2010 at 7:00PM ... or so I hope and it appears. I made my official move over from Typepad today, and we shall see how it works. The url to keep is still www.forestrogers.com.
Important things like Artist links and the Guest Artist page will follow. It'll take a little while, but... There's a great deal to report, now I feel I'm in the best nest for my purposes. So more anon.
Thank you for sticking with me! :)
Forest
Wednesday, March 24, 2010 at 11:30AM An earlier figure, with new head, who finally found her proper identity. Need to add an enchanted leopard entwined. Not to mention hair. And garments, enough but not too much.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 10:44AM I am haunted by numberless islands, and many a Danaan shore,
Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more;
Soon far from the rose and the lily, and fret of the flames would we be,
Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!
Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 7:05AM
The Morrigan, washing blood in the river. By Lou Rogers, my mother, oil on canvas.
Much to report of a remarkable workshop... soon.
