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| A great teacher inspires a new and authentic understanding of the world. Anyone who knew the artist and art history professor Mary Holmes (1910-2002), whether as a lecturer during a career that spanned six decades or as a friend, would agree that she was such a teacher. Keenly sensitive to the nature of art and the complexities of life, she communicated her perceptions with the authority of a sage and the timing of a great comic. Her mythological paintings of virtues and gifts of the spirit such as faith, hope, and self-discipline make visible those invisible realities, providing insight into the relation between our physical and spiritual lives. |
| When she was a child, Mary recalled, people used to assign to a newborn girl the verse from the thirty-first chapter of the Book of Proverbs that corresponded to the date of her birth. The eighth verse reads, "Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction." Mary always felt this verse to be a calling and an inspiration to speak for those who could not speak for themselves: for animals appointed to destruction, for oddball human beings, and for all audiences who could not articulate the meaning of their own experience of art and of life. .....con't |
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