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Writer's pictureLinda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
Dec 80 min read

Three Years of Excerpted Inspirations!


Liz Kufs and I have just completed a third year of Excerpted Inspirations for Deborah’s Tree. I never pictured what it would be like to keep finding story quotes week after week for such a long stretch without running dry. But I have an extensive personal library, both fiction and nonfiction, some of which I still haven’t read, and I keep coming back to favorite authors like Dorothy Canfield, Elizabeth Goudge, and Madeleine L’Engle. Catherine Marshall’s Christy is a treasure trove of deep, devotional yet down-to-earth thoughts. I’ve been able to come up with seasonal passages on request. From the start, Liz has made beautiful illustrations for the quotes, using photography and other media, and coming up with much more ambitious and high-quality work than I had ever envisioned. In the past six months I’ve started making a lot more art pieces for Excerpted Inspirations. At first I did it mainly to give Liz one less thing to accomplish in her busy life. But soon the process took on a life of its own and gave me unexpected joy and fulfillment. I studied illustration at Parsons School of Design 45 years ago; since then I’ve freelanced as a scientific illustrator, mostly in pen and ink, but never found or made opportunities to illustrate stories. I’ve discovered that making a picture for an excerpt from a story calls for a different approach than I would use to illustrate the story as a whole. I like to look past the literal words and bring out the emotional and spiritual values in the passage, using symbolic imagery to share a glimpse of why I chose the passage in the first place. The concepts are as important as the design elements. Inspired by the strong graphic presence and stylized quality in Liz’s artwork, I started using collage as a medium. With the help of friends and family, I’ve amassed a varied collection of nature calendars, garden catalogs, wrapping paper, and craft paper, and Liz has given me cutout shapes from her Cricut machine. I’ve enjoyed experimenting with different combinations of materials, playing with colors and patterns, and letting those things speak to my intuition and lead me in surprising directions. Working in collage has helped to free me from a stifling perfectionism in my art, and so has the fact that the pieces aren’t paid commissions that might be rejected as not good enough. What I come up with might be different from what I originally planned, but I say, “That’s just the way it turned out.” Some of the pieces end up with more professional polish than others – and somehow it doesn’t really matter. The imperfections may not improve the end result, but they don’t take away from it either, and that insight has enabled me to expand and grow as an artist. I have always loved the marriage of words and pictures in storytelling. Howard Pyle, the gifted Swedenborgian teacher of illustration, liked pictures in books better than pictures on the wall, and believed in the possibility of a fully adult art form that would bring words and pictures together. When I create a picture that never would have occurred to me without the stimulus of the words as a starting point, I feel the power of Howard Pyle’s vision. We plan to continue the blog for a while at least, and I hope you all enjoy the results as much as we do in presenting them to you. -Linda Simonetti Odhner

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