Mahatma Gandhi

Another portrait... These are all part of the Influential People series which started with Daniel Quinn a few months ago. I first learned about this extraordinary man in the 1982 film "Ghandi". I was 20 years old, and having grown up in a very strong Methodist and Southern Baptist environment, I was just beginning to open myself up to understanding other religions and new ways of thinking.

Although Gandhi grew up Hindu, he drew inspiration from many religions including Buddhism, Theosophy, and Christianity. Ghandi dedicated his life to discovering Truth. He tried to achieve this by learning from his own mistakes and conducting experiments on himself. He called his autobiography "The Story of My Experiments with Truth". Gandhi summarized his beliefs first when he said "God is Truth". He would later change this statement to "Truth is God". 


For me, Ghandi opened up a door into a new world. I left behind the dogma of Christianity that I had held onto and began to look for the Truth.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Lately, I've been doing watercolor sketches of old black and white photographs. It's kind of fun imagining the colors and in the end you get something that brings an old photograph a bit more life. This is from a photo taken of Renoir in his studio sometime around 1912 .

The Story - Mother Teresa

Paris to Austin

My nephew, Ben Foster, is a film maker and last summer and fall he had an amazing movie called Strings in many film festivals around the country. You can see a trailer for it here on his website. Anyway, as it worked out, if we shuffled our flights around just a little we could make it to the Austin Film Festival to see it with the rest of my amazing family including my super-talented singer-songwriter sister, Jen Foster. So from Paris we flew to Boston (see sketch on left), and then from Boston to Chicago, then on to Austin. Whew! A really long day but nice to be back in Texas with the family after a long three weeks away. The sketch on the right is from my brother's back porch - a nice view of the hill country from his home outside of Austin.

Back in Paris