“Perhaps Inherit the Wind’s biggest disservice to Bryan happens in the film’s third act. It climaxes with his surrogate blathering like a fool, trying to give one last speech that no one’s interested in, and seeking Biblical verse as the answer for everything. And that’s not the worst of it. In terms of historical narrative, the greatest lies are those of omission. The fact is that, a century ago, many of America’s most prominent evolutionists were also Social Darwinists who, in the name of ‘progress’, advocated for the sterilization of the poor, indigent, and disabled under the auspices of improving the ‘fitness’ of humanity.”
— B Duncan Moench in UnHerd magazine
July 12th, 2025
“Writing, like all creative forms, is a human endeavour. At its best it is pulled up from the soul and put down on the page, or the screen. We all use ‘tools’ of some kind to do this, like the keyboard I am now writing on. But AI is different. It does not help you to do your job; it does your job for you. It sucks up from the worldwide web the usings and doings and scrapings of the already-created and it rearranges them, pretending all the while that it has ‘created’ them itself. It imitates reality but can never replace it. It is, at root, a shabby, boring and actually evil thing. It is the end of art.”
— Paul Kingsnorth, 7/12/25
The art of legacy collage
July 10th, 2025“During the last two years at the Motherhouse, I made a real effort to ‘clean out,’ and organize everything. It was truly a freeing experience! However, I still had to decide what to do with what I wanted to keep. Around this time, I had attended the funeral of a friend who had commissioned three artworks to represent her life: ‘Body, Mind, and Spirit.’ I was immediately touched by this collage idea. From then until this writing, I have been working on my collages. I had planned to do only two: ‘Home and Family’ and ‘Ministry as a Dominican.’ My artist brought forth a third, and it is a perfect fit for my life.”
— Sister Mary Otho Ballard
Below is a triptych which represents of a type of artwork that I call “Legacy Collage.” My entry about a previous example from 2016 described the scenario of a person attempting to distinguish the difference between actual family heirlooms and other items marked for eventual disposal. Inevitably, some images and memorabilia would fall into a gray area between, 
and therein lies the potential for one or more collage compositions. If creatively preserved as wall-worthy artwork, they can remain meaningful into the future.
A retired Dominican Sister of Peace saw a collage triptych at the funeral of her friend. It was a grouping that I had collaboratively assembled with my late patron. Facing a terminal condition herself, Sister had been reducing her few possessions and arranged a commission for me to make a similar creation. She had lived an extraordinary life of educational and administrative service, including an extended ministry to serve the native people of Belize, but she was physically and spiritually detaching from all of it. Because Sister had taken a vow of poverty, her devoted nephew wanted to make an enduring memorial possible, and I was honored to accept the collage assignment.
Originally there were to be two panels — the first would document her life before convent, growing up as La Monda, part of a large, farm-based family in Kentucky. The second would be about her long and diverse life as a nun. When I took stock of all the designated ingredients, it became clear that this project would also need to be a triptych. The third panel would commemorate her active preparation for eternal life.
panel 1 ~ FORMATION ~ Farm and Family
panel 2 ~ VOCATION ~ Growth and Service
panel 3 ~ ASPIRATION ~ Love and Detachment
Sister and I worked together intermittently for nearly a year, bringing her vision into being. She introduced me to the practice of “Centering Prayer.” Her presence, wisdom, and peaceful soul have had a profound effect on my heart. It’s been one of the most personally rewarding experiences I’ve had as an artist. I met Sister’s nephew last year after the finished collages were delivered, and he was remarkably generous. As Christmas approached, her condition declined, My wife and I spent some time with Sister, but she struggled with clarity. She then asked her nephew to come for a visit and for me to be there to meet with them. He and I happened to arrive at her care center about the same time, only to learn that she had passed on a half hour before.
FORMATION ~ VOCATION ~ ASPIRATION
John Andrew Dixon
three legacy collage artworks on canvas
16 x 20 inches each
private collection
July 4th, 2025
“Posterity, you will never know what it has cost my generation to establish and secure your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.”
— John Quincy Adams
June 28th, 2025
Lalo Schifrin
1 9 3 2 – 2 0 2 5
the incomparable maestro
R
I
P
March 31st, 2025
“Free speech, designed to protect the flow of information and allow people to hear all sides, was replaced with coordinated censorship. The same voices who once defended ‘speaking truth to power’ now demanded power to silence dissent. These actions violated not just ethics, but the foundational principles established after World War II to prevent exactly this kind of coercion. The very protections created to prevent medical experimentation without consent were themselves abused. The public was never told they were participating in what amounts to the largest medical experiment in human history. The formulation that received FDA approval was never actually administered — a bait-and-switch that would be criminal in any other context. We still lack proper testing data, with the general population serving as unwitting test subjects.”
— Josh Stylman, 3/28/25
March 27th, 2025
“Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to ‘about face’; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed. Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another ‘about face’!”
— Smedley Butler, 1936
March 25th, 2025
“The large-cap U.S. stock markets increasingly present a gruesome picture. Leadership in plunder capitalism and central control, richly subsidized by taxpayer dollars, does not translate into leadership in science and technology, let alone reinvestment in the things that can reverse ecological damage and advance human civilization.”
March 20th, 2025
“Those who can afford the best technologies in AI merging will earn their entrance into the more elite castes. To deny yourself or your children this, is to not only deny their future, but their children’s future, and so on and so on. In fact, this new system will look a great deal like the old system where bloodlines were relegated to a life of serfdom or aristocracy based on ‘the blood’ you were born with, or rather… enhanced with.”
View my collage landscape galleries —
March 6th, 2025
Recent Landscapes
As I continue to focus
on “painting in papers”
LITTER-ALLY KENTUCKY
Also available as
premium giclée prints
A Change of Seen
When I first took paper
and paste outside
March 4th, 2025
“Zelensky made it clear during his disastrous visit to the White House last Friday that he’s dead-set on fighting until the last Ukrainian, unless his country either gets NATO membership or Western troops. Neither of those demands is acceptable to Trump since they’d risk World War III, but so too could that risk continue rising if the conflict doesn’t soon end. Trump therefore realized that the only way to force Zelensky to the peace table with Putin is to freeze all military aid until he moderates his extreme stance.”
— Andrew Korybko
February 7th, 2025
“While it may be true that even the greatest man needs the backing of Providence to decisively shape human affairs, Providence needs him too.”
— Darryl Cooper
February 3rd, 2025
“The ancien régime just hates it when Trump talks like that. The aspersions cast upon his political opponents, the braggadocio, the typographic bravado — it’s just not the way official Washington is supposed to sound. Not, that was, until January 20. Expect a lot more where that came from. I for one, am deeply grateful for it.”
— Roger Kimball
Back to California one more time . . .
January 31st, 2025
There are times when a moment of audacity pays off, and we found ourselves transported to the far side of the continent, the beneficiaries of a piggyback ride on a private jet. Now we get to celebrate the 90th birthday of Dana’s brother, Bill. As I witness her happiness to be here, it feels like a miracle, while I apply myself to “homeostasis” and get a daily dose of citrus off the poolside tree.
Do whatever he tells you.
January 19th, 2025
Gospel of John, Chapter 2, Verse 5
Those in most need of Thy mercy . . .
January 12th, 2025Although I have tiny, weak wrists and painful thumb joints, the great blessing of my life has been my able hands, ever responsive to what in contrast has always seemed a limited and resistant creative vision, more prone to disappoint than my loyal dexterity.
the studio is ever a quiet refuge
December 22nd, 2024“Sometimes a man humbles himself in his heart, submits the visible to the power to see, and seeks to return to his source.”This small landscape found its start a year ago during one of my library demonstrations. I finished it from imagination in the studio this past week after a season of “painting in papers” outside.
— René Daumal
La Monda’s Refuge
collage on canvas by J A Dixon
8 x 10 inches