Category Archives: Writing

Dr. Clarion Johnson, photographed by Scott Suchman for Sarah Lawrence Magazine

Full Immersion: A Physician Contemplates Healing and Grace
Sarah Lawrence Magazine, Fall 2012
Sarah Lawrence College
Editor: Suzanne Gray

Moments of grace can be as ordinary as the hand of a father touching his son. Clarion Johnson recalls just such a moment—one of his earliest memories. He was about 3, wearing a little blue suit, walking to church with his father: “Hand in hand, just the two of us, and later coming home, seeing my sister just about to sit up—she’s 11 months younger than I am—sitting on a newspaper, eating bacon.” A father’s hand, a little blue suit, a slice of bacon. Moments of grace, often mundane, make pictures that can be carried with us for a lifetime.

But what about miracles? As human beings, we find it both too easy and too hard to contemplate the miraculous. We use the word too casually, almost negating its true meaning. When we think that something’s unlikely, we might say, “That would take a miracle.” When something positive transpires against the odds, we say, “It’s a miracle.” And we accept life’s simple gifts with optimism that “miracles happen every day.” [read more]

Photograph of George Bisacca at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Jon Roemer for Middlebury Magazine

Restoration Hardware
Middlebury Magazine, Fall 2012
Middlebury College
Editor: Matt Jennings

A painting is an image, but it is also an object. The image resides in a thin film of pigment bound by a medium, such as egg yolk or oil, to an underlying support: a taut piece of canvas or—in the case of many Western paintings before the late-15th century—a carefully prepared panel of wood.

For most of us, the painting is what we see on the surface, where light reflects the image into our eyes. George Bisacca ’77 sees that same image, but his vision of a painting penetrates more deeply, to the object beneath. As one of the world’s leading conservators of paintings on wood (often called “panel paintings”), Bisacca sees through the paint to the cracks, fissures, worm holes, and clumsy repairs of centuries past—yet he also sees the craftsmanship, history, cultural tradition, and immense beauty of these objects. [read more]