In addition to all the other series that I am maintaining, I started a series based upon my visit to Sorrento last year. The above are both 9x12, top oil on canvas, bottom, charcoal and pastel.
I have always been attracted to John Singer Sargent's landscape paintings. Stanley Olson in
John Singer Sargent: His Portrait writes: "John '... ['s] object was to acquire the habit of reproducing precisely whatever met his vision without the slightest previous "arrangement" of detail, the painter's business being, not to pick and choose, but to render the effect before him...'...[P]aint what your eye sees, not what your mind instructs what you ought to see... the artist ought to know nothing whatever about the nature of the object before him... should but concentrate all his powers on a representation of its appearance. The picture was to be a consistent vision, a reproduction of the area filled by the eye."
Richard Rohr writes, "'Beginner's mind' is actually someone who's
not in their mind at all! They are people who can immediately experience the naked moment apart from filtering it through any mental categories. Such men and women are capable of simple presence to what is right in front of them without 'thinking' about it too much."
