Path of the Gods

A view of distant Capri from the Path of the Gods on the Amalfi Coast, another in the series of souvenir/postcard paintings. 6x8 oil on panel.

Italian Souvenir

An 8x10 oil on canvas of a crowded beach and waterfront at Marina Grande in Sorrento, Italy.

Sorrento Entr'acte

A couple 9x12 oil paintings of Sorrento; top is Via Bartolomeo Capasso, and bottom is Marina della Lobra, from my visit last year.  A change of pace from the canals, though another is on the way.

Marina Grande and Beginner's Mind

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."

Sorrento Medium

This past weekend I spent two days on a pastel that was overcooked, and is now gone.  This one is medium rare in comparison.  8x12.

There's another vision of beauty described on the first page of The Golden String,  the autobiography of Bede Griffiths:  "I remember now the feeling of awe which came over me.  I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel;  and I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the face of God...It was as though I had begun to see and smell and hear for the first time...I experienced an overwhelming emotion in the presence of nature, especially at evening.  It began to wear a kind of sacramental character for me.  I approached it with a sense of almost religious awe, and in the hush which comes before sunset, I felt again the presence of an unfathomable mystery."

Sorrento Rooftops

A 9x12 pastel.  A suggestion of a view.

I found the following quote from Maupassant in a magazine article:  "From time to time I experience strange, intense, short-lived visions of beauty, an unfamiliar, elusive, barely perceptible beauty that surfaces in certain words or landscapes, certain colorations of the world, certain moments..."  It caught my interest because I experienced a vision of beauty walking along a roadway recently.  The late afternoon sunlight raking a bluish road surface next to the tan gravelly edge, with brilliant grass further in off the road.  Nothing else, but I just stood there transfixed by what I saw.