My Paradise Found

(Click to learn more about above painting.)

I stepped up to half dead ancient chestnut. This great grandfather of a tree stood alone in a clearing beside a small out building full of old junk. This was in my neighbor Mario’s field just up the slope from his family’s vacant old stone villa there on Mt Amiata in Grosetto Tuscany. Mario visited this beautiful old home from time to time just to keep the property tidy. 

It was impossible to get my arms around any more than just about a third of its massive girth. Closing my eyes I stood and waited - glad that to be alone in the very early morning with out witnesses to see me doing something so weird and childish. Then it happened, all of a sudden I could feel an unmistakable deep feeling of a pure unconditional love gradually growing, flooding all through my body from head to toe. It was if every cell in my body began shimmering with something brand new.

I couldn't help but weep feeling something so powerful going through me. this was an experience completely beyond anything I had known up to that point. 

That was just a little over two years ago but I remember it like yesterday. Ever since that morning I will never feel the same way about trees. In fact it was just two weeks ago in a big park just outside of Paris that I stood inside the crotch of a massive twin trunked silver maple. I stepped up there not really thinking anything more than it would make a good photo op when again I was surprised to feel something suddenly shift inside of me. And then thought popped into my head

“Your strong because you have deep roots like me.” 

Again tears. Did a tree just talk to me?

My relationship with our local park is getting a little more intimate with every next painting I do. My oversized sketchbook is more and more swollen with its extra pages pasted in just to keep it going a little bit longer. 

Sitting underneath the cathedral like tree canopy in the park behind my French travel easel I do my best to capture with the oil paint a little piece of what I feel about this place. A little un-famous park that has become my very own paradise found. Another rag tag troop of little boys run past my portable tiny studio yelling at the top of their lungs words I don’t understand. Their parents stand by, some lost in their phones, others standing in clusters sharing conversation and knowing smiles.

I can’t think of a place in the whole world I would rather spend my summer days this year.