The Rose Garden

"It is the rose gardens of the world that nourish our Souls to help us get through the darkest of times. The beauty of nature reminds us that we exist because God loves us, and it is the sharing of that bounty that brings us all closer to home."

Those were the closing words to the statement for my first show of these pictures at Art Space, the cooperative gallery on Highway 41 in Oakhurst, California. The title of the show was "THE ROSE BASKET - Sharing the Bounty."

Click here to see "The Rose Basket" and the story about it.

During the opening a friend of ours, Sonja, came up with tears in her eyes and said, "You know, you are right." She was talking about my view of what helps us get through tough times. It made me think a lot about the value of what I was doing and where I wanted to go with my art.

Another friend of mine had a different experience. The idea of art bringing you joy came from Maggi Butterfield-Brown, one of the ministers at the Positive Living Center in Oakhurst, California. Maggi came to the art opening and looked at my prints and canvases but in the noisy gathering we did not get to talk. Later, she went back to the gallery and purchased a large 20x30-inch canvas of "Sheer Elegance" for her home. I stopped by to visit her, to see how it looked on her wall. She had hung it high in her living room. I asked why she put it there. Maggi just laughed and said, "So it can rain down joy on me every day."

The idea floored me. Moments of beauty, while they are all around us, are often fleeting. How often do we say that we should "wake up and smell the roses" and never do it?

But that is the power of art: to capture moments of beauty and connect us to them.

What I am after is to give you an instant to stop, to remember that there is beauty in your world. A moment for you look up from the mess of paper on your desk, the thousands of e-mail messages in your Inbox, to look up on the wall and let the radiant color of a rose penetrate through the haze until you can smell the delicate scent of Fragrant Cloud in front of you.

Here is a little secret: when beauty touches you, life is easier. The easier it is to love life, the more you are showered with joy. And if you don't have your own rose garden, I have one for you.

Click here to look at the images of my rose garden.