2025 Provence Workshops

We gather to begin the June workshop on Friday evening at my friend Stephanie’s 17^th century home on rue Cardinale in the heart of Aix-en-Provence. We introduce ourselves and share a bit of our past and what brought each of us here. I explain the essence of the week to come and how strongly I believe that Destiny had formed this group and how each one in the group was going to climb their own spiritual and artistic mountain.

The journey is an active contemplation of nature. We are an echo of the mysteries that nature will reveal if we abandon our egos and open our senses to join in the dance. The spontaneous echo will be manifested with rapid brush strokes on the canvas. The unanticipated lucidity, the moment of epiphany where nature lifts its veil to let us enter into the dance is more about our letting go than it is about nature changing its ways.

To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea (in our case to the sun colliding with the olive trees as it crescendos from golden to orange and timelessly slips behind the distant hill). There are few who are willing to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into their bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of their life into a living and vigilant silence.” – Thomas Merton

The result is a gift. It is greater than we could have ever imagined!

“It is a deep resonance in the inmost center of our spirit in which our very life loses its separate voice and re-sounds with the majesty and the mercy of the Hidden and Living One. He answers Himself in us and this answer is divine life, divine creativity, making all things new. We ourselves become His echo and His answer. It is as if in creating us God asked a question, and in awakening us to contemplation He answered the question, so that the contemplative is, at the same time, question and answer.” – Thomas Merton

The first morning we prepare our palette of notes. Our colors are placed in an organized way like keys on a piano, to be able to “play” our notes fluidly, urgently before the fragile lucidity received from nature would be gone. Urgency is vital to abandoning our ego, our intellect and going on faith.… “While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.” II Corinthians 4:18.

This is the way to coming upon the epiphany of the uncreated beauty!

Not knowing what is ahead, we paint – not calculating, not thinking. We paint the mountain, the poppies, the lavender, the olive trees, the sea, the market in the intense heat, with hardly a breeze. When a slight breeze came, we rejoice and are thankful. Indeed, we become: the poppies, the mountain, the lavender, the olive trees, the sea, the market. I feel privileged to watch the transformation of each individual on their own unique journey, climbing their mountain, dancing their dance, catching their big fish, reaching a new height in their spiritual development.

I am missing my painters! Seeing their paintings hanging on my walls to dry and remembering little exchanges, I have the feeling of being close to them. Their souls are speaking to mine and I am full and happy. Thank you.