Good Life

I believe that each of us carries an image of “the good life” in a private place very near to our hearts. Because I am a painter, I visualize The Good Life in terms of a scene that embodies the virtues and values that are most precious to me.

In The Good Life, third and final piece in my Beginning of a Perfect Evening Collection, I have in effect set up my easel in that imagined space where God’s bounty is manifest. It is an autumn evening: that season and time when God seems to live in the radiant sky and charge His world with special grandeur.

I identify with the fisherman, perhaps because Christ described His followers as fishers of men, and certainly because the fisherman lives in a profound harmony with nature and receives its gifts with humble gratitude. Mountain streams such as this are abundant with fat brook trout; the smoke of a cook fire rises in the still mountain air.

Towering peaks embrace the valley and light spills from the log cabin which seems ablaze with life. I imagine that my wife and daughters are safely tucked away within that cottage, enjoying the pleasures of a comfortable domesticity, as they await my triumphant return with the evening catch. Alone with my family, safe, peacefully savoring the glories of God’s creation – that is my image of The Good Life. I invite you to enjoy it with me.