The Good Life

Collection:  Beginning of a Perfect Evening III
Sizes:  20x24, 24x30, 32x40
Publishes:  April 2004

    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.

    -Thomas Kinkade