Page 3 - Kosinski - Journey in Watercolors

George Kosinski's Journey in Watercolours is a painter's pilgrimage through the Middle East that captures the timeless Holy Land in exquisite portraits filled with memory and majesty, light and luminosity, history and a hint of heaven. Kosinski's colours and characters change along the way, but always the subjects stay the same, religious landmarks or landscapes marked by devotion and divinity. Like a desert hermit in one of his Wadi Kelt gorges, or the Ethiopian monks unlearning worldliness in Jerusalem, Kosinski takes us on his own odyssey of self-discovery and reflection to examine age-old wonders of this world for signs of the next.
Kosinski's work first caught my eye in his magnificent portraits of Jerusalem, which evoke the ancient stones, the sun-bleached walls and the biblical backdrops in all their beauty and brilliance. But it did something further, quite often leaving half the paper for rendering the breathtaking sky above the walled Old City. What is Jerusalem if not this haunting and heavenly expanse above, which Kosinski calls forth again and again? He returns, like Monet to his cathedrals, to paint this eternal vista in all its otherworldly versions of colour and cloud, dawn and dusk, shade and season. It is this vision that seems to have so stirred the painter's soul, and that so ennobles his work.
Walking in the footsteps of prophets in this city of antiquity holy to the three great monotheistic faiths - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - Kosinski captures quiet moments of dignity in the everyday rituals of Christians, Jews and Muslims amid the ancient archways and ramparts. These inhabitants remind us of the reflection and revelation so unique to this sacred place that it stretches across the centuries to other calendars, other millenniums. Kosinski's eye mixes memory and detail with subtle splashes of sunlight that play off the medieval mosques, Crusader cloisters, the Western Wall, or the heavens themselves, rising sublime above a rose-tinted Jerusalem.
Kosinski brings his natural affinity with Impressionism together with an architects's appreciation of the real world's sharper perspectives to portray churches and monasteries, golden domes and Herodian stones, as gracefully as flowers on the Golan Heights, the waters of Jaffa or the faces of the Sinai Bedouin. His Journey in Watercolours extends from the Dead Sea mists or the colorful cliffs of Petra and the Sinai, to the shores of the Nile and the Galilee, the heights of Gamla, the ruins of Baalbeck, the courtyards of Damascus, and the souks of Cairo or Aleppo.
Kosinski paints doorways that bring us inside sacred shrines, temples and gardens. He depicts ancient alleys that draw us deep into old cities and times past. His arches, frames and thresholds inspire us to look through, and beyond, to robed men and veiled women, smoky shops and tiled fountains, Mameluke stonework and midday sunlight. And he unveils panoramas of Jerusalem with vision and heart that always invite us to ascend to the city on the hill, stark and beautiful, against a fathomless sky.
Storer Rowley, former Middle East Bureau Chief, Chicago Tribune.
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