Page 4 - Kosinski - Journey in Watercolors

For many travellers to the Middle East
George Kosinski's paintings will evoke the spirit and high quality of the greatest nineteenth-century artist of the Holy Land, David Roberts. Roberts, a Scotsman, landscape architect, painter of scenery for the theater, and one in a long line of fine artists to paint the Holy Land , arrived in Jerusalem on Good Friday, 1839; and the first part of his work, Egypt, Syria, and the Holy Land appeared in 1842. From then onward some of the most familiar western images of the Holy Land have been those of David Roberts. Many of the archaeological sites that he visited are still known through his paintings, which are admired for their accuracy.
Photography began to replace painting by the mid-nineteenth century and most of the pilgrims and travellers have subsequently relied on the accuracy of the camera to record their favourite images of the land and special moments there.
George Kosinski offers the contemporary lover of the Middle East and visitor to the Holy Land a unique voyage through time as he paints scenes of biblical landscape on the one hand and images of the people who inhabit them on the other. The combination of past and present, awash in Mediterranean colours that capture the essence of those past times and present spaces is truly memorable. Just as Roberts did nearly 160 years ago, so too does Kosinski capture the beauty, grandeur, complexity and promise of the region at the dawn of a new millennium.
Eric M. Meyers, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.
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