A number of pieces of art have had a strong effect on me. All have been ones I have seen in person over the years; being present with the work is so much more overwhelming emotionally.

Among them:

Sunflowers by Van Gogh. The intensity of the colors and the depth of the brushwork were stupendous.

Seeing Guernica before it was repatriated to Spain brought me to tears.

One rainy day I was walking through The Louvre, and stepped into a small side gallery. Right in front of me was Ship of Fools by Hieronymus Bosch. I was stunned, and the beauty and detail left me in wonder.

About seven years ago, my old girlfriend and I went to see an exhibit on 17th Century Dutch art at the De Young museum in San Francisco. The star attraction was Girl With Pearl Earring which was fabulous, but what kept me going back in the exhibit was The Goldfinch, the painting at the center of the movie coming out next week. We were both awed by the beauty of that work.

I could go on all afternoon.

Morning in the Tropics by Church. Love huge landscape paintings of nature. Bierstadt’s works for example.

Morning in the Tropics calms me down and mesmerizes. Fun to see small details like a solitary bird perched on a small branch.

I enjoy paintings which pulls me in and makes me want to disappear so I can reappear inside it.

I was in the National Gallery in London a couple of weeks ago and one painting in particular caught my imagination and I went back to it three or four times.

It shows a castle with a woman in the foreground. The woman looks distraught and sits in a strained uncomfortable position. The castle behind her doesn’t look far away but it seems inaccessible either by land or by sea. The painted castle drew me in to the picture and the relationship between the woman and the castle gave rise to endless speculation as it has done for 400 years.

The picture is known as The Enchanted Castle though its original title was “Landscape with Psyche outside the Palace of Cupid”. It was painted by Claud Lorrain in 1664.

Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream, is an iconic 20th work, but I did not know that when I first saw a picture of it as a teenager. It was in an encyclopedia on a page with multiple thumbprint sized paintings. The anguish and isolation of the character in the painting grabbed my attention, as it has for many others.

Picasso’s “Guernico” and Rousseau’s “The Sleeping Gypsy” are two that have compelled me since I saw them at MOMA as a child.

There are a lot of paintings where the level of skill is compelling on its own right.

What Picasso managed to capture in Guernica is beyond technical skill. There is so much emotion there.

Yes. Both of them were painted by friends of mine…both artists. The one I see the most is in my downstairs powder room. It is a Spanish woman who seems to look right into my soul when I look at her. It’s a great piece. The guy who painted it is young and so talented. I expect to see many great works from him. The other is not easy to explain the visual, but the message for me is clearly one suggesting that we are all connected via being plugged into truth. I get a lot of comments on that one. :) This artist and I have been friends for 41 years. She is a high school art teacher which she loves oh so much. She also works at the university in the art department. She has a studio of wonderful stuff that she will not sell. She keeps saying…....not yet.

There are many that have made impressions, but I shared these two because I treasure the work and the people who created it.