Pilgrimage

Once I traveled to Japan with a friend who simply didn't have the same experience as I did while there. Where I saw beautiful temples and searched for some sort of "deeper meaning", she saw beautiful guys and whined about being hungry every three hours without fail. A book like Pilgrimage can help any traveler see the beauty of the landscape, of the culture, and of spiritual places with better eyes and a more perceptive spirit. I wish I could have painted watercolors like this during my travels, to Japan and elsewhere. I would have learned to slow down and look.He's a pretty good writer too. It is interesting to read about Afghanistan when it was peaceful.This is a very beautiful book about very beautiful places. It cheers me up when I feel bored. My friends love to look through it. So I hope that you can find a copy for yourself.

Paul Osborne is a fabulous artist - one who presents far more than watercolor postcards of exotic places. His paintings (mostly of spiritually significant sites from Greece to Tibet, and including the Middle East, Pakistan and India) touch the essence of these places - their luminosity and mystery. His work honors and seeks to understand the lands that he travels through, and helps us grasp the language of these exotic and ancient sites as they speak to us of history, of the spirit and of an otherness that can teach us.The text is a delightful read, as he describes his long, overland journey on very hard roads. His route is one that few dare to take these days, and even in 1989 it was not without danger.One drawback is the quality of some reproductions. Take note of the color on the slipcover of the book, which is crisp and rich. Compare it to some of the washed out reproductions inside. Shame on the publishers! It would be great to see these paintings in person. If you are interested in great painting and adventurous travel, then this is the book for you. When is the next book coming, Paul Osborne? Certainly you have not been sitting home reading comics all of these years!