Impactful Encounters

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In life a seemingly small impact of an encounter can grow like a seed if nourished. The past few months have been full of chance encounters leading to some immediate appreciation and new friendships while others will sit in the fertile soil until the seed is ready to grow. 
This weekend Melissa, Gaia and I spent the weekend admiring art. On Friday night, we attended an art reception to support a group of realist artists at John Pence Gallery. On Saturday, we went to the DeYoung Museum to view the Masters of Venice Exhibition. 
Within the past few weeks we have had some of those impactful encounters, some were planned, some were serendipitous, and others were just amusing.
Regarding the amusing, while at the Masters of Venice Exhibition, I was filling up my notebook with museum notes on the great Venetian renaissance painters Titian, Giorgione, Veronese, Tintoretto, and Mantegna. In an exhibition like this, the museum security often must remind me not to get to close to the paintings during viewing, but I was consciously on good behavior this trip. Then I heard museum security ask someone to step back from an Andrea Mantegna Grisaille (term for painting executed entirely in monochrome or near-monochrome, usually in shades of grey). Knowing I was not that close, I turned to the perpetrator and noticed it was Juliette Aristides who exhibited the night before at John Pence Gallery and also wrote the book Classical Painting Atelier. I was pleased that someone other than me was under surveillance. Juliette Aristides and I haven't seen each other since BACAA about two years ago, so we compared notes on the Venetian Masters technique as we cautiously viewed the rest of the exhibition. While I studied in Vicenza Italy in the past, I learned a tremendous amount at the exhibition.
Regarding the serendipitous, we have met some incredible people recently including sculptor Alicia Ponzio and fine artist Justin Hess who both recently moved to San Francisco from attending and teaching at the Florence Academy of Art. Jamen Graves, Board Member of Florence Academy of Art, fine artist Sadie Valleri who recently opened an new Atelier in San Francisco, Eric Rhoads publisher of Fine Art Connoisseur, Vincent Xeus who painted a portrait of Gaia and I'm sure the greater art world will know about soon, and Stephanie Fine who is a generous volunteer and asked me to teach plein air painting for a day to grade school children in Sonoma. 
While Melissa and I are interested in nourishing our daughter Gaia's interest in art, ballet and life she is actually introducing us to friendships we would not have known. While I cannot name them all, we recently met Jason Moore, and his family, an artisan of wine making . He wrote a nice blog post about our meeting, so I thought I would share the post and his quote which deeply resonates with me.
"For some, determining one's true purpose in life is accomplished thru following the path of least resistance, and thus relinquishing to passion."