KINNERET THREE WAYS – a portrait of the Sea of Galilee in three media…

The Sea of Galilee (known in Hebrew as Kinneret, due to its having the shape of a harp – a “kinor”) is well known to most people in the “Abrahamic” world as it played such a crucial part in Jewish, and especially Christian tradition and history. For followers of Jesus it is of course famous for being the actual site and / or backdrop for several of his miracles, while for Jews, its main city of Tiberius was a post-biblical centre of learning and culture.

Arab boy looking east, from Ginosar – ink on paper

For the modern State of Israel, Kinneret is a major source of both pious and recreational tourist revenue, in addition to its crucial role as the country’s primary fresh-water reservoir.

Kids on the Eastern Shore – ink on paper

Sitting as it does towards the northern tip of the Great Rift Valley; filled by the creeks and streams of the western Golan and the Upper Galilee to its north; at its southern point, spilling into the River Jordan and; surrounded on three sides by steep escarpments, the inland lake (for that what it actually is) has a geography to match its epic traditions and history.

Girl on a Raft – Ein Gev – ink on paper

As an artist, and a romantic it was always the stunning physical beauty of Kinneret which excited me most. To this day, I can still clearly remember my first-ever sight of it, from high up above, standing on the Horns of Hattin (where Saladin defeated a Christian army in 1187) – a dazzling smear of precious turquoise sitting deep within a heat-hazed frame of ochres and pale greens.

Three Generations – Eastern Shore – ink on paper

That was in 1967, when I was seven, and it is a view which I have never tired of since, and which I have been fortunate enough to revisit on many occasions, and never more so than during the summer of 1980…

Mother bathing Child – gouache on paper

It was in that year that I and three friends decided to walk the entire circumference of Kinneret – starting out from, and returning to, Tiberius over the course of two days.

Mother bathing Child – oil on canvas

We decided to do a clockwise circumvention and so set off heading north along the west shore of the lake, with only the clothes on our back, two rucksacks (a couple bottles of wine, cans of beer and packets of crisps and Bissli falafel chips in one, and music cassettes and radio batteries in the other) and a small ghetto-blaster…

Ein Gev Bathers – gouache on paper (commercial poster)

As it turned out, these meagre provisions and sparse equipment helped generate one of the most pleasurable 48 hours of our young lives…

Family Group – oil on canvas (palette knife)

The fact we were two boys and two girls; the wine and beer (chilled each evening in cool water of the lake); two lingering golden evening swims; and some incredibly empathetic music provided by the likes of George Benson and Carlos Santana made for an intensely sensual experience…

Danish Girl at Ein Gev – ink on paper

…So much so, that even though it all happened the best part of 40 years ago, whenever I think back to that walk it still makes me smile.

Ein Gev Girl – oil on canvas

Thanks to the fact that I made many sketches and paintings of Kinneret, and the people I witnessed playing on its pebble beaches and bathing in its refreshing waters, I get to smile on a more less a daily basis. I hope that the pictures shown here provide an equally happy reminder to those of you fortunate to have been there, and an enticement to those of you thinking of going…

OUR “WHITE PRAETORIAN” – a portrait of Aura, our Italian guard and friend…

Although I promised the resumption of normal posting for this piece, I’d forgotten that I would be in Oxford, and thus geographically separated from my two hard-drives (one in Jönköping in Sweden, the other in southern Spain). So, for the third successive post I’m restricted to the material I carry around on my laptop and hence, this canine themed picture post.

This is in effect an homage to our late dog Aura, with whom we shared so many wonderful and wacky moments.

The images here will be a pleasant reminder to those among you who remember her, and for those more recent arrivals on these pages, you might wish to check out these links to some of my earlier posts: https://adamhalevi777.com/2015/06/26/dog-days-1-auras-big-sniff/; https://adamhalevi777.com/2015/06/29/dog-days-3-a-dog-in-the-room/and; https://adamhalevi777.com/2015/06/30/dog-days-3-michelin-maremma/

For a large dog, Aura loved small cosy spaces, and none more so than the back of Dido’s old MGB GT – pictured here outside our mews house in Paddington, about to set off for a trip to the Lake District…

…and here we are arrived in the Lakes. This car seating configuration worked just fine, so long as Aura hadn’t eaten anything garlicy the night before!
Aura liked nothing more than frolicking in a heap of freshly fallen snow, or failing that, a heap of freshly fallen autumn leaves…
By the time we’d moved to Spain, Dido had moved up to her late uncle’s Alfa GTV. Despite sharing the same Italian roots with the Alfa, Aura always preferred the MG…
Call me biased, but Aura was quite simply the most beautiful dog I have ever seen, not to mention, the most photogenic. Her she is in our-then new home in southern Spain…
…and she wasn’t averse to modelling the latest hat-wear…
Our time in Boulogne was mostly miserable, but Aura could always lighten the mood with a play on the beach with one of the locals…

This ancient Roman statue (in the Vatican Museum) known as The canis pastoralis  is thought to represent the direct ancestor of the Maremma, which were reported to have guarded the imperial flocks from around the time of Emperor Tiberius (early 1st century).