The Floating Lighthouse at Big Sur

I was lucky enough to have captured this image on film many years ago….The fog gave the appearance that the lighthouse and ancillary buildings were floating in the air….I painted this in 2013 as part of a Big Sur series of artwork.

BIG SUR

The enchantment of Big Sur began at age 16 when a group of crazy teenagers flew across the country in a 1970 Buick LeSabre at speeds of over 140 mph from New Jersey to California. I documented that “coming of age” trip in a book “Only Moments” many years later. Big Sur was the epicenter of incredible beauty, danger, and a magnet for all types of people in my generation. From the writer Henry Miller, to the beats, to the children of the sixties this place was magical….and still is. The paintings were done in 2013 and there is one more that I will post next that is my favorite and was the hardest to do….

My paintings are now on display right outside of Sedona, AZ at “The Miner’s Pick Gallery” in Jerome at 123 Hill Street located at what once was the hospital and surgeon’s home. Stop in and see Melissa and their incredible offerings of natural wood furniture, crystals, gemstones, geodes, and fossils along with my artwork hanging on the walls.

For more paintings go to http://www.ipadimagination.com

Only Moments Book Review

Malcolm Campbell author of “The Sun Singer” reviews my novel “Only Moments.”  Malcolm hails from Georgia and posted this on communati.com on November 21st and gave the book a four star rating on Amazon.com.  Malcolm’s website can be accessed from the links list on the left.

When you watch a man dancing on a dark stage in front of a flashing strobe light, you see only moments of the dance. Nick Oliva has taken the defining, and often poignant vignettes, of musician Chris Vadia’s life and choreographed them into a remarkable novel.

We begin in the future, after all of the moments are long gone–a coming-of-age car trip, first love, marriage, marital strife, a husband-and-wife performance at Carnegie Hall, the death of a spouse–and look at events so fresh they appear to be happening now! But they are of the past and cannot be changed, and they take us–along with Chris–figuratively back in time and where they dance before our eyes in perfect detail before we move on.

The struggling Chris we find within each moment of his life’s journey is not the Chris observing his past from the perspective of a man who learns, is learning, actually, that his seemingly disparate moments of joy and sorrow that appear to have been separated by time and space and vantage point are connected into a well-defined, sensible whole.

If you’re a musician and/or if music impacts your life in meaningful ways, you will appreciate the impact of Oliva’s experience as a musician on the piano/violin practice and performance scenes. But you’ll also see as you read from moment to moment that music is one of several apt metaphors in “Only Moments.” Life’s moments are like the notes in a composer’s great work in progress, a work that in spite of all the choices, false starts, crescendos, decrescendos, and improvisations, turns out the only way it possibly could have turned out.

A long-time fan of Joseph Campbell and his hero path structure or myth and mythic stories, I see within the pages of this novel that Chris Vadia is discovering–like all heroes on the path–that the events of one’s journey, in all their glory, are the tip of the iceberg to the important inner journey we all travel from birth to death and beyond.

“Only Moments” is the journey of a lifetime carried forward on the wings of Chris Vadia’s stirring memories and Nick Oliva’s stirring prose.

Big Sur Central to Only Moments, A New Novel

Big Sur is the focal point of fate for the characters in this new novel. I care not that the book makes me large sums of money or that my blog site makes money through ads or pass-throughs; I only want “Only Moments” book’s readership to expand in order to touch souls without egocentric satisfaction, and to promote the introspection of the self. There is force of God within, therein lies the answers to the “secret” of life, not ancient papers and codexes throughout the dawn of man; of words mistranslated, misunderstood and held up defiantly as an excuse for the right to kill one another. I take no superior attitude as some would accuse me, I have been dead, literally and allowed back to the land of the living and even as I suffer great pain daily, I am thankful. I count every day as a miracle, everything around me as such. Thank you for taking the time to look at the site and reading mere words.

See www.onlymomentsbook.com for reviews and excerpts.

The story opens in the year 2020, with a romantic/erotic dream sequence and waking of one lonely sixty-six year-old widower Chris Vadia, a retired professional musician, and his sullen celibate perspective due to his wife dying fifteen years earlier.  After establishing the time period and the impossibility of replacing human intimacy with the high-tech devices of the period, we flashback fifty years to 1970.  The story then leads to the serendipitous and comic circumstances of how he met the love of his life, while on a wild summer vacation driving through California with three friends.  A beach in Big Sur is the dramatic background for the fairy tale loss of their virginity.

Time then shifts chapter to chapter, through their college days, marriage, their struggling and successes, parental deaths, the World Trade Towers disaster, their Carnegie Hall debut, and then the crisis of having grown so far apart despite being with each other 24 hours a day. The novel explores how the deep flaws of both individuals bring them together through life, and how the chance actions of childhood experiences run so deep that they ultimately affect an entire life.  At age 51, she dies; the cause of Chris’ mental downfall.  The reader then finds Chris in the present and the reason for the quick flashbacks of time from when he first began reminiscing on his beachside outdoor deck. The book’s climax occurs as Chris goes through a body/soul separation that is literally the culmination of all the previous chapters by using a device of repeating phrases (shown in italics) from previous chapters that now bear new meanings. The reader can now also understand that the opening dream in the first chapter was a foretelling of the entire book.

In the last chapter, his finds his life dramatically changed for the better as a result of his experience from a powerful singular event.

The unforgiving world, the false hope of technology, the commonality of human emotion throughout history ties into an uplifting romantic fairy tale.  The underlying theme is the imperfection of all things human and the unrelenting passage of time, but is written in a very positive manner. The road, throughout the novel is representative of one’s life path and sense of discovery.