The paintings gathered for this exhibition were not conceived as a project but as a slow unfolding of affection. They came like waves, each one carrying a memory, a face, a rhythm of light. My time in San Francisco has been less about living in a city and more about listening to it—the murmur of the Bay at dusk, the shifting fog that hides and reveals, the silhouettes of hills that rise like psalms. I did not paint to describe but to respond, to let the city inscribe itself upon my colors and my thoughts.

I have painted in Europe, in the Balkans, and in the quiet studios of the American West. Yet here, at the edge of the Pacific, I found a kind of harmony between the elements—the Greek light of my youth mirrored in the California sunset, the Byzantine pulse hidden in the geometry of bridges, the chant of gulls mingling with the distant hum of the city. This meeting of East and West, of the sacred and the urban, has shaped my brush more profoundly than I can explain.

Painting, for me, is an act of communion. The canvas becomes a small altar on which matter and meaning reconcile. Each hue—gold, red, blue—is a confession of gratitude; each form a prayer for unity. I find myself painting the invisible presence that lingers within the visible world: the divine trace in a stranger’s face, the gentle sanctity of a tree leaning over the Bay, the conversation of clouds that drift like pilgrims toward the horizon.

San Francisco lends itself to this theology of vision. Its beauty is never static; it moves with the tides, bends with the light, humbles the observer. The city is a mirror of the human condition—luminous, wounded, restless, and always yearning for reconciliation. It reminds me that art, too, is a form of repentance: a desire to make visible what love has already revealed.

If these paintings carry any unity, it is not of subject but of spirit. They arise from encounters—with people, with places, with time itself. I have met saints and wanderers here, dancers and poets, each one bearing something of eternity in their gaze. I have watched the ocean consume and release its own color, as if rehearsing resurrection. And through it all, I have felt the whisper of continuity—the same mystery that once animated icons and frescoes, now shimmering within the modern landscape.

This exhibition does not seek to impose meaning but to invite contemplation. It is a gesture of reverence before the mystery of place—this city that stands like an open door between heaven and earth. The paintings are not answers; they are thresholds. They ask the viewer to dwell for a moment in the stillness where vision and faith converge, where the material becomes transparent and the eternal begins to breathe through it.

As an artist and a bishop, I live between two obediences: one to the word, the other to the image. Both are languages of incarnation. In painting San Francisco, I have tried to speak both at once—to let color become theology, and silence become praise. The hills, the wind, the bridges, the faces—all are sacraments of the same mystery: that God is present in all things, and that beauty remains the first language of hope.

If I have learned anything from this city, it is that light is never still. It moves through fog and memory, through laughter and loss, through the faces of those who believe and those who doubt. It binds us, heals us, reminds us that the divine is not distant but near, shimmering quietly at the edge of all we see.

This exhibition is, then, a hymn of gratitude. To the friends and strangers whose lives have touched mine; to the saints who walk these streets unseen; to the city that stands at the continent’s end yet opens toward eternity. May those who enter this gallery feel what I felt while painting: that in the fragile shimmer of light over the Bay, there is always more than meets the eye—there is grace, still moving, still creating, still calling us home.

The painter is both witness and creator—he unveils a mystery that touches and draws in every person willing to face a long and noble tradition, and even more so, to face oneself.

I thank Radmila Vasiljević and Asterouli Thermou for making it possible for us to paint some of the landscapes together.

I would also like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the organizers of the exhibition—Melody Key, Marija Gordić, and all those involved—for inviting me to create this thematic collection dedicated to the city they call home, and for inspiring me to uncover and illuminate its hidden treasures, the quiet poetry that lives beneath its familiar skyline.