THE GENESIS OF MY FINE ART JOURNEY

     We were broke and sitting in a lonesome truck stop in Nevada wondering and praying for what to do next.  There was the promise of a steady job and according to family legend we maybe had just enough money to get there.  My Dad, Mom, infant me and a boxer dog had left Tulsa in an old borrowed station-wagon in our own 1950s version of The Grapes Of Wrath.  We were headed to the promised land of California and aside from getting a job Dad was going to become an artist and get rich and famous.  Prominently placed in the front seat along with his King James Bible was a brand new Permanent Pigments Oil Paint Set that my Granny had bought him just a few days before.  As  Providence would have it the answer for our dilema came rolling up in a cloud of dust and full of manure.  A cattle hauler.  Dad met the trucker as he was stepping down from the cab and I imagine the conversation went something like this.....

     Dad says, “Sir, I wonder if I could paint a cow on your door panel?”

      Mr. Trucker responds, “No.”

     “We're trying to get to San Fransisco and we just need a few bucks.”  Dad pleads with a sad look and a nod toward me and Mom sitting in the car.

     “Oh Alright,” Mr. Trucker relents, “if it won't take too long.”

     That trucker pulled out of there with a fine portrait of a Holstein painted with Ivory Black, Flake White, and a touch of Raw Sienna.  Some years later I saw a photo of it and I can attest that it was a real work of art.  Dad was like that, he could do almost anything with his hands really well with little or no practice.

     We made it to the promised land but as it turns out a steady job was anathema to my father's constitution.  He was a man of many talents but staying in one place was not one of them.  Despite his plethera of other jobs, by the time I was ten years old my Pop had become an itinerant master sign painter and I had become a bonafide sign painter's helper.  My job resume included standing on a scaffold three stories in the air while I filled in the seven foot tall letters of a Coka-Cola emblem on the side of a building.  Today I would not recommend this for a 12 year old but it seemed quite normal to me at the time.  The upside of living with Dad was that I was seldom bored and I saw a lot of landscape.  We never missed a national park or a art museum or a good fishing hole. The downside was that the nomadic lifestyle took a toll on my Mom who was predisposed and fell into mental illness and fell out of my life fairly early. 

It is impossible to say where my Dad's bio leaves off and my bio begins.  He never did pursue a career in fine arts but he was of the old school of sign painters who created their work completely by hand.  The fundamentals of drawing, layout, and design were in his tool box much like any fine artist.  Visual expression was the topic of many conversations we had.  If I had to choose one event that was the GENESIS OF MY FINE ART JOURNEY it would be the day Dad came home with several boxes of artist supplies and said “Have at it.”  A sign painter's supply store that had sold art supplies as a sideline was going out of business, and though he could ill afford it, he bought all they had for pennies on the dollar.  I was 15 years old and you would have thought that I'd been given a shiny new Camaro with baby moons. The choices were overwhelming but with a little experimentation I was soon making paintings of my rodeo buddies riding rough stock for ten dollars a piece. This was the start of a life long passion of playing with paint.  Some years later I did receive some formal training at the Art Student's League in New York and I also took some workshops with some artists I greatly admire.  I can tell you that nothing I was taught in art school ever contradicted anything I learned from my father.

Oil Paints circa 1970