Landscape of Virginia

It's been a free ride but I need to pay up. I mostly work to paint and paint to live but to love is what it's really all about. It was George Gross a WWII painter who lived in Pre-WWII Germany that coined that phrase and it's sort of stuck with me all these years..hat's off to him. He really had a lot of guts to stick it to the fascist in their own homeland, it was only through a stroke of luck or God's Will (whichever you want to believe in) that he got out of Germany just in the nick of time before they were to come after him. He then lived in the good old USA until his death. He put meaning into every painting and drawing he did and told it like it is ya know...anyway I too began working in that vein but as with most survivors we mellow with age and I certainly am not any exception to that rule: my paintings today are rather decorative when one might compare them with what I was painting in my Academy of fine arts days. So it goes but I do still enjoy a g...

  A new work done over my spring break from work, it took all of my energy to work on this one canvas due to the overwhelming amount of area that it covered in it's breath. My breath was diminished once it was done, it was too four to six hour sunny days of working on site. Then I touched it up at home. It's an oil painting about twenty inches in height by thirty eight inches in withe. It's of a street scene nearby to my home. It's a street with a good number of flowering trees on it and they were just beginning to bloom when I began this canvas. I added the flowers to the trees in as much as they were blooming then and in the days just beyond the time of it's execution. I hope you all enjoy my effort.

A new painting of what I dubbed "the Blood Red House" is a view of a really nice looking porch on a house that caught my eye. As it turns out, it is a new purchase by the farming cultural community of disabled Americans known as Innisfree, it is a housing unit for clients who will live in town. I enjoyed a good view of it in the way that the trees still haven't bloomed with their leaves yet, so I got a really unobstructed view of it to paint it. I stood across the street as the flower pedals dropped onto my palette while I was working. The wind was stiff. The colors were grand that day and the sky was clear of clouds so the sun shown brightly down on me. I got a small amount of sun that day, but it was all worth it because of the result. I might even go back and create an even larger painting just to do this view justice.

My newest helper is Bob; he's a union guy I hired from a local homeless shelter. He works for food and shelter. I do what I can to get his psychic going in a positive direction again but it's tough. He mostly sits around and sleeps...I do what I can to keep him active but it's hard. He like giving me advice about everything I do. He's got an opinion about the way it aught to be done about everything. Oh well, maybe if I just keep giving him the word to stuff the hairballs from his ears into his throat he might learn something. I'll keep at it.

A good part of me wants to be a loving, caring man who has the capacity to love another being, in this case I've decided to take on a cat into my home. This happens after loving and caring for another young female cat for five or six years, only to lose her to diabetes. It was a while before I could accept it and move on but it's happened that I found myself ready for a companion in my home once again. So I took on a trip up the the local SPCA and found a cat that's not had the benefit of a home for the last three years. He's a good boy and we get along. His name was "Roberto" but I changed it to "Bob" cause he's moved on to being the unacceptable one to being my best buddy here within my home, and so a name change was called for. Bob is resting in the window bed I fixed him, he's not be able to just look out upon "life of the outside" very much in the last three years so for now he's just feeling good being able to loo...

It's been both a warm outdoor spring and now a cold winter styled time of the year. Today I am inside filming my artwork that I did earlier during a warm spell. The work is focused on the local houses not far from where I live, they are very typical of houses in this town. I enjoyed working on the various colors and features within their design. People almost always comment upon the bright intense colors I choose to use in my paintings. That's because I enjoy them. I love intense cheerful colors on my palette and I use them whenever I can. Mostly because I think of a work of art being on someones wall for a good time, well I want that art to be attractive to whomever looks at it. For me, the serious attention given to a painting upon the wall of someones home aught to be an enjoyable experience and therefore I think of nice intense color as being not only attention getting but soothing to view in a indoor room. And so I paint from the heart of what I do so much enjo...

Upon our early springlike weather I popped out and put up my easel with canvas upon a local avenue that is titled :"Belmont Ave", it is here where I did a preliminary drawing before rendering it in oils this past Sunday. I have yet to photograph the oil painting but I did have this pen and ink which I will post. It's going to be a pleasure to get out once again into the elements with my equipment and in such accommodating weather it is very pleasurable to work in the outdoor air, and sun here in Charlottesville. I am hoping to get something done this spring break or the very first week in April, but we will wait and see....one never knows in this ever changing world with all the problems we have, have had, and will be having that are not even known about now. I know that the truth is always subject to revision when it comes to making plans for my future. I've learned to just put somethings aside of my own self interest for the sake of the common good of ...