Just a Little Old Art of Mine!

               One of the talents I displayed way before I started doing my creative writing, was painting and drawing at a very young age. 

                                                   (Like at four!) 

                   My mom used to gather up my tossed away, crumpled up paintings and drawings I didn't like. When she died, we found a whole drawer full of them from those early years, hidden under her underwear.  That's a mom for you.

My college art days. 

          I haven't done much since I went off to college, then to Scotland as a  married lady, returned, later remarried, had kids, remarried (seems I am always doing that till I get it right!) and somehow the rest of my life happened; the kids took over. 

             I stopped painting and drawing when I was working full time and raising my family, just no time.   I attended college in my 40s and again in my 50s graduating with top honors and two degrees, and enough credits for a doctorate, but never pursued it. 

                Art was not in my life's work program, except to work with my kids and encourage them along their own way.  My oldest son, Brad is quite an artist, musician and an inventor.   He built his own bass guitar and wrote over 40 original songs, was in a band for a while.  He has two young daughters who are artists in their own right, very talented for their ages!

Brad did this with Photo Shop in about an hour!

                 Here is one of my son Brad's digital art works from years ago.  He's a busy dad of two and has little time, just like me, to indulge his talent.

My talented son Brad.

                    Someday soon, I hope to start it up again.

 

             I took lots of photos and videos last summer at the Oregon coast and bought my very first set of water colors, after 67 years!    Hope to paint some small water color paintings of waves breaking and sea gulls wheeling overhead in the blue skies!    (I figured if I got small 5 by 7 inch watercolor paper I would NOT be intimidated into putting it off.) 

      Maybe I will paint one of the lighthouses we photographed.  Oregon was fodder for the creative mind and I loved going there.  My heart is still there, among the crashing, timeless waves, that have lapped up on the beaches for eons.  

One of the amazing photos my hubby took of Heceta Head  in Oregon, from the path to the Lighthouse!

My husband shot this charming photo of Heceta Head Lighthouse from below it.  See it?

Here I am soaking up the beauty of crashing, lapping waves and the cold temps -
in JULY 2010!!

Here is Seal Rock beach overlook. See that huge wave breaking on the rocks? Great for a painting someday!

Yaquina Head Lighthouse was spectacular.  That's in Newport, Oregon on the US West coast.

             Here are a few of the things I did in my teens, when I won prizes, got written up in newspapers and had art clients who commissioned my work.  Just a few sketches and some Art School projects remain.

Very seriously attending my sidewalk art show in 1960 something.

             I began selling my paintings at the age of 13.  Most of what I painted then was horses, horses and more horses!   Finally I painted some people, and they all sold better than the horses.  I was KNOWN for my unusual horse paintings, however.

I sold lots of sets of pairs of horses, in my teens, all done in India Ink.

              I couldn't afford water colors, so I used kid's poster paints, India ink and pencil.   I would paint a solid area in one color and then use a wet paint brush to remove some of the color, letting the paper shine through making a highlighted area.  My parents sent me to art lessons but soon found out I was way too advanced for my age group.

          I'd also use Indian Ink and then wet the paper and put thinned washes of Poster Paints over the wet letting it "bleed" blending the color against the wet paper, and let it dry; then I'd go back and add some brush strokes of solid colors.  Those were winners!

       This painting, which was done when I was in my late teens, I have saved over the many, MANY years, still exists, although the paper, which was not acid free, has yellowed.  It is an example of one of the India Ink and washes I did.  I sold lots of those, some very large.

This is an ink drawing with watered down poster paint washes over, then solid strokes when dry.  It is titled "Cloud Ponies."    Won first prize in high school.

        There were sketches from St. Andrews Presbyterian College in Laurinburg, North Carolina, where I learned to do ink sketches.  Here are a couple.

The St. Andrews knight and a girl studying in the library.  Quick five minute sketches!

               I had to learn not to fuss for hours over my work.  If I learned one thing there, it was to be spontaneous and it worked!    I also liked pencil sketches, done over with India Ink. 

             I even sketched my Histology equipment on notebook paper in the late 60s.  This sketch was of a now very antique old freezing Microtome used in sugery for cancer back in the 1960s!  I worked as a registered histology tech for 20 years, but not with this old stuff!

I worked with this in surgery for pathologists who were looking to remove cancers.

             Here is a sketch of my dear dad, made later than this photo of him about 15 years earlier.  

My dear father, fifteen years earlier

           Here is another college sketch from the St. Andrew's days.  This is Mary Ann Taylor, Lord knows where she is now these days.   

          

         This was a charcoal sketch.  I liked it but it was messy and expensive.  I had to do this at college as an art project.  Wonder what happened to my old college classmate after I left this school in the 1960s?

            My parents wanted me to be a famous fine artist.   

          I wanted to be a Histology technician!  I loved science and medical field since my dad gave me my first microscope at ten.  I also volunteered in the VA Hospital Medical Art department and got to drool over real surgeries on humans and animals, even autopsies!  (One day I was waiting around for the pathologist to cut into this dead guy, but he disappeared.  I finally got impatient and walked around the autopsy table.  He was passed out on the floor!)  

          Guess the gas gangrene got to him.  It didn't bother me.  I knew right there and then I wanted to do that kind of work.. Yes, gross, I know.

            Drew a lot of illustrations for that department.  (None of which I have.)   I learned to colorize black and white photos.  Medical illustration was a possible career but never got into it.   I wanted hands on the body parts!

            Finally, after a year at St. Andrews, a quarter at University of North Carolina, in Greensboro, NC,  I dropped out and went down to Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida without my parents knowing about it.    I enrolled, held them hostage to pay for my food, rent, tuition and bus fare.   

      I learned to do Commercial Art, which I hated.  One of my instructors is the man who designed the Marlboro cigarette packs.  He was a total drunk, came to class, fell of his stool and left.   I got flunked out of a project I did as a miniature of a gallery because I did it in his LEAST favorite color!    

      After half starving, staying up too late trying to be a perfectionist, I then got sick after five months, and had to come back home to NC.   (Yeah, me and 24 boxes of art stuff, clothes and supplies, arrived in a taxi on their doorstep where I collapsed with a kidney infection.)  

          Here is one project left from those days.   A cherry pie that I half finished.   I got a B because I didn't get the bottom half of the pie finished.  This would have been a project I could have done for an Art agency doing ads for pie fillings.  Dumb, huh?

This was my first exposure to acrylic paints.  They are wonderful but I never wanted to pay the money for them.  

           At Ringling School of Art I learned that Commercial art meant working in an art agency drawing tire ads, cigarette and clothing ads and doing hand lettering, very competitive.  To be a fine artist, you had to be REALLY creative and competitive.  The talent of those guys really blew me away.  (There was NO way I could make a living much less rise to any stature in that field, so I gave up art altogether after that.)    At Ringling, I also got to draw NAKED people LIVE!   

            My folks would have died if they knew I was doing that in art school!  Pretty soon, you don't see the body of the person -- you see lights, dark, curves, and shadows.  You get caught up in the ART.   After I got over being very embarrassed at a naked person just feet away, I didn't care or notice anymore.

        Ringling School did expose me to other kinds of great art work.  I got to see Andy Warhol art, pop art, classic art, like Van Gogh and Da Vinci;   I got to see every kind of 3-D "touchy" art you can imagine.  It really opened my mind and my eyes.

       Now I have the opinion that if a guy can take car bumpers and junk yard trash and make something out of it that others will put on display or buy, it is ART!     

        I saw one very expensive painting at a gallery that was all white, a huge oil painting, totally all white from edge to edge, except.... for one tiny red dot in the off center.....   Whoever bought that, did NOT get their money's worth!  But it qualifies as ART.

                      I really appreciate really, really GOOD art.   I love Western art especially, horses and animals and Indians..  Yeah, being part Cherokee, that would be me.

       Art that is better than the camera can capture and tells a story.  My favorite (and I don't have a photo, sorry) was of a swan taking flight off the water.   You could see through the wings of the swan as it fanned them heavenward to lift itself.  The eyes looked at you, they captivated you!   The slightly parted beak with those real-looking eyes, real almost touchable painted feathers made that painting come to life!

           Well, maybe someday soon, this summer when I can sit outside under an awning by my motor home and paint will be the birth of my talent again.  It's there, buried somehow beneath my sense of humor and my sense of duty.  Maybe it's just buried!

Put out our awning, and I could sit and paint the beauty I have seen.