Hi,

I’m fairly new to the art world.  About four years ago I started drawing and some friends who saw my drawings liked them very much.  Inspired I started working with colored pencils and thought that that was the only medium that I wanted to work with.  A mentor set oil paints in front of me one day and asked me to try.  I fell in love with the medium.  For about three years I’ve been trying to learn the medium.  I’m self-taught and I know that I have a lot to learn.  It is fun and I get a great deal of enjoyment out of creating not only for my own pleasure, but also for others.  I have done several commissioned portraits and have sold a few paintings through local galleries and art shows.  I work full time and have managed to only complete about thirty-plus paintings in three years.  Below are three of these paintings.  Comments are welcomed.  I can use all the advice that I can get.  ‘Susan’ (oil on board, 2004), was my third painting attempt.  I did it from a picture that I had taken of my granddaughter about 1990.  ‘Mouse’ (oil on canvas, 2005), is a big gray that is afraid of his own shadow and can jump sideways with you in any gait.  ‘Trigger & Ugh’ (oil on canvas, 2006), sold last year at a local gallery.  I’ve owned the horse ‘Ugh’ (Ugh is the bay horse in the painting), for about eleven years.  He got that name about ten years ago when he threw me so hard that when I landed I yelled out UGHHH.

I wish to thank everyone for the comments.  Heather I’m sure your grandson is quite proud of his riding abilities.  Jim I’ve added a few more pictures for comment.  ‘Petra’ is only 4x6 while Mitre Peak and Glacier Bay or 30x40s.  I’m also resending ‘Susan’ as a JPEG.  As to your question Richard, I’ve been painting with oil for about three years.  I did work with colored pencils for a few months before that.  As to drawing, I’ve been able to capture the likeness of a person with a pencil since my early teens.  At one time in my mid teens I lived just a few blocks from the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts (since 1983 known as The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art), and for a over a year I would take my introverted self and spend my time wandering all over the Museum.  I would spend hours just looking at a Monet, or El Greco’s Portrait Of A Trinitarian Monk, and Michelangelo’s St. John The Baptist.  John Hopper’s The Tambourine Girl is still a favorite of mine.  I developed a love for both art and history.  I even thought that I might want to be an artist and attend the Kansas City Art Institute.  We moved away. I entered the army and went out to see the world.  Over the years I of course doodled and sketched.  The ability to see and render with my hands I’ve used many times over the intervening decades.  About four years ago recovering from a slump I had been in for several years and trying to fill my time I went out and bought sketchpads and for the first time in my life devoted my energy to drawing.  I still don’t draw enough.

Hi folks,

Thank you Heather, Materese, Jim, and Ron for your comments.  I’m sorry to say Ron that I’ve not done any colored pencil work recently.  Materese, I don’t really know how to answer you.  I painted the picture of ‘Glacier Bay’ for my wife during the summer of 2004.  She lived for 28 years in Alaska and wanted me to do a very blue painting to remind her of the place.  It is a composite of several pictures.  I didn’t have an easel then that would hold the canvas so I put a couple of nails in the living room wall to hold it up while I painted.  I must give credit to my wife, as we had been married for only a few months, that she had faith in my abilities to do the work.  It was my first attempt at a landscape.  I approached and still approach landscapes with trepidation.  You have not seen my utter failures.  I’m slowly learning that rendering the likeness of flora and fauna is sometimes like Chinese and Japanese calligraphy and painting.  It’s in the type of brush or tool used and the stroke.  I’m a very slow learner.  I cannot explain as to what’s different about the landscapes from my other paintings.  I had thought that I would never do landscapes.  Landscapes looked hard and they are and I don’t particularly like them.  Beyond the beauty of a subject I look for some other emotion to convey.  It’s like walking through the battlefield at Shiloh and feeling eeriness to the place when you walk through sun lit woods that were there then and realize that over 25,000 men died in such a short time and in such a small area.  How do you convey that feeling onto a canvas?  “Glacier Bay’ took me two months to do.  I’m still trying to find myself and as a result I seldom approach a painting the same way.  I’m always trying something different.  ‘Mitre Peak’ was my third painting about that subject.  The first two were started out plein-air and then finished in my studio and none are alike.  Sometimes I paint the canvas with an undercoating before I start and sometimes I don’t.  The undercoating may be almost any color.  I have a habit of taking globs of old paint off my palette before cleaning the palette and mixing it with turpenoid and then coating a number of canvases.  I will then try to use colors in my paintings that are a complement to my undercoating (kind of backwards isn’t it, but I hate to waste anything?).  A lot of the time I will use paint straight from the tube.  Several times I’ve glazed with thin coats of paint and linseed oil.  I’ve gotten in the habit of sketching directly on a white canvas with a mixture of oil and turpenoid and I have done some paintings with such a thin mixture of oil in the turpenoid that I had to do lay them flat and treat them like I was water coloring (fluid dynamics at work!).  If I have painted the canvas with an undercoat then I may just start painting without any sketching.   Yet every now and then I will sketch with pencil, apply a fixative, and then paint.  I’m working on one right now that way.  I haven’t tried closing my eyes and throwing paint at the canvas yet…, but  I’m having fun.  Every now and then I sell a painting.  For instance the little 4x6 painting of ‘Petra’ I thought would never sell.  Yet it finally did this last December to a lady who said that the expression of the little girl reminded her of herself.  I seldom give up, but just keep on trying.  I’ve attached another landscape.  This is of Seminole Canyon from inside ‘Fate Bell Shelter’ looking out.  I’ve been down into the canyon several times.  ‘Fate Bell Shelter’ is a big overhang about 150 yards long and 40 yards deep at its widest where people lived off and on for thousands of years.  The back of the ‘Shelter’ is covered with pictographs.  To the people who lived here this was their home.  They left Pictographs and Petroglyphs throughout the Big Bend area of West Texas.  When they looked up the canyon from inside the ‘Shelter’ they would see water flowing and pooling along the canyon floor after a heavy rain. Today I see it as a lonely ancient place.  They would not have seen it that way.  How do you convey the beauty that they saw of home through eyes far in the future that see only rock and desolation?  This is one of the canvases that had to be laid flat to be worked on.  The paint was so thin within the turpenoid that it flowed like water.  I had to work rapidly without any sketching.  I then added paint with a bristle brush to the canvas before it dried to give texture to the flora along the ridgeline.  I try carefully to watch the fat over lean rule as I build up the paint in various areas.