Blog

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I had prepared and hung a lovely show of my paintings at the James River Country Club. Sadly we were social distancing before many folks were able to enjoy the show. So I thought I'd share my own commentary with each painting for everyone to enjoy from the comfort of your own home. All of these paintings are currently available for purchase. If you are interested, please contact me and we ...
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A while back I was working on a commission for someone who asked me to paint her parents circa 1941 at Oceanview Amusement Park in Virginia Beach. I did enjoy getting all my research together and doing preliminary sketches. I enjoyed the stories through photos of the sailors who were deployed from Norfolk during World War II. They spent free time at Oceanview Amusement Park. The colors and movement of amusement parks and fairs have ...
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Artists know that we can really mess up big-time. Sometimes we just have a miserable painting day. And it happens much more frequently than we'd like to admit. The other day I decided to attack a painting that I had done several years ago. While the painting was pleasant to look at and interesting to a lot of people, it lacked what I would like to see my work represent. In other words, it lack ...
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I think there is a general misconception by the public that people like me, who tend to get involved in what we loosely called creative pursuits, simply plod along. We engage in brilliant creativity. We progress from one brilliant idea with a beginning, middle, and end,. There is a pause and then we go to the next brilliant idea. Well obviously every idea isn't brilliant, but when we are in our inspiration phase, sometimes we ...
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One of my first memories of art is when I was nine years old. I know I was nine years old because my sister had just been born and my mother came home from the hospital with a bunch of gladiolas. I proceeded to take out some colored pencils. I drew a picture of the floral bouquet which resided next to the drawing that I had copied of a cartoon character. The character was a ...
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I worry about the Christmas card industry. Everyone this year seems to be sending photos instead of cards. You know. The ones where you have to use a magnifying glass to see faces and even then you don’t know who they are! I do admire the efforts of writers of the traditional letter - that document complete with tiny photos urging us to enjoy vicariously their many trips and adventures. “Wonderful experience seeing the glories ...
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Dear Packagers of America. You have taken child-proofing and theft control to such an extreme that most of us - not just the older demographic- cannot open anything without the help of scissors, pliers, wrenches, and in some cases, hammers. A carton of milk has a tab that can almost break a fingernail. A huge impenetrable plastic square that surrounds a teeny camera chip. I know. It's too small so too easily stolen so let’s ...
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We recently spent a week in Colorado where, yes, the scenery was beautiful, no, the altitude did not affect us, and yes, the tour of Colorado’s most interesting crop was - interesting; but I have to tell you my moment to remember story. Our Colorado friends found us a second floor room at a lodge right outside Rocky Mountain National Park. It sits on one of those fast moving rocky mountain streams that provide background ...
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I have been working on my painting for three days, weeks,months and it still doesn’t work. Why? My sketch was really incredible. My sketch was better. I loved it. But what could’ve gone wrong. This happens to artists all the time and sometimes the error is that you probably never checked to see if your sketch’s proportions matched your canvas. In my case the vertical sketch was thinner than the canvas. Therefore my two lady ...
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Although I am a good cook, I do not claim to be an expert on any food much less the undervalued vegetable. But I do have opinions and a blog. I like to cook vegetables. Growing up in a blue-collar urban family , I was exposed to a total meat and potatoes diet which also noodles and very occasionally rice. Most of my vegetables came out of a can. My father demanded they be cooked ...
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