I honestly have a thing for artists that critics hate and common folk like my parents and grandparents loved. Norman Rockwell is a bit like that. He enjoyed commercial success as a magazine illustrator. That is about as far from avant garde art as you can get. But what can I say? I don’t call myself an artist. I am a cartoonist and all around goofball. I don’t do serious art. So the questions surrounding Thomas Kinkade bounce off my tough old non-critical hide like bullets off the orphan of Krypton. I love his pictures for their gaudy splashes of color, his way with depicting puddles and water of all sorts (splashes of splashes), and his rustic homes and landscapes of another era. This is a man who does lovely calendar art and jigsaw puzzle art. He is roundly criticized for factory production of “original” oil paintings which are actually a base he created and made a print of painted over by an “assistant” artist or apprentice. But I don’t care . I like it. And you used to be able to see his originals without going to museums, in art stores at the shopping mall. He is unfortunately dead now. For most great artists, that makes their work more valuable and more precious. Kinkade’s art hangs in so many homes around the country already that his fame has probably already reached its peak. Look at these works that he did for Hallmark and Disney and various other mass-market retail outlets. I dare you not to like it.
There are many, many things I appreciate about other people’s artwork. It is not all a matter of envy or a desire to copy what they’ve done, stealing their techniques and insights for myself, though there is some of that. Look at the patterns Hergé uses to portray fish and undersea plants. I have shamelessly copied both. But it is more than just pen-and-ink burglary.
I like to be dazzled. I look for things other artists have done that pluck out sweet-sad melodies on the heartstrings of my of my artistically saturated soul. I look for things like the color blue in the art of Maxfield Parrish.
I love the mesmerizing surrealism of Salvador Dali.
I am fascinated by William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s ability to create photo-realistic and creamy-perfect nudes.
Basil Wolverton’s comic grotesqueries leave me stunned but laughing.
The dramatic lighting effects employed by Greg Hildebrandt slay me with beauty. (Though not literally. I am not bleeding and dying from looking at this picture, merely metaphorically cut to the heart.)
I even study closely movie-poster portraits like Bogart and Bergman in this Casablanca classic poster.
I could show you so many more art pieces that I dearly love to look at. But I will end with a very special artist.
This is the work of my daughter, Mina “the Princess” Beyer. Remember that name. She’s better than I am.
When I was a boy in the 1960’s I looked forward to Grandma Aldrich’s Saturday Evening Post arriving at the end of her farm lane in the mailbox. We were at Grandpa and Grandma’s farm north of town almost every day. I often went to get the mail. This one magazine was supremely important to me, not because I liked to read the articles, that was too much like school, but because of the wonderful pictures on the cover. Norman Rockwell had established himself by that time as THE cover artist. He wasn’t on every single issue, but he was on most. And the world inside his paintings was filled with the kind of gentle humor, beautiful color, and wisdom tempered by love that I wanted to imitate. I wanted to paint just like that… and if I couldn’t, then I would find a way to tell stories in words the same way I saw them in his oils. I could gush more about the humble painter from New England, but I think it would serve my love of his work more just to show you what I mean;
Today I have a low-grade fever. A slight cough. No sign of Covid yet, and I am fully vaccinated. But I have been to Walmart without a mask and get regular flu regularly. And it could also be a sinus infection again due to high pollen counts and neighborhood grass-cutting.
But the truly frustrating thing is that I had planned to go tomorrow to Bluebonnet Nudist Park, give them a copy of my nudist novel, and meet some of the members of that establishment that I didn’t meet in 2017.
The frustrating thing is that this marks the fifth time that I had planned to go back to Bluebonnet for a second visit. And now the plans are canceled yet again by illness.
As ever, I remain mostly a closet nudist. Me being a nudist now in the twilight years of my life is mostly a joke I tell, only loosely based on reality.
Part of the problem is the fact that I simply waited too long in my life to give in to the urge to be a nudist. I was one from childhood onward, but always too afraid of the unknown to try it openly. Especially after being assaulted at the ripe old age of ten.
My real opportunity came when I had a girlfriend in the 1980’s whose sister lived with her husband and children in a clothing-optional apartment complex in Austin. I met nudists there fully committed to the lifestyle and who encouraged me to join the movement, even after I broke up with that girlfriend. There were limited opportunities to become a nudist then. A park near Houston, a park near San Antonio, a nude beach on Lake Travis (Hippie Hollow,) and clubs in the Austin area that met in members’ homes. I only ever visited those places with clothes on. I never actually tried it. And now that I am old, I regret the opportunities missed.
Now I am old and ill and unable to express my love of nudism and naturism except through art and fiction. Of course, it has always been a very visual-only experience for me. No touching was ever involved. Whatever sexual feelings there were were always sublimated and deeply buried or strictly controlled.
And, as always, I didn’t absolutely need to share these normally private sort of details, but it seems my art and writing make me far more naked to the world than walking around a nudist park ever could.
I was invited to take part in the “My Writing Process” blog tour by a fellow young adult fiction writer, Stuart West. (https://stuartrwest.blogspot.com) Stuart is the author of the Tex, the Witch Boy series of paranormal YA thrillers. He is something of a mentor to me, and easily the best published author I am personally acquainted with. Before you take me seriously, you should definitely check out his blog.
For this little exercise, I have to answer four questions, then invite three other authors to do the same. I’m a little slow on getting others to agree to this plan, but I am shameless when it comes to opportunities to talk about my own writing. I will post the three authors later this week, after I am done begging and bribing.
Step 1: Acknowledge the person and the blog site that invited you to take part.
Step 2: Answer four questions about your writing process.
1) What am I working on?
2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?
3) Why do I write what I do?
4) How does your writing process work?
What I am working on now is a story that is sequel-requel-prequel to my novel Catch a Falling Star. That means that it uses characters from that novel, a bunch of new ones, and some from other stories of mine as well to tell what happened before that novel, during that novel, and after that novel. Silly plan! Believe me, I realize that while sweating over re-quel details (a phrase that here means a retelling of parts of that novel – I do also realize I stole this particular conceit from Lemony Snicket). The book will be called The Bicycle Wheel Genius about a scientist who is a super-genius inventor trying to live incognito in a little Iowa farm town after leaving government service. He is trying to live down a family tragedy while at the same time befriending the boy next door, avoiding government agents and assassin robots, dealing with an alien invasion by invisible alien frog people, juggling time travelers, creating rabbit-men, and engineering old-fashioned high-wheel bicycles.
How does my work differ? You have to ask? Unlike all the careful plotters, step-by-step writing crafters, and picky editor types out there, I put words and ideas in a blender, mix on the “Are you insane?” setting, and then let it all come pouring out into pages and scenes and chapters (although I call them cantos for some bizarre reason). I also have to admit that I base a lot of my characters on real people that I either grew up with in Iowa, or met over my thirty plus years as a mostly middle school teacher. And these stories have percolated in my head for twenty to thirty years. Did I mention already that I am not a person who thinks in straight lines? You can tell by the shifts, reverses, and loopty-loops in this paragraph that much of what I call humor comes from my purple paisley prose (a phrase which here means overly ornate, wordy, and down-right convoluted sentences and paragraphs). (Thanks again, Lemony).
Why do I write it? Let me think. Could it be because teaching middle school students for too long leads to insanity, and if the insane are going to be useful in society, they have to do something at least mildly interesting for people who live in the real world? I mean, if I just sit in a room all day drooling and counting and re-counting my Pez dispenser collection, that wouldn’t be entirely helpful. Writing honors all the people I have known, alive and now departed, who touched my life and made a difference to my heart. It also helps me make sense of things that have happened to me over time and shaped me as person… hopefully a person you might like to get to know. And you can know a person through their writing long after they are personally worm food. How could I live without Mark Twain or Charles Dickens in my life, and both were dead long before I was born? And I know you’re going to ask yourself what makes me think that other people couldn’t live their lives better without knowing me? But don’t ask. I have developed a certain amount of wisdom over the course of my life, and I know I really don’t want an answer to that question.
How does my writing process work? I have taught the writing process in the classroom so many times, that the only answer I am still sane enough to give is that everyone’s process is entirely different. I can, however, drop an insight or two on you. First of all, everything I have ever written is still a part of what I call Prewriting… with a capital P. Everything ever written can be rewritten and improved. Secondly, it is important to re-read what you write. I hate typos and mistakes in what is supposed to be “finished” writing. It is the reason I hate the entire experience of my first published novel, Aeroquest. That writing will never be okay until I have a chance to re-write it and re-tell it and re-everything it. Dang it. Thirdly, you must carefully consider who to allow to have input on your rough draft and re-worked copies. Even some professional editors don’t bother to try to see things in a way that reflects the fact that they care about what you have written. You need someone on your side to share it, and love it, and cherish it the way you do. Only that person will give you input that is worth listening to. Fourthly, if you reach fourthly your list is too dang long. And finally, publish it. Share it. Don’t put it away in a drawer for the mice and spiders to read when you are long gone.
So, Stuart, how did I do? I hope at least it proves what you have known all along. That Mickey guy writes like his hair is on fire and his pants are unraveling… in front of girls.
(Three writers to be named later will take up this same blog tour… I hope.)
Okay, so on the synesthesia tests I didn’t score as a synesthete on the music/color test. But I was extremely synesthetic on the tests for color/months/days of the week. I was a little over the mark on letter/number/colors synesthesia too, but it was more a problem with manipulating the color-selector device when I don’t have a mouse to use on my laptop. The test for music did not test the way I see colors with music. They wanted me to respond to what color each individual note seemed to be, and that isn’t even close to the way I experience it. For me, the perfect description of how synesthesia works for me is Bach’s Tocata and Fugue in D minor as it is depicted in Fantasia.
I was shocked when I first saw it. The colors are wrong for this piece, but the visual experience is almost exactly how I experience music, especially wordless instrumental music. The only problem with this piece is that the overall color schemes are wrong. But this comes about because every synesthete sees the colors differently. And I have no doubt that at least one of the artists who created this had synesthesia. If there were more reds, yellows, and magenta in the opening and more indigo contrasted with silver later, this interpretation would be perfect.
Music synesthetically works in two directions for me. The picture above, called The Wings of Imagination, makes me think of La Mer by Claude Debussy.
If you listen to the piece, don’t look at the YouTube illustration, look at my picture if you want to see the music the way I do. The following song, Don’t Worry, Be Happy, is a multicolored song that I can best express with the colors in the picture I call Rainbow Peacock.
The full range of primary colors together in one picture, or one song, always means completeness, fullness, and happiness to me. If there is absence of one or more of the basic colors from the color wheel, the mood and emotion present in the song or picture is altered to something other than happiness. The Firebird Suite by Igor Stravinsky goes from the indigo and navy blue of fear and confusion to instances of angry red and feverish orange. It would look something like this in the theater of my imagination;
And one of my favorite instrumental pieces of all times, Prelude to the Afternoon of the Faun by Claude Debussy, is full of melancholy and sexual tension, deeply felt vibrations in the depths of my stomach, and would look like my picture Sleeping Beauty with its teal and blue melancholia juxtaposed with candle-lit yellows and wood brown mixed feelings of joy and anxiety.
Now, if you have waded through all of this goofy color-and-music analysis from a source whose sanity is questionable at best, you probably have no earthly idea what any of it has to do with anything. But if you have that aha!-moment and see it all clearly too, then I suspect you probably are a synesthete too. Poor you. It is not a treatable condition. But it is also not a burden. Learn to enjoy it. It resonates in your very soul.
Yes, Mondays are blue. Specifically French blue. Every day of the week has its own color. Sunday is golden yellow, Tuesday is a yellow-ochre, Wednesday is indigo blue and sometimes changes to blue violet, Thursday is burnt orange, and Friday is solid wood brown, and of course Saturday is rich pure red while Mondays are not just any blue… they are French blue. I learned the names of these colors from being a painter and using oil paints. I experience these colors every week and they help me maintain the calendar in my stupid old head. I began to realize when I first heard about the colors of the wind in the Disney movie Pocahontas that there was something to this everyday thing, something different in the way I see the world. I have in the last few years learned that this condition has a name. It is called synesthesia.
It has been suggested to me by more than a few people that I don’t really perceive the world the same way “normal people do”. When I was growing up, and going to school, I never had trouble remembering to capitalize the first word in a sentence. I did however, have a great deal of difficulty with capital letters on nouns. Looking back on that difficulty now, I can say without a doubt that I was having trouble not because I didn’t know the difference between proper nouns and common nouns. It was because things like the word “dog” or “chair” had to begin with the right color. Dogs are blue when you are talking about the color of the letters in the word. But small “d” is blue-green, not true blue. It doesn’t fit as well as the dark blue capital “D”. And chairs are orange-red when you write them down, while the small “c” appears light green by itself.
Sundays are Sun-days, and that’s why they are golden yellow.
I am told that most synesthetes are taken by surprise when they learn that they are seeing things differently than other people do. I certainly was. I always got funny looks whenever I described Thursdays as orange, or the month of November as sky blue. My classmates in 4th grade thought I was nuts… of course, it wasn’t just for the orange Thursdays thing. I was not a normal kid in any real sense of the word. I always suspected that if I could look at the world through other people’s eyes, I would probably see the color green as what I called red, or that glowing halo that surrounded things when organ music played in the Methodist church would no longer be there. But once I learned how synesthesia works I knew it was true. The visual part of the brain can be scanned to show activity, and lights up on the scanner as if the brain is seeing bright colors when Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is being played while the subject of the scan is actually blindfolded. I am told that synesthesia is more common in left-handed girls. My daughter, the Princess, tells me that she also sees color on printed numbers and letters. She is left handed and also gifted at drawing. I suspect she inherited the synesthesia from me.
Synesthesia probably explains what this nonsense is all about.
Now, I acknowledge the fact that my synesthesia is self-diagnosed and not proven by any of the methods the articles I have read about the condition talked about. But my personal experiences always seem to fall in line with descriptions of letter/number/color combinations and music/color combinations that I have read about. And if I do have it, it is not the same as any of my six incurable diseases. It is not a bad condition to have. In an artistic sense, it might actually be a good thing. I could use some good for a change. Good doesn’t usually come from weirdness… not my weirdness, anyway. (Oh, and capital “G” is lime green… as is the word Goodness).
Our previous President, the man whose name I will no longer use because it makes him happy to see it in print, has a hollow pumpkin for a head. Hollowed out with no remaining think-o-lating pieces, seeds of ideas, or potential candle lights to shine out of the carved eyes and fanged demon smile. Just empty. Desolate. Possibly a site for spiders to spin their cobweb houses.
And everything I said in that previous paragraph, the distortions, the metaphors, the exaggerations, are all lies.
Spiders would definitely NOT be comfortable spinning webs inside Trumpalump’s head. And I just used his name even though I distorted it. And he did have ideas. Lots and lots of EVIL ideas.
Really, journalists are writing lots and lots of books about it. They are giving him so many journalistic hotfoots, that his pants are bound to catch fire.
And that’s a lie too, unless you grant me the notion that the metaphors are accurate.
The pictures used in this post have nothing at all to do with the topic of the post. I was simply able to go all the way back in my media gallery to March 2014 to show you pictures I have not ben able to show you for a long time.
As the flames continue to lick upward around the seat of the defeated former President’s pants, brought on by an administration’s inability to deal with anything but by lying, we must all deal with the fact that most of what human beings on planet Earth actually believe and act upon are lies.
Yes, we are all necessarily liars. Not just the lying leader of what was, before his presidency, the leading nation of the free world. All of us.
And keep in mind, this article is written by a fiction author and former middle-school teacher, two jobs that necessitate telling lies to others daily.
It is entirely possible that I am even a liar as a fantasy artist. My sister never met the boy in her lap in the first picture. The Aztec girl was not really an Aztec as the background suggests. And if the red dragon is really personifying liars in the picture I call, “The Family Picnic,” that dragon will win the battle and eat the whole family.
Of course, not all lies are malicious.
That’s why it has taken this long for prosecutors and judges to start applying matches to the Trumpinator’s trousers. They have to prove how stupefyingly manipulative and harmful his monstrous lies have been.
The models for the “people” in this picture were both actually naked, but they were on horse, not a chicken. Therefore, this picture too is not a photograph.
Mostly, however, we tell lies for benign reasons. We tell ourselves that science and technology will find a way around extinction of life on Earth through Climate Change. We tell ourselves we will go to Heaven when we die. These lies comfort us in that, well, they might be true. And they give us hope against the bleakness of reality.
And there is truth to be found in the creation of fictitious worlds through books, movies, plays, and poetry. We can rewrite the world and its problems to our liking, possibly creating solutions to those problems along the way.
But basically, we all have to constantly be checking whether the smoke rising from our pants is being ignited by our dishonesty, or by the dire need to change something about our daily diet. Lying is a fact of our humanity. And it can get out of control to extreme levels where it Trumps everything else.
Mai Ling uses psionic ninja powers to separate the flowers from the weeds, a thing that is not easy to do.
I suppose that if I were to be insightfully honest for a moment, I would have to admit that I am a failed novelist. If you take “success” as meaning “financial success”, the fact that I only make less than five dollars a month for my writing means I am a failure at it. If you specify that success means my books find readers, then evidence would suggest that my books are mostly ignored. A majority of those who have responded favorably to my work are actually members of the nudist community on Twitter. I admit that I have cultivated that a bit with nudist characters in about a fourth of my books. But that is a result of having experienced fascinating people and situations that I felt I had to write about because I happened to meet, totally by chance, interesting nudists in real life.
I have lost a lot of writing-community followers on Twitter because of my interactions with Twitter nudists. My work gets dismissed on occasion because your standard teacher-turned-writer on Twitter, usually female and usually fundamentalist Christian, doesn’t want to be contaminated by sinful nudist associations. Ah, such a life. But I don’t wish to destroy anyone’s faith in a God who will apparently burn them for an eternity in Hell if they are tempted to frolic with no clothes on. I would rather be blocked by them on Twitter than have them give up on whatever paradise they are pursuing.
But I am basically on the Brad Bird side of the argument about whether or not you can choose to be a hero even if others will see you as a monster. My fiction does not cause demonic possession and probably does not cause spontaneous bouts of joyful nudism either. Even my werewolf story, which was too much for one potential reviewer, does not have actual werewolves in it. Although it does describe some things that really happened to me as a child in a fictionalized, sort-of-truthful way.
So, by those criteria, I judge myself to be a failed writer.
But I am definitely not giving up on writing in despair. Those were never the reasons I wrote novels to begin with.
I write because I have something to say to the world and stories to tell. And I mean to have my say, even if the world is too stone-deaf and stupefied to listen.
I have things to say about living and learning.
I have things to say about finding love, and losing love, and finding it again.
I have things to say about how I think the world works, and why I’m pretty sure I’m completely wrong about all of that. And what I intend to do about it.
To that end, I have started writing a book full of essays like the stuff and garbage and lovely wisdom I write in this goofy little blog. And I shall call it Laughing Blue. Because, you know, nobody is going to read it anyway, and I can call it whatever the heck I want to call it.
The next morning was a Monday morning in Summer. No school to worry about, and the beans were not tall enough yet that the boys had to worry about walking them yet. Walking beans was a summer project whereby farm kids walked up and down the rows of every family-owned beanfield with gloves and hoes and hats, to protect against sunburn, looking for evil, intolerable, low-down filthy weeds to chop or pull out by the roots.
You had to be on your toes all the time to truly combat evil. That’s why Horatio T. Dogg was always thinking about the crimes he had to solve. And that’s why Bobby was also always thinking about Horatio thinking about the crimes he had to solve. Like the murder of Little Bob the stupidest turken by the evil Professor Rattiarty.
Horatio and Bobby were both sitting on the porch as two of his classmates from Belle City Middle School came walking hand and hand down the gravel road to the Niland farm.
“Hey, Mike, I haven’t seen you since school got out,” Bobby said.
“I needed to beat somebody up today. I haven’t slugged anyone since that last day in Loomis’s class,” said Mike with a grin.
“I can smell that he’s not telling the truth,” said Horatio with a snort.
“Oh, I know. Mike is my friend. He’s only joking,” said Bobby.
“Oh, you can talk to the dog?” asked Blueberry. She was a cherub-faced girl that Bobby secretly adored, but was definitely afraid of for various reasons.
“Well, yeah. Horatio is a very special dog. Can you hear him when he talks?”
“No. But I will be trying to learn to hear him,” she answered. “There is nothing that would make me happier than having a talking dog for a friend.”
She blinked her big brown eyes at Bobby in a way that seemed to melt his knees Not enough to make him fall down, but enough to make him wobble.
“Blue, dogs don’t talk in real life,” Mike said matter-of-factly. “That’s just a weirdo Bobby-thing.”
“Oh, I know. But Bobby has a beautiful imagination. And that’s what I like about him most.”
“I like her,” said Horatio.
Bobby didn’t comment, because Blueberry would hear and that would be embarrassing.
“But that’s what made the two of you think you turned the music teacher into a swan by magic, and then turned yourselves into swans to rescue her. How dumb a thing was that?”
“But that was real. We both became swans,” insisted Blueberry.
“I remember that,” said Horatio. “You didn’t really change. I would’ve smelled the difference.”
“I know,” said Bobby.
“You are both screwy,” said Mike.
“Tell him why you came to talk to him,” said Blueberry.
“The reason we walked all the way out here from town was to ask you about walking beans. We’re putting together a crew. Danny has promised to drive us to and from the fields.”
“So, you want me to walk with your crew? Or you just came to ask my dad to work in our fields?”
“Both,” said Blueberry.
“We’re only charging three dollars an hour,” said Mike.
“Well, that’ll get you hired by Dad anyway. That’s less than I asked him to pay me and Shane. But if you get the job, and I’m working with you, he won’t pay me what we first agreed on.”
“Sorry. But we need the job. And you don’t want me to beat you up for real, do you?”
“No, of course not.” Bobby knew he would have to make the sacrifice. Dad wouldn’t hire Mike and the gang at the price he was originally going to pay Bobby and Shane to do it by themselves. And the cheaper price for more workers meant it would get done faster and would be cheaper over-all. It was a sacrifice that Bobby had to make to help both the family farm and Mike and the gang. Besides, there would be more money to make with Mike’s crew on other farms.
“You shouldn’t be so mean to him,” insisted Blueberry. She was a very thin, small, and perky girl who was never afraid to say what she thought. “If we are going to have him on our team and we’re going to work for his dad, you should be nice to him.”
“Aw, Bobby knows I don’t mean it when I say I’m gonna beat him up. You know that I’m only joking, right?”
“Actually, you beat up Steven Shanks for picking on me. And Frosty Anderson is only nice to me because you make him.”
It was true. Mike was like a protector for Bobby. Of course, that was partly because Bobby was a Norwall Pirate and Mike protected all the Pirates. The Pirates were the town’s 4-H softball team, and also the local liars’ club.
“You should tell Mike about Professor Rattiarty and the recent murders. He might be a good boy and help you defeat him,” Horatio said with a dog grin.
“I will definitely ask Dad to let us walk his beans. He’ll hire your crew,” Bobby finally said. “But I also want to talk to you about barn rats.”
“Barn rats?”
“Yeah, they been killing Mom’s favorite turkens.”
“Those silly-looking things with no feathers on their chicken necks?”
“Yeah. Let’s go in the barn with Horatio’s nose to help us and talk about the evil Professor Rattiarty.”
“Uggh! Imagination again! Too many darned Pirates have too much imagination for their own good,” said Mike.
“Now, you don’t say bad things about imagination, Michael. You know I wouldn’t be your girlfriend if it weren’t for the power of our imaginations.” Blueberry often got hot about the topic of too much imagination. She was in favor.
“Yeah. I know. But you and he wouldn’t have gotten turned into swans, and flew all the way to Belle City in the snow, or saw each other naked if you didn’t have too big of a imagination,” growled Mike. Yeah, jealousy was probably part of it. But Bobby never actually saw Blue naked, and you can’t exactly turn back into a boy from being a swan all covered in feathers without being naked at some point.
“Do you want to see the Professor’s evil lair, or not?”
“We certainly do want to see,” insisted Blue.
“Okay. We go into the damn barn.”
“You shouldn’t say damned, Mike,” scolded Blue. And so, they went into the brick-walled, white barn to look for clues with the detective, Horatio T. Dogg.
These images can be found at http://thomaskinkade.com/
Catch a Falling Star 
Other Folks’ Artwork
There are many, many things I appreciate about other people’s artwork. It is not all a matter of envy or a desire to copy what they’ve done, stealing their techniques and insights for myself, though there is some of that. Look at the patterns Hergé uses to portray fish and undersea plants. I have shamelessly copied both. But it is more than just pen-and-ink burglary.
I like to be dazzled. I look for things other artists have done that pluck out sweet-sad melodies on the heartstrings of my of my artistically saturated soul. I look for things like the color blue in the art of Maxfield Parrish.
I love the mesmerizing surrealism of Salvador Dali.
I am fascinated by William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s ability to create photo-realistic and creamy-perfect nudes.
Basil Wolverton’s comic grotesqueries leave me stunned but laughing.
The dramatic lighting effects employed by Greg Hildebrandt slay me with beauty. (Though not literally. I am not bleeding and dying from looking at this picture, merely metaphorically cut to the heart.)
I even study closely movie-poster portraits like Bogart and Bergman in this Casablanca classic poster.
I could show you so many more art pieces that I dearly love to look at. But I will end with a very special artist.
This is the work of my daughter, Mina “the Princess” Beyer. Remember that name. She’s better than I am.
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