I am celebrating because I have done a lot of blogging and I believe it has reached a few people who really read and like what I post. I know for a fact that many like my artwork. I am not foolish enough to believe that I deserve to make loads of money as a writer. So far I have made 28 dollars worth of royalties on two published books. That makes a lot of hard work for very little return. I have spent more than that on my writing, so I am realistically making negative dollars. But the important thing is that my writing and art is now out there in the world, inhabiting closet and desk drawers no more. Some of it now resides in you who are reading this. I thank you. My life was complete before I started this endeavor, beginning and ending with being a teacher, so every word I can possibly write on the heart of a reader is pure whipped cream on top of the lemon-meringue pie.
Tag Archives: Oil Painting
The Road Home
This sofa-sized oil Paffooney is called the Road Home because it was painted from a photograph looking west on US Highway 3 towards Rowan, Iowa, the little town I grew up in. I painted it when I lived by myself in South Texas, believing that one day I would go back to Iowa to live out the rest of my life. Here’s where today’s post gets mortifyingly morbid. Yes, I know that last expression is repetitively repetitive, but that little bit of alliteration was necessary to lighten the load of this non-laughing part of my post. I am not going to make it. I am stuck in a North Dallas metroplex that I sincerely do not love. My kids are not done growing up there. I have family and roots there. I have them in Iowa, too, but like a Sioux warrior, I belong to my wife’s tribe once I married into it. I am old. I have six incurable diseases and I am a cancer survivor since 1983. Every day of life is a new miracle. but the miracles are running out. My COPD makes my chest hurt, and I have trouble breathing, especially at night. The house is rotting away around us, courtesy of the housing bubble we bought it in back in 2005. Doing what maintenance and repair that I can makes my arthritic body ache intolerably, more than Aleve can cure. I will not go back to drugs like Vioxx or Celebrex and let them kill me to enrich the pharmaceutical industry. My diabetes has made it almost impossible to eat without enduring a round of high blood sugar and nausea. I do not look forward to either insulin or the possibility of losing an arm or leg. So, if I get out of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, it will probably be by curling up my toes and going bye-bye, followed by a cremation. I would like to have my ashes scattered in Iowa, but the family will probably find flush toilets much cheaper. Ah well… dark part done. Now for the part about going home.
The reason I feel uplifted, and crazily feel justified in calling this post “humor” is because I have already won my battle. I was a teacher for 31 years. I touched more than 2,500 lives, some of them profoundly. I have almost raised three wonderful, talented children. I have written and published three books, and if I can scratch out enough time, I have at least two more ready to be published. I have shared what little wisdom I have acquired along with a lot of really goofy artwork I have done in this blog, and, although I used to be the best author no one had ever read, people are actually reading and liking my books. In my stories, I have told about growing up in Iowa, about being a teacher, about being a friend, about being in love, about facing fear, and ultimately about being able to laugh about all of it. In my fiction, I have already gone home, repeatedly. When I get my cheapo flushing-funeral, that will not be me. I will be in the cornfields under the blue Iowa sky with a threat of thunderstorms in the distance. And while I may cry a little bit, because what is life worth without some of that? I will be mostly laughing and laughing and laughing. Because life may end in death, but nothing about it is sad if you don’t let it be. I like to delude myself into thinking the world is a little bit better now than when I got here, and I pretend that I have had something to do with that. The game is won. Everything else is just gravy! (Sorry about that. I do realize that gravy goes on mashed potatoes, not a game, but mangled metaphors are one of my specialties.)
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William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Forgotten Master
I came to an awareness of Bouguereau in the San Antonio museum of art. In the 1990’s they had one of Bouguereau’s most famous works on display upstairs in an alcove at the head of the stairway. I walked up the stairs and this painting, called Admiration hit me right between the eyes.
Admiration 1897
He was a master of figure painting in the late 1800’s. He worked in oils from live models, and may-or-may-not have used optical mirrors to transfer images onto canvas, although that sort of cheating does not account for his mastery of color, shape, composition, and form. In my humble opinion, having tried to do what he has done, he is as great a painter as Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and Donatello. His figures are alive. Their skin looks absolutely real. Even the facial expressions suggest that the character is about to speak.
Of course, he creates nudes at a level that might get him labelled a pornographer. In fact, you have to realize that he comes from a time when salon painters were the only creators of erotic art, using biblical or mythological themes to cover the fact that they were creating nude female figures (and sometimes male nudes) to appeal to the automatic sensual response common to all living humans (well, most humans… I can’t speak to how prudery and religion can kill desire). Other painters of his day were definitely little more than the equivalent of Playboy Magazine. Still, he was able to produce images both nude and clothed that appear ready to step off the canvas and talk to you.
He lost a lot of his popularity at the beginning of the 20th Century because Renoir, Monet, and the Impressionists actively criticized his worked and divorced the perceptions of good art from the pursuit of realism. The invention of photography also took away some of the need for photo-realistic art. Still, in my studies of this particular painter, I believe I have discovered one of the greatest masters of oil of all time.
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Western Art
Yesterday, on Friday the Thirteenth, we went to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. My parents, both in their eighties, took us there in a week-long celebration of Dorin’s graduation from high school. It was a worthy thing. Unlike most kids, my three are not bored to apoplexy by art museums. In fact, for most of the exhibitions, they traveled at my heels. It seems I know enough about art to fascinate them. All three of them are amateur artists themselves.
The Amon Carter Museum is centered on old Mr. Carter’s collection of the paintings of Frederick Remington and Charles Russell.
Remington was an adventurer and story-teller. He was also a sculptor with a gift for creating action-filled scenes in bronze. The Bronco Buster, the statue pictured here, is on prominent display in the foyer of the museum. It is one of Remington’s first, and one of his best known (in large part due to the Amon Carter Collection). The painting that follows was used as an illustration for one of his western stories. Remington wrote western novels, articles about the west, and factual essays about Native Americans. He had actually lived with Indians for a while and did a lot to lend credibility to everything he wrote about them. He didn’t save them from the depredations of the white man, but then, who could have done that? His nighttime scene is ultra-realistic and you can learn a lot about Indians just by studying the picture.
Russell came after Remington by a few years, but he was a contemporary and an admirer of Remington’s work. Russell is also an artist of intricate detail and accuracy, having also studied Indians from inside their villages and camps. The Silk Robe painting shown below and exhibited at the Carter reveals detailed knowledge of curing a buffalo hide that only could have come from watching the process in real life. He also did bronze sculpture and watercolor paintings along with his fantastic oil paintings. In fact, in his day, Russell was considered a sculptor who also paints. I don’t know how you can look at his cowboy art and still believe that. He is a truly masterful painter.
You’ll have to forgive me for taking a break from the usual humor blog, but I have an overwhelming love for art and painting, and this museum visit put an Indian arrow right through my silly old heart.
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Laughing Blue
Griselda by Maxfield Parrish
One of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in the art world are the paintings of Maxfield Parrish. That’s why this post needs to be about his work instead of mine. He made his mark painting ads for tire companies and on the ends of orange crates. The secret to his melancholy beauty is the cobalt blue underpainting he always did. Of course, the dominant color over all is a ghostly, iridescent blue. It fills his paintings with quiet grace and powerful emotions. I love that laughing blue quality more than any other thing I’ve ever seen in the realm of art.
I love to use the term “laughing blue”. It’s an oxymoron that sums up me better than any other descriptive phrase. It is the laughter that goes on so long and so hard that it causes tears, and at the same time it is the sobbing that eventually becomes uncontrollable laughter. Sweet-sad feelings of love and longing, piles of smiles that stretch for miles. Nothing is better or wiser or more filled with life.
There was the time when the church youth group put on the Halloween Carnival. I had won a blue, helium-filled balloon at the ball toss when beautiful Alicia was watching. She smiled at me. It was such a perfect moment that I had to savor it the best I could. I gave my friend six tickets to put me in jail. It was two tickets to get in. Someone had to pay four tickets to get you out. Tickets were a nickel each. I figured my friend would leave me in there for a while so I could just sit and contemplate that balloon. I was right. Mark spent the four tickets at the cake walk. He won a cake.
In the jail was a little boy, the son of the local barber, who had a bright red balloon. His mother had put him in the jail as a joke. He was four years old, I believe, about the same as my little brother David. His name was Tommy. Some laughing-jackal teenage boys came past the jail. One of the doody-heads had a safety pin. Bang! The red balloon was no more. The high school doody-heads took off cackling with glee. Tommy burst out in tears for his lost balloon. His mother, outside the chicken-wire cage, was beside herself, pleading for the gatekeeper to open up and let her boy out. Several church ladies zoomed in to see what they could do. My mother was one of them. Before they could get into the cage, however, I solved the problem by giving him my blue balloon. His mother never saw, never realized he had been upset by the loss of his balloon. She didn’t notice that the balloon he was holding when he left the cage was different than the one he took in. It didn’t matter. No one needed to know the sacrifice I made that night.
Later, at home, I cried. Yes, I know I was twelve years old and too big to cry about a lost balloon. But it wasn’t really that anyway. It was that feeling that filled me up. It was gladness that I had seized the moment to be unselfish and kind though somehow no one else knew it. It was sorrow over the loss of my connection to that moment when she smiled at me. It was beauty caused by ugliness. It was Laughing Blue.
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The innocent sylph bends down to wake her sister, the sleeping nymph. The morning has broken on a new day. The painting has existed since the 1920’s, probably his most famous work of all. He worked from a photograph to paint it. Several photographs, in fact. Wouldn’t the authorities be upset now, this man painting a naked girl? Artist or no, it could look like pornography to many in this day and age. Ironically, though, the nude person in the photo he used as a model was himself. It was only a matter of the play of light over the bare form. It was a matter of innocent yet sensual beauty. It was a matter of Maxfield Parrish Blue. The painting itself is far more subtly blue than it appears here. It is laughing blue. It is a mix of youth and grief, the birth of the new dawn and the ancient jagged hills behind. It is flowers and parched rock, waking and dreaming. The art of it is in the opposition of things, what Confucius meant when he taught of the Yin and the Yang, what Lao Tzu spoke of in the Book of the Tao. Yes, it was Laughing Blue.
I wish I had the talent to paint like Maxfield Parrish. I loved his magazine illustrations and his faery-tale characters. I loved everything of his I have ever seen, and I have dug up a lot. He was a prolific artist. Almost everything he painted is from before I was born. He died not long after I came into this world. I am sad that he can paint no more for me, yet I can’t imagine anything he could do that is better than what I’ve already seen.
In the book The Little Prince the fox says, “It is only by the heart that we can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” How true that is! We cannot describe in words the beauty we see in these works of art. We cannot explain why it is there. But we know it when we see it. It is Laughing Blue.
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The Fallen Ace
I have not been a very good teacher of late. I have been ill, having difficulty breathing and aching in a number of ways. I would stay home, but I lose a full day’s pay for every sick day I must use now. I could end up owing the school money at the end of the month if I miss too much. So, I have posted a Paffooney that portrays in oil paint the proper attitude. As the Baron is dropping to his death (WWI pilots did not have parachutes) he gives the old thumbs up. I know I am going out just like that. The end is coming, but I fear it not. Achtung! It has been a good flight up to now.
At My Grandpa’s Knee
Although the child in the painting is definitely not me or one of mine (the dog is Queenie, and she was real), and although I grew up about as far from the sea as you can get, this painting reveals something critical about who I am. My Grandpa Aldrich was a singular man of wisdom and good humor. He could tell a funny story with the best of them. He was a farmer and inculcated in me a farmer’s work ethic, that get-up-before-dawn style of thing. He never got mad, even the time I broke the plumbing in his house by playing Tarzan in the basement, swinging on the bathroom pipes in the ceiling. Everything I know about how to love, and how to act, and who to be I got from him, or at least from him through my mother who was his child. My grandpa lasted into his eighties and was alive until I finally got married at 38. He lives in my heart still, guiding my actions… even the words I am writing now.
Unfinished Art
Sometimes you create something and reach an impasse beyond which you cannot seem to go. Such happened with this double portrait of a young Native American and a noble stag. I wanted to create a picture behind a curtain of snowfall. The problem… I liked the picture too much to risk painting snowflakes and dots of white all over it. How easily I could’ve turned the whole thing into a miasma of pockmarks and polka dots! In order to go forward, you have to risk a total whangaroo of everything you have already accomplished. It isn’t just oil paintings that can happen to. My teaching career… every novel I’ve ever attempted… my family… Everything you do in life risks blowing everything all to Hell. There is simply no safe endeavor to be found. If it’s safe… it simply isn’t worth doing. You will never get the full effect. Okay, so here’s the thing… I keep sitting in front of this painting, staring at it, and wondering how good or how awful it will be if I dare to go forward.
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The Stag of Prophecy
I painted this oil painting of Bambi-esques from a dream I had long before I met my wife. I admit, I didn’t actually finish it until a couple of years after we were married, but I have always felt it predicted what my family would be like. We now have two boys and a girl, two bucks and a doe. I am certainly not as majestic as poppa deer in the picture, but he is in general very like me in his cartoonish mildness and Disney-like gaze. It is a weird thing to feel you have to live up to a painting, but it is also weird to paint from a dream and then have it be a prophecy come true.
Catch a Falling Star 