How I came to feel about my own painting.

Probably, I began to think about Art when I was a child and I was entranced by the storytelling of Norman Rockwell on the Saturday Evening Post covers of the magazines we subscribed to. AS I got older, it was hurtful to me to see the disrespect and even mockery that was directed at Rockwell's work by modern abstract painters. Of course, eventually I realized it was a familiar pattern in any new regime whereby the old leaders are sacrificed and the new 'top dogs' take over. Even though I studied art throughout my life in a wide variety of institutions from Glassboro State college, to the Academy of Fine Arts, and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and numerous smaller art schols such as Perkins Art Center, personally, I was always drawn to an artisan side of art, possibly best manifested in Illustration.

In a painting course that I took when I was an Art Minor at Glassboro, I disovered how to develop a 'concept' upon which to hang a dozen paintings, an exploration of color relationships where I put together puzzle pieces of colors that bounced off one another which gave the whole a kind of jumpy quality. I was pleased with my work but no one ever understood it and I had to explain the concept which inevitably ended in a kind of fade out. That was not what I wanted.

Soon enough, it became apparent to me that I was interested in communicating with y fellow humans, not just some level of elite viewers with Art backgrounds who could puzzle out what I was getting at. I wanted people to understand and enjoy what I painted immediately. Also, I wanted to become profiicient at realistic depiction. I wanted to learn and practice the skills of the tradition.

Along with that practice, came a current of desire to paint things that were meaningful to ME. The paintings were kind of worshipful objects, kind of relics. First I began with places near me that seemed to hold an emotional quality that reflected how I was feeling - that was the color pencil series of buildings in South Philadelphia. Then, I branched out to people, and to other objects tha reflected a feeling I had about something, for example, I did a still life painting of summer vegetables harvested from a friend's garden that spoke to me of the lively abundance of summer itself.

I guess that became the kind of piece meal of my personal style, places or people, or animals or things that had meaning to me personally, not a theory or idea. Also, when I realized my career was in teaching, not in the Art World, that had a big influence and kind of set me free. I didn't have a wider public to whom I had to appeal or customers or gallery owners, or even shows.

However, that did lead to a kind of dead end because then what do you do with all those paintings? Lately I have been giving them away.

Just wanted to share some thoughts about painting this morning as I sit here after our dog walk, my Uma and me. I should be thinking more about smells because the foul air of rotten eggs is wafting over all of us in the South Jersey and South Philadelphia area due to a truck at TA Travel Center, Berkeyley Rd in Paulsboro, having become overheated yesterday and forced to release some chemical called LUBRIZOL 1389 in order to vent rather than explode. Everyone in a 10 mile radius is smelling sulphur odor of rotten eggs. It isn't too bad here but it is held down to the ground by the cloud cover.