Small Town Cafes, Real American Landscapes

Renting a beat-up Ford station wagon from a trusting gentleman, I began my first on-the-spot painting trip. Driving up the Westside Highway along the Hudson River, looking for any sign that I was on the right way to color. Connecticut, to the right, seemed like a good place to start learning about painting landscapes. So to the right it was. Leaving behind the grey colors of New York City, the first red oak growing in the median said I had a lot to look forward to.

Heavy autumn traffic was part of the learning. For me, the quiet back roads were going to be part of my art. Yellow maples surrounding tombstones drew me in and I parked the rented car. Setting up next to the last resting place of Alfred Abrums, I began teaching myself the art of landscape painting. Painting the figure was so much easier - painting figures was how I learned to paint. Talking with models was my way of relaxing when painting. Alfred was who I relaxed with that day. The shapes and lines I began with slowly started to make sense. Not a great painting, not even a good one, just one Alfred liked. Talking for Alfred, I learned we were pleased with what we had learned. Packing up for the day, he convinced me to keep up my efforts - should the next one not show improvement, toss that one. With that, I left Alfred to his blanket of yellow maple leaves.

“No vacancies” weren't in my plans, but autumn does that in New England. Plan trips better, I learned.. Sleeping in the car wash at a gas station also was not in my plan, but it sure saved me money which allowed me to eat at a little cafe.

Sitting at the end of the counter, I did my first sketch of a story. My subject told me he makes sleds. The kind pulled by draft horses in the winter, and he told me how he makes them and the people who buy them. I listened as I drew and sipped on my coke. My sketch of the sled maker was far more interesting than my painting of the maple tree and tombstones. Every painting trip is now well planned around small town cafes.

A few hundred sketchbooks with stories fill my nights now. Hot cocoa, a warm blanket, and I'm set for the night.

Who I Was

Dear Granddaughter, or is it Grandson?

This is who I am. Each night after dinner, when dishes are dried and put away, I climb the stairs to the attic where I put on my painting apron. There I paint you a letter, or a poem, written with brushes. You may think it is a painting of a waterfall, or a nude of a love I once had. But it is a poem about myself and who I was. That small painting of a cow was Angie, your Great Uncle Melvin's only Swiss brown cow. Your grandmother hated having a cow named after her. That figurine of a girl dancing among the geranium leaves was your Great Grandmother’s favorite. I confess, I was the grandchild who broke it. I painted it for you. I may sell them, but my heart is filled with love for you as I paint them.

That nude you use to sneak up to the attic to peek at? That is Kim. She used to bring sandwiches to the homeless when she posed for me. The painting of the little girl in the red dress was the neighbor kid who I watched from the attic window, playing in her yard teasing her brother and locking their babysitter out of the house .

I love colors, and trees with robins singing in them hiding among the green apples. Their red breasts always gave them away. When the apples ripened, I gave them to the dancing figurine in the green dress, so others could share in things that I wrote about with brush and colors. Uncle Melvin's farm pond became a Texas man's Maine pond that he fished as a kid. The dreams we put on canvas or paper become other's stories of lost childhood or first loves. And they are always poems to you.

Your Loving Artist.