Their mom had her phone out ready to take a picture. They came in close, hollering and laughing. Our granddaughters were 8 and 7 when the picture that this painting is based on was taken.
Painting is black and white acrylic on 24″ x 24″ gallery stretched canvas. The edge is painted black, so no frame is required.
Price: $200 plus postage
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For Valentine’s Day, this year, I painted on 6″ x 6″ stretched canvasses for each of our five grandchildren. It was not planned this way, but as it turned out, they all have purple or lavender in them. They say purple is the most provocative of colors. I think it is fun. These paintings have been well received on Facebook. Here goes!
“Asters, etc.” is for Brigitta, age 9. She loves green and is a very good, abstract artist in her own right (better than me). In art, anyway, I find it hard to break free from physical reality. This is a freestyle interpretation of asters, with a couple of undefined, red weed flowers blooming, above the jumble of mixed foliage below.
“Goldfinch” is for Elijah, age 9. He loves it! It is based on a photograph I had taken through the front door window of our house on Front Street. It was the same goldfinch who had serenaded me at arm’s length while I paused on my morning walk just after my open heart surgery.
My painting for Isabella is of a sunflower, but with lavender petals. When she saw it, she said, “Poppop, you are a genius!” I surmise she likes it.
Jacob’s 11th birthday is next week. He wants a cat. His dad does not want any more animals in addition to his three sons in the house. So I painted him “Bizaro Skittles.” It is a portrait of my cat, mirrored, in purple and pale green.
“yes!” is for our 12-year-old grandson Aidan. I wrote around the sides: “Even when the answer is No, it says YES! I love you. 2 Corinthians 1:19”
It came to me that he is of the age and temperament that he needs to hear this. When his parents or other adults tell him no, it is not because they don’t want him to have fun, it is because they love him and want him to have a long and happy life. I explained this to him when I gave him the painting. He gave me a huge, tight, long hug-of-war hug.
The fact that we keep desiring to have children and keep having children is probably the greatest sign of the level of hope most humans have in the future. Against all indications to the contrary, we still feel things are going to get better for our children.
This is #20 in my images of hope for Perkasie Fun-A-Day 2018
Painting is acrylic on 6″ x 6″ x 1.75″ stretched canvas.
Price: $25 reduced to $15 plus postage
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I have set a challenge for myself this month to paint a picture of hope every day of January for Perkasie Fun-A-Day 2018. When I did an internet search for images of hope, most just had the word in it. A few had a tender plant sprouting up. One had a tree sprout coming up from a crack in the pavement. That was on my list to do, already. There were candles and there were scripture verses and other pithy sayings. There were fewer than 30 unique ideas in the images. Almost all of them contained words. I started this painting with a blank, cadmium yellow 20″ x 20″ x 1-1/2″ canvas.
Bright yellow is the color Buddhists use to signify hope, blessing, happiness, or good luck. Christian iconography also uses it to signify blessing or glory, which is the “blessed hope”. I looked at it, pondered it, and let it tell me how to turn a blank, yellow square into an image that conveyed hope. The result was wheat, loaded with grain. I grew up in Golden Valley, Minnesota, the home of General Mills. It had been a crossroads for a mill since 1875, with the rest being golden wheat fields until about 1960 when the rest was carved out of the prairie to house us baby boomers and our WW2 veteran parents. The next suburbs out were Crystal and New Hope. Everyone listened to the farm reports with the futures prices, weather, etc., and the off-color, farmer jokes on the major CBS affiliate AM radio station that went coast to coast overnight. Even though half of the state’s population lived in the “Cities” (Mpls/St. Paul), everyone knew that agriculture was where their bread was buttered, literally and figuratively. Just as in millennia past, even though our Golden Valley was no longer waving with grain, but had golf courses and Kentucky Bluegrass, our hope was still in the golden fruit of the grass growing on the prairie to the west.
Painting is acrylic on 20″ x 20″ x 1-1/2″ stretched canvas.
Price: $120 reduced to $60 plus postage
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I was falling behind on my one a day, Fun-A-Day, carousel animal painting prequel, so I made a valiant effort and painted 12 in this moonlit carousel. This is the first time I have included passengers. It is clearly a dream, however. There are no spectators, no adults, no carnival hubbub; just a lonely, half-dark carousel, under the moonlight, with happy, sleepy children waving good night to the world. We see a dozen carousel animals. I will list them as we see them from right to left, before they pass out of view: a peacock bench, a white stallion, a pink zebra, a brown pony, a green tortoise, a pink burro, a crocodile, a purple draft horse, a blue colt, a pink mare, and an ostrich.
Painting is acrylic, including some metallics, on 24″ x 18″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 reduced to $50 plus postage
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I may have mentioned before, that I grew up in Minnesota. In my day, there was a strong and booming middle class, thanks to an aggressive, progressive income tax structure on both the federal and state levels. On weekends, holidays and vacations (Working people actually took vacations back then), it seemed just about anybody and everybody went “to the lake”. That is what we all said. Our cars’ license plates advertised “10,000 Lakes”. The Almanac counted 12,512 lakes plus a few thousand ponds. One did not have to leave “the Cities”, short for “the Twin Cities”, Minneapolis and St. Paul, to go to a lake. Mpls. is a mash-up of Sioux and Greek meaning “City of Lakes” and has 25 lakes within the city limits, including one manmade one, since they just needed to round up, I guess.
When I was in junior high, my folks bought a lake place just across the river in Wisconsin. I learned the cheeseheads called Minnesotans “swampies”. But this article was supposed to be about my painting of a Great Blue Heron. I grew up seeing these beautiful, fishing birds on the edges of lakes and swooping down and diving into them all of my young life, growing up in Minnesota and Wisconsin. I have seen them occasionally, if only fleetingly, in PA.
Painting is acrylic on 10″ x 10″ stretched canvas.
Price: $90 plus postage.
SOLD
Pepi was a Golden Cocker Spaniel. Our family purchased him at a service station along Route 8 on our way home from family camp at Camp Lawton on Deer Lake in Wisconsin, when I was six. He was the runt of the litter, so they let him go for $10. I was the youngest of the four children. I spent the most time with him. He pretty much became my dog. Like me, he had a wide circle of friends, and roamed freely in a wide area of the neighborhood. We had Jewish next door neighbors who dearly loved him, and welcomed him into their house regularly. He would defend their front step as vigorously as ours from the paperboy or the mailman. The mailman always brought a Milkbone for Pepi. Pepi would bark, at first, for show. He would receive his treat and petting, then he would accompany our mailman along the rest of his route. This helped him a great deal, as Pepi would keep any dogs busy while he delivered the mail. If any pets were loose, Pepi would make sure they would not come near to, or harm, the mailman.
Pepi would always get excited when my dad got home from work. He knew when the normal time was and he would sit on the manhole cover in the middle of the street, looking East in anticipation of his car. Our neighbor’s Hebrew school bus would sometimes come to drop Elaine off after her lessons. Pepi would not budge from his spot on the manhole cover. The driver would have to veer way to the right to go around him. Pepi loved kosher food. Whenever there was a Jewish family picnic in the neighborhood, even if he had to cross the highway, somehow he would sniff it out and find it. He would beg for food and scarf up anything that was dropped. Then he would come home, eat grass and throw up. We found out just how far he had ranged when our neighbors, the Shermans, had a big gathering on the occasion of a visit of family members from Israel. Pepi, of course, attended, as well. So many of the guests said to each other, “So you know this dog, too?!”
The painting is based on a 4″ black and white snapshot I took of Pepi eating from his dishes in the back yard of our house on Lowry Terrace in Golden Valley, Minnesota. In the background is the fort that my dad built from plans from Popular Mechanics. It had a locked shed in the back for the lawn mower and yard tools. The front had a little play house with a ladder through a hatch to the top deck with the turrets. It was great for snowball fights, etc. That fort was a famous landmark for children for miles around. More kids played in our fort than I ever knew. Behind the fort was a swamp that had milkweed, so we had loads of Monarch butterflies and other wildlife. Behind that was a sledding hill with four rows of American Elms which separated three great sled runs, that terminated on the swamp, which, of course, froze in the winter. The lower part of our yard, next to the fort, was flooded for a skating rink, for several years when I was growing up. In the summer, our yard was the middle of three mostly flat yards, with only one tree, that ran together without fences, where we could play football, baseball, soccer, dodgeball, etc. It was a great place, and a great time to grow up.
The painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 reduced to $50 plus postage
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Shortly after we moved into a tiny house (500 sq. ft.) across the street from our granddaughters, I painted them life-sized on a canvas and mounted it on the outside of the bathroom door. The bathroom door is what one sees when one enters the front door of the house. I started painting this one of our grandsons last year. I finally finished it this week. It is based on a black and white photo of The Three Stooges. I “colorized” it and superimposed the boys’ heads on it, painted it on canvas and glued it to our bedroom door. The landlord and lady should not be concerned. I used clay based paste which remains water-soluble forever and washes off cleanly with warm water.
It obviously is not for sale.
This is a painting of our youngest grandson with my cat. It is based on a photo from several years ago, when Elijah was just a little boy and Skittles was just a kitten.
Original painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
Price: $250
SOLD
My playmates for the first six years of my life were my sister Sue Ann and our neighbor across the street, David Ericson. They were two years older than I was. I was the youngest of four in my family. David was the youngest of four in his family. There were other children in the neighborhood, but these were my closest friends and constant companions. Our family built a bigger house and moved two miles away in Golden Valley, MN, the summer between kindergarten and first grade, but we stayed in touch. We spent 4th of Julys together and got together around Christmas and did some other outings, as well. We ended up going to the same high school: Robbinsdale Senior High.
When we were little and playing cowboys and Indians, David always managed to get killed right outside his back door. He would lay there for a moment then he would get up and run into the kitchen and pour some ketchup on his face and lie back down; you know, to add bloody realism. The next time we would come by, he would still be lying there, but he would be scraping the ketchup off with potato chips and eating them. You just can’t waste food like that! There were children starving in Africa.
David’s parents, Lester and Lois prayed for our family daily and brought us kids to church when my folks didn’t go, and to vacation Bible school, to their little Bible church in North Minneapolis. Lois particularly prayed for me daily from the time she heard my mom was pregnant with me until the day she died in December, 2008. I played with David’s toys while he was in school and my mom was working for the 1960 Census. The Ericsons’ house was the safest place I knew as a child. Playing with David’s Lincoln Logs in the middle of the living room floor with Mrs. Ericson in the kitchen was as good as life could get.
David grew up to be a serious, well-mannered, Christian, young man. He graduated RHS, Class of 1971. He decided to take a year off to do a short-term missionary assignment with Wickliffe Bible Translators, helping his sister and brother-in-law, Jim and Carol Daggett, in Peru, instead of starting college. While there, he was accompanying a girl on a flight to Quito, to go to a hospital for an emergency surgery. It was Christmas Eve. The flight went down and we did not know for three weeks what had happened. Finally, we learned that only one German girl survived. The plane had broken up in mid-air in a bad storm. Pieces of the fuselage had fallen from the sky. Her mother died in the seat next to her. She was carrying her wedding cake on her lap. That helped save her. A tribe of natives who were known to be cannibals took her in and treated her wounds. She was finally found and rescued. So we lost David. He died on a mission of mercy. He was Les and Lois Ericson’s only son.
In 2000, my sister Sue Ann committed suicide. I just remember being so much happier and four and saying, “Alison, can you help Sue Ann and me cross the street so we can play with David?”
Painting is 12″x12″ acrylic on stretched canvas.
Price: $80 plus postage
SOLD
As I painted this portrait, I reminisced of a time before my birth. I recalled Grama Dodier’s life from when she was born as a “half-breed” on the prairie of Minnesota in 1880, to when I interviewed her when I was a 12-year-old in the Spring of 1968. I still have a clear vision of her log cabin and her excitement at her French, trapper dad arriving home after a weeks’ long hunting and trading expedition. I can visualize the scene as freshly now as then of her first vision of a motorized vehicle. It was steam-powered. I asked her if her daughters were flappers during the “Roaring 20s”. She laughed. She told me she helped make Irene’s dress. The times had changed and she and her husband had moved to the city (Minneapolis).
I have no photos of Grama Dodier. She is not a relative, but I carry her memories. She was a neighbor’s (two blocks away) mother. I painted her portrait from 49-year-old memories. It is truly amazing how quickly things have changed. She witnessed the first automobiles and now we were heading to the moon. She was an outcast for being a “half-breed’ as a child and young mother. By the 1950s, no one noticed her race because of her French last name. Her daughters married well. She could pass, but the Blacks and the Native Americans were still struggling in Minnesota.
I learned much from Grama Dodier and was careful to preserve these memories as a living link to the past. It is now 2017, so I have a link going back 137 years.
The painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
Price: $80 plus postage
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Michael was a classmate in high school. He was a year older than the rest of us, as he had been held back at some point. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed academically, but he was good at mechanics. His younger brother was a better scholar and was in the same graduating class as him. I’m afraid we did Mike a great disservice. There were a half-dozen guys who went to the same huge, fundamentalist, Baptist church in the city, who were intent on evangelizing our classmates. We met for prayer every morning before school in the library. Our church had youth recreational activities every Saturday and training activities most other evenings of the week. We invited Michael to these outings and talked to him about becoming “born again”. At some point, he made a profession of faith, got re-baptized and joined the church. I’m sure this caused a rift in his Irish Catholic family.
The pastors of this church (there were eight of them) would never bother to contact the parents of teenagers who were getting baptized and joining their church. I now find this reprehensible and totally irresponsible. My dad threw me out of the house for converting (literally), two months after I was re-baptized. If it were not for my mom insisting on leaving with me, forcing my dad’s hand, I would have been stranded, homeless, in rural Wisconsin. He decided to keep my mom even with me. So I don’t know what all Michael went through. Whatever it was, he went through it with no adult help.
We graduated together in 1973. We had good times that summer, with camp and lots of activities, bicycling together, etc. Then all of us went off to Bible college, that is, all of us except Michael. He lost his gang of comrades, his support group. It was sometime during that school year we got word that Michael had died. Then we learned it had been a suicide. We never got details, never knew about a funeral or burial. His family wanted nothing to do with us or the Baptist church. Since it was a suicide, he couldn’t be buried in the Catholic Church. We had been in college more than an hour away, taking 22 credit hours a semester, being self-absorbed 18-year-olds, too busy to notice that our friend was suffering.
I painted Michael in monochromatic, burnt umber with shiny golden hair. He had naturally wavy, blond hair. I chose to do this to signify the hope and promise of youth, “the golden-haired boy”, snuffed out.
This painting is monochromatic burnt umber on 11″ x 14″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage
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This painting is based on a 50+ year old black & white snapshot of my friend Dean and his new, German Shepherd puppy, Prince. We were about ten years old. Dean and his dad treated Prince in such a way that he became nervous and mean. Dean became more wild as he grew up. The only time I went egging houses, it was because Dean brought the eggs, when I was just planning on toilet-papering. I found out the day after, that eggs peeled off paint. We were thirteen. That was the last time I got together with Dean. We went to Carl Sandburg Junior High and were in the same graduating class of 1973 at Robbinsdale Senior High, but both schools were huge and our paths never crossed.
In January, 1974, Dean went to see The Exorcist, shortly after it was released, at a theater in downtown Minneapolis. He was high on LSD. He came out of the theater and blew his brains out with one of his dad’s handguns. His dad was a local sheriff. At least, this is the story as it was relayed to me by my mother.
The painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage
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Bobby was a good friend in grade school and junior high. His family lived two blocks away from mine in Golden Valley, Minnesota. We would bicycle together, sled and skate together in the winter, and sometimes camp out in our backyards together in the summer. He was a beautiful boy! He was handsome, with thick, dark hair, athletic and smart. All the girls loved him. Most of the boys wanted to be him. He did not appreciate all the attention. He was shy and became more withdrawn in his junior and senior year in high school; to the point of not allowing any pictures of himself to appear in the yearbook. This painting is based on his two pictures in the 1971 Robin. The pose is from the soccer team’s group shot, but his eyes were closed, so I looked at his yearly picture for details of his face.
The last time I saw Bobby was in the spring of 1974. I was visiting a few of my friends at the University of Minnesota’s main campus. At that time Pioneer Hall was for both men and women; every other room for each gender. I greeted Bobby as he darted stark naked from the showers to his room. I was shocked at this, not because of modesty, but his apparent lack of it. He had changed, and changed radically. Early December, 1974, we heard the news that Bobby had shot and killed his father, his mother and his sister, Ann, then himself, with a 12 gauge shotgun in the middle of the night in their Golden Valley home. A neighbor discovered their bodies four days after when North Memorial Hospital called her to check on his father, because he had not showed up for his on call assignment. He was a doctor.
Bobby’s case was written up in a feature article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He had suffered some sort of mental breakdown prior to this and had been in treatment. He left the treatment and had been alienated from his family. They reached out to him. He was home for dinner that night to discuss re-entering treatment as an inpatient. After they had all gone to bed, Bobby got his hunting gun and shot his parents and his younger sister while they lay in their beds. Then he shot himself.
The four of them had a joint memorial service at Valley of Peace Lutheran Church. Their were four, beautiful Christmas wreaths on stands in the front of the packed church. Pastor Stine gave this horrible message. He said, “Heaven is God’s gift to us at Christmastime. Bobby gave his family their Christmas gift early.”
I got up, then and there, and walked out of that church! What an ass! This was the same ignorant pastor who had kicked me out of confirmation class one month shy of completion for asking too many questions about heaven and hell, and how one gets to heaven, after my best friend, Steve Rainoff had died by falling through a skylight, chasing a soccer ball, in a locked school in New Jersey.
In the spring of 1975, the Mpls. paper had a feature article on Angel Dust. The authorities had just seen a rise in its use. The symptoms of its use and long-term effects sounded just like Bobby. I have always wondered if he could have been exposed to that, and that is what changed his personality so never know.
I painted his portrait in monochromatic phthalocyanine blue, from a happier time in his life. Bobby was a beautiful boy. He had all the advantages. This could have been me.
Painting is acrylic on 11″ x 14″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage
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We knew Lynn nearly our whole time growing up, at least the part in school. She was in my sister, Sue Ann’s, class, so she was two years older than me. We were in Girl Scouts together, the musical, swim team, Student Service Organization in junior high, Annual Staff in senior high. She was one of the gang.
Lynn kept you on your toes. She always had a snappy answer. I have yet to meet another person as quick-witted or funny as she. She was smart. She developed early, so she was bigger and taller than all the girls and most of the boys all through junior high and most of senior high. This gave her body image issues. She so desperately wanted to be liked. Nothing worked out. She had academic success, but couldn’t find a man who could embrace her amazing intellect, her quick wit, while at the same time simply love her “like a boy loves a girl” as the song says.
We got word that Lynn had killed herself when we were in Minnesota visiting family in 1989. Lynn would have been about 36.
Painting is 11″x 14″ acrylic on stretched canvas.
Price: $120 plus postage
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Scott was a good friend of mine in junior high. He was on the ski jump team. At Theodore Wirth Park, there was a huge, wooden ski jump. Next to it, was a smaller jump built into the hill. Scott would be there, training with his jumping skis. I would be skiing on the downhill slopes on the park board slopes on the Saturdays I couldn’t get away to Wisconsin, or after school. One Saturday, Scott found me and let me use his jumping skis on the smaller jump. What a thrill! He tried to coax me to go off the big, wooden jump. I knew I didn’t dare. The likelihood would be I would jump off the wrong side of it. Another Saturday morning, Scott finished with his jumping practice. He had forgotten to bring his downhill skis and didn’t have a ride home until later. He found me and persuaded me to share my skis. He let me use both my poles. He just used a single downhill ski. He taught me how to ski downhill on one ski! That was a useful skill. The rope tows were a little tricky. I would end up slowly wilting to one side and pull all of the other passengers on the line with me, down into the snow.
Scott was a beautiful boy, and charming. He had a fort he had built behind his house. In the summer after 8th grade, guys and girls would hang out at his house. Couples would use his fort to make love. I was not aware of this until my girlfriend told me it was “our turn”. I declined. I was caught completely off guard. That ended my relationship with that redhead. That was OK. I am so glad I waited until marriage.
During junior high and into high school, Scott was one of those who called me on a few occasions contemplating suicide. My sister, Sue Ann, and I, it seems, were known as the suicide counselors for our junior high. How that came to be is anybody’s guess. All I know is that Scott and I spent time talking, listening, crying, laughing, renewing a reason to live.
We went to different high schools. The night in 1972 in our junior year when Scott took his life, he did not call me. It still hurts.
Painting is 12″x12″ acrylic on stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus Postage
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