dog

Meega

We don’t know what breed or breeds of dog Meega is. She looks like a Golden Lab. She is a mid-sized dog. I have never seen a dog with more energy. The fence between her yard and ours is a mere suggestion. She runs under it, if she sees any of us in the yard or pulling up in the parking area. She is constantly jumping in the air to get at eye level with any human visitors. This is a painting of her standing up to look out Pete’s kitchen window, because she heard our screen door open. She is wiggling in anticipation that I am coming over to play.

I watch Meega and her ‘brother’, Easy, while Pete is at work. This painting is acrylic on 20″ x 10″ stretched canvas. It was a gift to Pete.

Easy

Easy is the Mastiff cross that lives next door. He was a stray that had been abandoned in the Philadelphia neighborhood where our neighbor, Pete, used to live. He was skin and bones. He apparently had been left out in the weather or tormented with water. He will not go near water and I cannot get him to go outside if he so much as smells a hint of rain in the air. I watch Easy and his ‘sister’ Meega, another stray that Pete adopted, when he is at work.

I painted this as a gift to Pete. It is acrylic on a 16″ diameter stretched canvas. I framed it using the outer rings of two 8″ diameter embroidery hoops.

Carousel Snoopy

Carousel Snoopy

Imagine riding Snoopy while he dreams of being the Red Baron while riding Charlie Brown’s mailbox. My sister went to college with Charlie Brown. Well, he looked and acted a lot like Charlie. His name was Mark, though. He was Charles Schulz’s son.

This is my 23rd carousel animal in my Perkasie Fun-A-Day 2018 ‘Prequel’.

Painting is acrylic on 6″ x 6″ x 1-1/2″ stretched canvas.

Price: $50 plus postage. SOLD.

Clyde

Clyde

I painted Clyde using just black and white paint based on a photo shared on Facebook by our friend Deb Vriesen of their dog just after she buried him. It was so cold in Minnesota, they had to wait several weeks, with his body frozen in a shed, until it was warm enough for them to build a fire to thaw the ground enough to dig a grave.

I never met Clyde in person and only saw one photo, so I hope I caught something of his personality. If it doesn’t look much like Clyde, I think he looks like a friendly dog at any rate.

The painting is acrylic on 24″ x 24″ stretched canvas.

Price: $150 reduced to $50 plus postage.

Fill out the form below so we can arrange payment and delivery. I take PayPal, so all credit or debit cards are accepted.

Pepi

Pepi the dog

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

Fill out the form below so we can arrange payment and delivery. I take PayPal, so all credit and debit cards are accepted.

Dean & Prince

Dean & Prince

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

Fill out the form below so we can arrange payment and delivery. I take PayPal, so all credit cards are accepted.